Overview
Embassy Village is a Manchester based charity who are creating a new community in Manchester that will provide much needed wrap-around support for the city’s homeless and vulnerable men. Embassy Village will provide a safe environment to enable them to get back on their feet.
Their approach is to reintegrate vulnerable people back into society by helping them to find work and a home of their own, reducing the pressure on local councils. They work hard with residents to build their confidence and life skills so they can contribute to society again, offering them a hand up, not a handout.
Andy Marsden, Business Development Director at Connectus said: “Essentially, I decided to get Connectus involved in this project as a born and bred Mancunian it really resonated with me the large-scale homeless problem we have in the city, particularly men who often must sleep rough even in the cold of winter. I met Sid in 2021 and was really taken by his passion for the project and what he’d achieved to date with the embassy bus project. As a result of this I felt a good way to give back would be to provide broadband and telephony to the Embassy Village site free of charge. In addition to this, it came to my attention that Sid and his team were suffering with IT issues of their own with email not working properly and a lack of suitable storage for all the various documentation they needed so we took them on as a customer (FOC) and got them working more effectively and efficiently using Office 365 and moving them away from their old, outdated storage system.”
“Connectus liked this vision and the offer began with a pledge to install and supply long term, the broadband for the village and it’s Village Hall as well as phone lines. The hall is the community’s heart, with an office for the staff team and a training kitchen, laundry, large social space and counselling room. Broadband here allows our staff to do their job but also for residents to get on a computer and write a CV, apply for jobs, video call family abroad and print out forms and documents. We’ll also be glad to watch films together or England lose the football. There’s a lot of savings being made for the charity while serving the poor.”
“Since beginning the partnership with Embassy, Connectus have also helped the charity move from drop box and a small email server to Office 365 and to new emails free of charge and also paid for all the software licenses for the staff team across their laptops. Connectus intends to continue to work with Embassy going forward as its outsourced IT department, helping the charity to manage IT challenges and stay on top of things, again, pro- bono.”
