Our ethos at Prism, from the beginning, was to use what we had to help third sector organisations.
At the beginning of our journey, as a start-up business, we did not have the resources or ability to generate and donate money. What we did have was a desire to donate our core ability – IT Support, and to encourage other SMEs to do the same, whilst backing initiatives that allowed the SME world to get involved in philanthropy at no monetary cost.
We took one cause and committed a donation for over a decade, realising we couldn’t scale it we pivoted and created several other donation types. After assisting hundreds of organisations with everything from Wells and PCs to Cooking kits and capital donations we have drawn a close to a chapter that began in 2008. Concluding with a free to use and copy blueprint of ‘How to Do It In Your SME’.
As we move into new times we have decided to build PETT out as a standalone Third Sector Support vehicle offering more of what organisations need through our various partners, known businesses and funds available.
PETT will be funded via an annual contribution, fund raisers and a one-off seed donation allowing us to be more supportive and creative to our beneficiaries.
We will use these funds to offer our beneficiaries support in the new now through capital investment and innovative giving.
Watch this space for future developments.
We realised that giving our core ability to local charity Friends For Leisure (FFL) in 2008 was not scalable, although we maintained that original gift for ten years.
At the same time as this, we were receiving an abundance of unwanted PCs from our clients that, at the time, would have been destined for landfill. Seeing all this waste made us realise that we could refurbish the best ones and put them back into use in the third sector, whilst diverting the rest to a local social enterprise that would go on to make use of them in offering employment through the reuse and resale of these devices.
In a quest to build a scalable offering, we began to accept donation requests and got into the groove of donating one device a week.