Applegreen

APPLEGREEN

Funding Education and Wellbeing

Applegreen partners with the Irish Youth Foundation on the Blossom Fund, which supports thousands of marginalised young people from disadvantaged areas

In 2018, Applegreen partnered with the Irish Youth Foundation (IYF), a national charity dedicated solely to meeting the needs of children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Through this partnership, Applegreen launched the Blossom Fund and pledged to raise over €100,000 yearly to enable the IYF to expand their services which provide supports to where they are needed most—be this educational projects or health and wellbeing programmes for young people nationwide. Applegreen has a comprehensive, target-led Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy and wants to give back to communities in which it operates and has demonstrated this since 2009 by raising €4.7m for charities across Ireland.

Since asking employees in 2018, a direction became very clear that they wanted to support young people. Since the partnership launch employees across 124 stores and head office have gotten behind the Blossom Fund. Each store has a fundraising target to reach every year and nominate a charity hero who takes ownership over the fundraising activities for their team organising everything from customer facing donations at the tills, bake sales, static cycles and getting involved with the charitable fund activities.

SUPPORTING YOUNG PEOPLE The Applegreen Blossom Fund is designed to target young people at risk of early school leaving by supporting them at times of key educational transitions. This will not only benefit the young people themselves but also their peers, their families and wider communities.

This need was identified by working closely with the IYF. In the summer of 2021 the charity released its ‘Generation Pandemic’ report which told a worrying story of the effects of the pandemic on Ireland’s most marginalised children. Included in this was an indication of a stark increase in early school leaving which is tied to much higher levels of unemployment in later life and other poor life outcomes. Augmenting this were the findings from the ‘Annual Report of the Special Rapporteur on Child Protection 2021’, which reached similar findings.

Taking this into account Applegreen made the decision to change the focus of the 2021 Blossom Fund to support programmes working to stem this tide. The projects chosen were varied in their methodology but it is hoped all will have long lasting effects on their community by keeping children in school, increasing their employment prospects later in life, and increasing their self-esteem.

One of the groups that has been allocated funding is Saplings School in Rathfarnham, Dublin, a co-educational school that provides specialist education for pupils with autism and complex needs. Commenting on the funding, Michael Wood, Principal at the Saplings Rathfarnham school, explained: “Our pupils here in Saplings have very complex needs and the funding provided by the IYF Applegreen Blossom Fund will be vital in helping us to meet those needs.”

The 16 successful groups were selected from a total of 100 applications by the IYF, in consultation with the Applegreen charitable fund team. In addition to Saplings in Rathfarnham, other notable recipients include Narrative 4 which is based in Limerick, home of prominent IYF supporter, Greg O Shea. Narrative 4 brings young people together and builds their confidence via the narrative of storytelling. Other recipients include Galway-based Venture Out Wilderness, a nature-based health and wellbeing programme for young people in disadvantaged communities.