Find out how Rebeca’s employer, Gattaca, is encouraging its international teams to support the engineering community by raising vital funds for Foothold.

Foothold was chosen as the charity partner of my employer, Gattaca, in October 2020. Since then, staff and the management board alike have been working hard to raise as much money as possible to fund this brilliant charity’s life-changing work.

We had heard how Foothold had used these funds to develop a dedicated online wellbeing hub, where engineers and their families can access a wide range of free resources to help enhance their mental health and wellbeing.

Since this resource is available to our clients within the global engineering sector, we were keen to support Foothold and spread the word in any way we could.

An international effort

So, a group of us within Networkers Iberia, owned by our parent company Gattaca, decided to take on our own fundraising challenge for Foothold.

Since our team members work remotely from home across North-Western Spain and Portugal, we decided a distance-focused exercise challenge would work best, with each of us contributing as many kilometers as possible to collectively cover a target of 50kms in one week.

Kicking the challenge off on the 10th October to mark World Mental Health Day, our team walked, hiked and ran across some beautiful and diverse terrains, including Lisboa and Oporto in Portugal, the centre of Madrid city, the sunny coastline of Galicia and “The Ball of the World” in the mountain range of Sierra de Guadarrama.

“We used our team WhatsApp chat to communicate and cheer each other on throughout the week, which helped to unite us on our mission and give us a shared sense of what we were trying to achieve.”

We also used tracking apps like Strava to compare our efforts and add a competitive edge to the challenge!

I’m pleased to say, we managed to smash our original target by collectively racking up more than 180km. This was largely down to our most daring contributor, Fátima Escrivá de Romaní, who refused to let an injured Achilles tendon get in her way!

A shared purpose

We all had a great time during the challenge, and I feel more than just charitable good came from it. For my physical and mental health, for our team spirit in Gattaca, for the publicity that it generated for our company and, of course, for raising funds and awareness for a fantastic charity within our sector.

“Not only did we get to see some amazing places, but we were also able to share the experience with our teammates.”

We challenged ourselves and each other to achieve more, and this common sense of purpose outside the workplace helped us to get to know each other better on a personal level too.

To any remote teams considering taking part in a fundraising challenge, I say go ahead and do it! It’s an empowering and enriching way to overcome the feeling of distance and fatigue that homeworking can bring, and the team-building aspect is so motivational.

At Networkers Iberia we’re already planning our next fundraising challenge, and we hope to recruit even more Gattaca staff and associates to raise more money and cover more distance.

This challenge is our opportunity to show the global management and staff of Gattaca what the Iberian folks can do!

If your company would like to take on a fundraising challenge for Foothold, please visit the corporate fundraising pages on our website for ideas, events and advice on how to get started.