To combine our celebration of the Football World Cup and our passion for sustainability and the environment, at the end of last year we launched our Plant-A-Pitch campaign which ran alongside our World Cup 5-A-Side. The culmination of this came in February when we took 19 members of our team out to plant 250 trees on Dartmoor with local charity Moor Trees.
We partnered up with Moor Trees with the aim of planting enough trees to fill a football pitch. This meant we needed to raise enough money to buy 770 trees along with all the accessories and aftercare needed to support them through to maturity. To do this, we played a fantasy football game which involved everybody being turned into a shiny World Cup player sticker and earning points out on the 5-A-Side pitch. As well as this we auctioned off an official World Cup football and ran a series of football prediction competitions.
Thanks to the amazing effort of our whole team, and those within the wider Oxygen House building, we far exceeded our fundraising target. By the New Year only one thing remained to do and that was to get our hands dirty with a bit of digging. So, on a sunny but cold February morning we headed to South Brent to spend a day planting various species of tree to create a shelterbelt around a field edge. Shelterbelts provide the perfect natural cover for windy valleys to help bring back wildlife.
Fortunately for us we didn’t need to plant all 770 trees that day. We managed 250 in the time we were there, but Moor Trees volunteers have been hard at work since to plant the rest of ‘the pitch’. It turns out that football and tree planting are a winning combination!
