by Tess Clare Marshall, Communications Lead
This year, we took the opportunity to rethink some of the ways we make new staff feel at home at MacIntyre.
Welcome packs
We wanted to find a way to make the first few days for new staff extra special and give them helpful core information right at the start of their employment.
Our Workforce Director, Sebastian Moh, and I started working together to develop a welcome pack which could be presented to new permanent staff members on their first day.
I'm not going to tell you everything in the pack because we want it to keep a nice surprise, but as we started kicking around ideas, I realised something was missing.
Supporting people into work
It's really important to us at MacIntyre to promote work opportunities for people with learning disabilities and autistic people, whether that's within MacIntyre or externally. And it's equally important to make connections with other organisations.
So I started thinking about how we could look outward and use our welcome packs as a chance to include something meaningful which would have a relevant connection.
For some time, I'd been a customer of a company called Stand Out Socks. One the co-founders is Ross "the Boss" Laing, who has Down Syndrome. The other founders are Ross's big brother Christian, and Natalie, Ross's sister-in-law.
They make the most amazing colourful socks and their mission is to employ other people with learning disabilities. Their business really took off after they were on Dragon's Den and got funding from two of the Dragons!
So I reached out to them to get a quote for including a pair of socks in each of our welcome packs.
More connections
And then things got even better! We work with a company called i-tel to produce the welcome packs. Taking a leaf from MacIntyre's book about the importance of making connections, i-tel shared how special the socks are with another of their clients, Welcome Break, who gave MacIntyre a donation to cover the cost of the Stand Out Socks.
Local and national connections
Our Everyone Everywhere initiative focuses mostly on making smaller local connections, and on personal stories, but this experience made us realise that the larger connections we make can be equally influential, just in a different way.
We've helped Stand Out Socks in their mission:
Buy one = empower many
and in turn we've been helped along the way.
Find out more
You can find out more about Stand Out Socks here and see how their connections are making a difference in the video below. After all:
Why fit in when you were born to stand out?
At Stand Out, we passionately believe in investing in those society overlooks. We provide paid employment opportunities for individuals with learning disabilities, and use our eccentric socks to ignite essential conversations around inclusion. We're not just in the sock business, we're in the business of making a difference.
MacIntyre is so pleased to support Stand Out Socks - it's great to connect with others who share our values! Go on, buy a pair today!
