What does a bake sale in a Buro Happold office have in common with repairing water pumps in rural Sierra Leone, restoring mangrove forests and with climbing the three highest mountains in Scotland, England and Wales?
Over the past few weeks, rather more than we might have expected.
Buro Happold has been a valued supporter of Action on Poverty (APT)’s work in Sierra Leone, providing both financial support and pro-bono professional expertise to two programmes focused on water access, women’s economic empowerment, mangrove restoration and climate resilience.
In Sierra Leone, one of the programmes supported by Buro Happold is training women as professional water-pump mechanics. When a pump breaks in a rural community, access to safe water can disappear with it, leaving people – particularly women and girls – travelling much further to collect water. Training local women to maintain and repair these pumps helps communities keep their water infrastructure working, while also giving women valuable technical skills and opportunities to earn an income.
The second programme focuses on restoring and protecting mangroves in coastal communities. Mangroves provide natural protection against erosion and flooding, support fisheries and biodiversity, contribute to local livelihoods and store significant quantities of carbon. APT and its partners are working with communities so that local people can restore, manage and protect these ecosystems over the long term.
Buro Happold is providing pro-bono technical expertise to both programmes. For the water project, their engineers are advising on the construction of toilets and helping ensure that both sanitation facilities and water pumps are designed to better withstand flooding. For the mangrove project, they are supporting plans for two fish ponds, which will provide communities with an additional source of food and income while reducing pressure on depleted local fish stocks. This should give the surrounding mangrove ecosystem – and the fish populations it supports – more time to recover.
Then came the Three Peaks.
This year, we set ourselves the challenge of climbing Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Yr Wyddfa – around 38km on foot and 3,200m of ascent, travelling between Scotland, England and Wales and aiming to complete the whole adventure in around 24 hours. The objective was simple: take on something difficult, raise money for APT and hopefully introduce more people to the work happening in Sierra Leone.
We also wanted people to be able to join us without having to climb three mountains, so the Road to Three Peaks was born.
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People at Buro Happold quickly found their own ways to get involved.
The response from the Buro Happold team was incredibly positive from the start. Tabark, Carys, Oscar, Abi and Sheng were all supportive of the challenge and what we were trying to achieve. Tabark and Oscar then took that support a step further by organising a bake sale in the office, with colleagues contributing cakes and coming along to support it.
Everything sold, and we saw a real jump in donations that day. Just as importantly, it got people talking about the challenge and APT’s work, introducing the projects to people we would probably never have reached otherwise. And apparently helping organise a bake sale wasn’t quite enough for Oscar, because he also decided to come and climb the mountains with us.
His challenge started before we had even put our boots on. Travel disruption meant a very late arrival in Glasgow after a fairly epic combination of trains and buses, followed by a few hours of something vaguely resembling sleep on a sofa before we left for Ben Nevis.
Over the next 24+ hours, it was genuinely great getting to know him. He brought an enormous amount of positive energy and curiosity to the team, whether we were battling rain, wind and hail on Ben Nevis, climbing Scafell Pike in the dark or making the final push up Yr Wyddfa the following morning. Along the way he was helping other hikers, checking people were safe and even picking up rubbish from the trail.
But things did not always go according to plan.
Between the mountains, our driver became seriously ill with food poisoning and suddenly we had to rethink our logistics while already tired and against the clock. Oscar simply adapted, offered to help and stayed positive while we worked out how to keep going.
For me, one of the nicest things to come out of the challenge was simply getting to know Oscar better. After sharing an adventure like this, I came away feeling very lucky that he had decided to join us. He was a great addition to the team and, more importantly, a genuinely great person to have met.
The Three Peaks was a first for us, and definitely a learning experience. We’ve come away with plenty of ideas about what we could do differently – and bigger – next time.
By Luc-Antoine Bonte
Programme Manager