Regional chartered accountancy firm MHA Monahans, which has eight offices across the West of England, has donated out-of-date branded merchandise to support the work of a humanitarian aid charity in West Africa.
Last November the firm rebranded from Monahans to MHA Monahans to highlight its ongoing membership of MHA, the national association of independent chartered accountants.
Determined not to just throw away items bearing its old branding, the firm instead decided to hand them over to Jacob’s Well Appeal, a charity providing educational equipment along with medical aid, agricultural and tools and building supplies and emergency disaster relief in more than 30 countries.
The items will be sent to schools the charity works with in Burkina Faso, with pens going into shoe boxes given to children as gifts, hessian bags will be used by them as school bags and t-shirts will be used by teenage pupils and staff.
MHA Monahans marketing manager Zoe Meaden said: “It’s fantastic that our old branded goods can be reused by communities in Burkina Faso to help young people in their education and support much-needed charity work in the region by the Jacob’s Well Appeal.
“We also donated craft goods to a local school club and so wanted to ensure that we could have the widest reach possible to help charitable and good causes.”
Jacob’s Well Appeal office manager Bridget Conroy said: “On behalf of Jacob’s Well Appeal I would like to thank the Team at MHA Monahans for donating bags, pens and apparel.
“For 36 years now we have been regularly sending out 40 ft containers to organisations/charities we partner in very poor countries or disaster areas with medical, agricultural and educational supplies. We strongly believe in helping people to help themselves.”
Monahans has 16 partners and employs 190 people across its offices in Bath, Trowbridge, Chippenham, Melksham, Frome, Glastonbury, Swindon and Taunton.
The firm provides a full range of accountancy, tax, investment and insurance services to businesses and private individuals.
Yorkshire-based Jacob’s Well Appeal, which also works in Ghana, Moldova, Syria, Albania, Somaliland and Cape Verde, recently launched a self-sustaining project to feed poor families in 30 villages in Burkina Faso through a ‘seed bank’.
This ‘lends’ the villagers a 100kg sack of maize, which they plant and tend on land they have cleared until harvest time, when they can expect to reap around 8,000Kg of maize. They then return a 100Kg sack of maize to the charity.
