Training Solutions

Holdfast hosted its fifth annual ‘Carpers for Veterans Support’ fishing event at Oak Lakes Fisheries in Southminster last weekend, and are pleased to report that we have raised over £3k for Blind Veterans UK.

The event is organised and run by our Performance Manager, Mark Jobling, who also served in the Army for 30 years. His commitment and support for such a worthwhile charity is testament to the success of this annual event. Since the competition started 5 years ago, Mark has raised over £17k for Blind Veterans UK.

There were 18 anglers taking part and most were serving Royal Engineers or veterans, with the eldest being 65 and the youngest 25. The group signed up to take part in the 48-hour competition which saw them fight it out to catch the five biggest carp!

A big thank you to everyone who supported the event. It's not too late to make a donation and any monies, big or small are gratefully received - https://www.justgiving.com/page/mark-jobling-1706713713549    

Holdfast were delighted to help a number of vulnerable families from St Margaret’s Infant School, Rainham with summer care boxes during the 6-week school holidays.

Each box contained a variety of food and toiletries which we hoped lightened the load of the weekly shop and gave the families spare funds to use for more enjoyable activities during the summer period!

Holdfast worked in collaboration with one of our secondary contractors, ESS, who shared the cost of each box with Holdfast and also did the delivery drops to the families each week. Thank you, ESS for your continued work in helping us support the local community - a job well done.

Holdfast were delighted to welcome the winning pupils from St Margaret’s Infant School, Rainham and The Delce Academy, Rochester to The Royal School of Military Engineering on Monday 15^th July ’24. The winning pupils did a wonderful job of producing colourful posters that highlighted an important message to all regarding environmental awareness and how we can all make small changes to improve our carbon footprint.

The pupils enjoyed seeing several of our sustainability projects such as beehives, wormery and allotments and learned a lot of important facts about bees from our beekeeper – they even got the opportunity to try our very own RSME honey!

After the pupils had done a spot of gardening and sowing seeds to take home, the pupils went on to pick fresh produce from our vegetable garden which they used in their cookery lesson with our onsite chefs. We had very creative and colourful pizzas for lunch! The day was topped off by hearing the pupils say they had a great time and rated it 100/10.

Holdfast would like to thank ESS for their continued support in this ESG Initiative and look forward to working with them on other ESG initiatives later in the year!

We are delighted to share that for the second year running Holdfast have won a Gold Award at the InfraRed ‘Creating Better Future Awards 2024’ held in London on 3^rd July. This award was in recognition of the Summer Sports Camp initiative that supported 25 local vulnerable children attend free sporting activities during the summer holidays. We collected the award along with our main contractor, Babcock, who went on to support these children during the October half-term holidays. This initiative not only supported the children and their families, but has also given Holdfast and our stakeholders the opportunity to engage with our local community and make a difference. We have lots of exciting ESG initiatives taking place this year and we look forward to entering next year’s awards!