We have a group of 16 people at Fruit Towers collectively known as The Foundation Guardians.
This is them pictured below (well some of them)
Angelic, aren't they? Their day jobs span everything from IT to Marketing but they also spend some time looking after the various projects that the innocent foundation supports.
Every year, innocent gives 10% of it's profits to charity, most of which go to the innocent foundation. The Foundation then invests in rural development projects (run by NGOs) in countries where we source our fruit. We have 16 projects on the go at the moment and the Guardians all look after one of them, keeping in touch with the relevant project partners, reporting back to the business on progress, and generally keeping an eye out.
Every now and then, the Guardians all get together to update each other and last week, Catriona Fox (from Find Your Feet) and Peter Ryan (the CEO of the Microloan Foundation) came in to tell us all about microfinance.
Mircofinance involves lending small amounts of money to people in rural communities to enable them to start small businesses and improve their own lives. It's the focus of a number of our projects so it was great to get a really indepth talk from two experts in the field.
They really know their stuff so it was good to be able to hear them describe their work and ask them lots of questions. Plus Sustainability Jess made cake. Which is always essential for a good meeting.
I'm afraid we ate all the cake, but if you are interested in watching the video that Peter showed us it's here...
Watch this space for more Guardian updates, coming very soon.
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