Like most companies, Global Connects has had difficulties caused by the seeming closure of the UK and world economies. However, that hasn’t stopped us from trying to do what we think is right as opposed to what is profitable. Don’t get us wrong, we like profits, but, as we’ll try and show, there is more to life than money and even in these trying times companies like ours can make a real difference when they put their minds to it.
Hard as it is just now, our situation is as of nothing compared to the poorest in Africa. There, they don’t care whether the translation on the food parcels is accurate: they just care that it contains food. Just before the pandemic and lockdown struck, Global Connects decided to support a remarkable charity called Educate the Kids, who built Joluarabi School near Mombasa from scratch in order to give some of the incredibly poor children in this part of Kenya an education they could otherwise not afford.
We sponsor this little boy, Luther Mdasia. In normal times, many of the children walk miles each day to get to the school, where as well as the classes they are given a uniform and also food they might not otherwise get. This is a brilliant charity that takes not a penny for admin and management charges. ALL the money raised goes to Kenya, originally to pay for the buildings, the teachers and, of course the kids, but now every penny is going to pay for food for the people who live in the villages around, whether they go to the school or not. We’re delighted to play a small part in this effort.
Secondly, on a totally different scale, we were very pleased to be involved with the Edinburgh International Cultural Summit this summer. The EICS is a biennial global event – a ministerial forum established in 2012 by the Edinburgh International Festival in a unique partnership with the British Council, Scottish Parliament and the UK and Scottish Governments. Featuring world-class contributors and speakers from across the planet, this year’s event had “The Transformational Power of Culture” as its theme and because it had to be delivered entirely online, Global Connects was tasked with providing all the Spanish subtitles for every session.
Thirdly, in the last few weeks, Global Connects has worked with Police Scotland on a project to increase the diversity within the national police force. Perhaps strangely, this did not involve any translation or interpretation work: rather, we put together a marketing campaign that we delivered to the interpreter community in Scotland, asking them to consider a career in the police, where their language skills would obviously be an advantage. Many might consider this counter-intuitive: why would we risk losing good interpreters? The Global Connects view is that they could easily see the advertising in other places and so we would rather work in partnership with the police to help them improve diversity and inclusion and thus develop our (already strong) relationship with this client. With an open rate of 75%, our mailer has already resulted in about 25 interpreters getting in touch with Police Scotland to find out more.
Fiona Woodford, Global Connects