ZURICH Community Trust Swindon employee Clare Maynard is the 100th employee since its beginnings in 1994, to travel to India to help a rights based child centred charity by sharing her business skills and expertise.

Clare spent a month in Bangalore on an assignment which was designed to help charity partner the Association for Promoting Social Action, set up an external and internal communications plan.

Clare had to complete a range of tasks in a short time including developing an understanding of how charities work in India and putting in place a communications framework that they will be able to use and evolve on their own.

She said: “This charity, among many other things, does amazing work for children from the streets and slums in Bangalore, challenging local child labour and child abuse issues.

“As a small organisation with just one part-time communications manager, they have neither time nor resources to formulate a communications strategy.

“My focus has been to prepare a communications toolkit and a planner, as well as updating brochures and advising on their website. I also provided some recommendations for them to develop their future communications strategy.”

The Zurich Community Trust works with five charity partners in Bangalore and Chennai, in Southern India.

Two of the partners work on issues such as physical disability, two work with children’s and community rights issues and the fifth works with the homeless mentally ill. Zurich provides grants and assignment projects such as this one undertaken by Clare, with the aim of improving the partners’ capacity to deliver their work.