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Celebrating a charity challenge and being together again!

It’s been a tough year for many businesses and at CRM we are pleased to have weathered the storm and are looking forward to seeing more of each other in person in the office and at our legendary social and charity events.

“We’ve started to come back into the office, on a rota, a couple of days a week so it’s great to be able to chat face-to-face and work together away from Teams for a change,” said CRM’s Office Manager, Emma Bullock. “We started a Friday night quiz online through the pandemic, with a different team member acting as quiz master each week and we’ll hopefully be able to do another Escape Room challenge or other fun activity as a social event soon.”

The CRM team always gets wholeheartedly behind their nominated charity, which is Daybreak Oxford this year, but a more creative approach to fundraising has had to be initiated this time. Following the success of the Christmas hamper raffle, the team decided to travel the length of the UK virtually in May to raise funds for Daybreak, which runs dementia day centres around Oxfordshire.

1432.95km is the distance between John O’Groats and Land’s End, so the company decided to get active. They split into two teams to walk, cycle, run, swim and paddle-board the distance – with a little healthy competition thrown in for good measure!

With team captains Tony Hobbs, CRM’s Managing Director, and Kat Kurgane, CRM’s very active accountant at the helm, the committed bunch eagerly took on the challenge and achieved the target distance relatively easily.

When they got to Land’s End (virtually), they decided to turn around and head back to John O’Groats to complete 2865.9km! Generous donations from family, friends, clients, and associates meant that they raised a magnificent £1,530 for Daybreak Oxford.

“It was so good to pull together, albeit virtually, to compete and keep fit at the same time. Our winning team was captained by Kat, who made sure there was no slacking with regular spreadsheet updates and equal praise for our efforts. I might be the first to eagerly leave our team Whatsapp group though!” said Emma.

She concluded: “The challenge brought out our team spirit again and it’s so good to get to share a coffee or a cheeky takeaway breakfast when we’re together in the office now! The pandemic has shown that we can be flexible and do our jobs competently from home and we’ll continue these flexible working arrangements to suit colleagues’ preferences going forward.”

If you’d like to donate to the John O’Groats to Land’s End Challenge fund, there’s still time, please visit our JustGiving page.

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