Rotheras’ Head of Marketing Jo Walchester has been involved in many activities benefitting organisations and the local community, from social mobility initiatives to mentoring and designing websites for local charities.
NRG Lawyers focuses on paving the way for non-Russell Group university students to enter the legal profession by breaking down barriers and supporting and nurturing individuals whatever route they take into law. Jo designed the organisation’s website, ensuring it has a prominent online presence to reach out to students and individuals who will benefit from its mentoring and support programmes. https://nrg-lawyers.com/
Jo is redesigning the firm’s work experience programme, this includes developing partnerships with ThinkForward and Young Enterprise mentoring to ensure that children from low-socio economic backgrounds receive the opportunity to understand the legal career path, through the various routes to becoming a lawyer or part of one of the operational teams.
Jo is heavily involved in the firm’s social mobility initiatives. This includes partnering with several new charities including ThinkForward, which develops skills that young people need and provides long-term coaching to prepare young people for the world of work. Jo has also been involved in several talks to local schools, discussing various practice areas and routes into the profession.
Jo is currently a mentor at Nottingham High School for the Young Enterprise Scheme, inspiring and equipping young people to develop the life skills, knowledge and confidence needed in the world of work.
Jo is a current trustee of Roxie’s Cat Rescue Nottingham, a cat rescue working towards ending the pandemic of stray, abandoned and homeless cats by rescuing, rehabilitating and rehoming cats in need. Jo co-founded the charity with Beth Clayton, she supports the charity objectives through bid writing, marketing and fundraising events coordination, as well as having designed the website, branding and marketing materials for the organisation. https://roxiesrescuenottingham.org.uk/
Having already established a relationship with Chaplain Reverend Jo Tatum, and Rotheras offering sessions to employees through the organisation, Jo provided website design to the Nottingham Workplace Chaplaincy. The workplace chaplaincy was instrumental in guiding Jo’s faith, and she was keen to collaborate and support their goal of marketing such a valuable service to more organisations in Nottingham. https://nottinghamworkplacechaplaincy.org.uk/
Jo was a co-founding member and former trustee of Brighter Futures Through Sport, an organisation founded by former professional footballer Lee Canoville that provides a specially designed mentoring programme to over 40 schools in Nottingham with the aim of raising participating children’s confidence, self-respect, citizenship and social awareness. Jo designed the website, branding and marketing tools, contributed to bid writing for the charity and ran fundraising events throughout her time as a trustee. https://bfts.org.uk/
Jo is an extremely passionate advocate for mental health and wellbeing, she is keen to ensure staff feel supported in their working environment. Jo founded and currently runs the development forum which invites staff to regularly participate in wellbeing activities such as the recent mindfulness sessions led by former lawyer Paulo Karat, along with previous activities such as reading self-development books and trialing wellbeing apps. Jo leads on the facilitation of discussion around self-development, providing tools and resources to support improving mental health whilst promoting peer discussion, fostering a sense of support and a positive culture around mental health.
In 2022 Jo completed her Level 5 Qualification in Coaching and Mentoring with the ILM, funded by Rotheras. As part of the qualification, she ran a coaching programme with 4 members of staff, for 6 1-hour sessions each. This gave staff the opportunity to be supported in working on specific goals or behaviours they wanted to change. Jo will be running the coaching programme on an annual basis with the view to providing a safe and supportive space for staff to work on barriers to their goals. Jo is also currently completing a certificate in Awareness of Mental Health Problems; this will help her to better identify areas of mental health staff may be struggling with and ensure she is able to sign-post them on effectively to the right support services.
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Kelly strives to make a difference in her role, she puts 100% into what she does and works tirelessly to deliver the best service she can for her lawyers and those she supports across the wider office and firm. She is an extremely experienced Legal PA, supporting the Nottingham office Senior Partner and 5 other lawyers with their every need.
In addition to her ‘day job’ of being a PA she has progressed through the ranks and is now the Nottingham office CR Manager, supporting multiple local and national charities which includes organising large scale client events and smaller local office events. She manages a large committee of people and strives to deliver the firms strategy for CR.
She does both in her Legal PA and CR Manager role seamlessly; both roles are highly demanding and she receives consistently positive feedback from both her internal and external clients.
An example of a large scale event Kelly has organised is the annual charity quiz. This event raises funds for a local hospice which has raised in total over £50,000 over numerous years. In addition to the quiz, Kelly also organises raffle/auction prizes from local companies to help raise additional funds at the event, all proceeds going to the local charity.
Kelly has also organised events for multiple charities over the past 12 months, including:
- Sports Relief
- Christmas Toy Appeal
- Kit out the Nation
- Legal Walks
- Sleep in/out
- Children in Need
- Movember
- Global running day
- Easter egg delivery
- World Food Day
- Women’s Aid Integrated Services
- Contributions to local homeless charities
- Ukraine relief fund
- Christmas Toy Appeal
In addition to the above charity work Kelly also organises various volunteering schemes for the local community, including:
Eversheds Unlocked. This programme is designed to give young people aged 16-18 who may not consider attending university due to social, economic and / or cultural backgrounds but have an interest in law or the support to successfully apply for a degree in law. It is designed to help attendees consider the skills they might need to develop and the challenges they might need to overcome to achieve the success they want. Despite covid restrictions Kelly continued to run this programme virtually successfully for the local community.
- Skills builder. This supports young people and adults at all stages of their life as a national careers week and we facilitated he event connecting with a class and taking part in Q&A’s.
- IntoUniversity- an educational charity which aims to support young people from areas of disadvantage to raise their aspirations and achieve their full potential. It involves mentoring and advising them to fulfil their roles giving students ‘hands on’ insight into the world of work.
Other volunteering work Kelly has supported and organised is as follows:
- West Bridgford Junior School careers day
- Enabling enterprise
- Pathways to law
- Vacation scheme programme (in-house work experience)
- Volunteering at Bluecoat Aspley School – talking to students with disadvantaged backgrounds or within the care system
- Mentoring students from the Nottingham Law School and NTU
- Volunteering at local hospices such as decorating, gardening and painting fences
- LGBT Pride
Kelly brings an enormous amount of energy and passion to her role, regularly going above and beyond the usual parameters. Kelly also helps to bring cohesion to the office environment - which is crucially important in the current era of hybrid working – through her considerable efforts as part of our office social committee.
Kelly has most recently secured a partnership for the local office with a charity called Magic Breakfast. Magic Breakfast is an initiative where volunteers go into a local school on a weekly basis during Breakfast Club and help with various activities such as reading etc. We are taking part in Magic Maker and have raised money to purchase items from a wish list for the children at the school for Christmas and Kelly, along with a colleague will be delivering these gifts to the children by hand in time for Christmas.
Feedback
“Genuinely, I can't remember life before Kelly - she's that good. She is super organised, super committed, super professional and super enthusiastic and she does it all whilst remaining calm and friendly. She always volunteers to do extra, whether that is covering for others, her CSR role or arranging the Into programme.”
“Kelly is absolutely the heartbeat of the office on a number of fronts for the Eversheds Sutherland Nottingham Office. Kelly not only is my own PA for which I am daily grateful for her support, but Kelly also leads on our CR programme locally leading on and driving numerous local and firm wide initiatives.”
