Team Shoutout – Restart South Yorkshire & Restart Liverpool

Across GC, our colleagues are making big differences within their business units

As the green champion for her area of GC Employment, Alina Teodorescu, Employment Advisor for Restart South Yorkshire, has been passionately promoting environmental awareness with her customers.

Alina creates a monthly environmental awareness calendar which highlights key awareness days. She shares these calendars with customers and places them around the office in high-traffic areas. Each month, she focuses on a particular theme, such as thrifting, where she introduced customers to apps like Vinted and shared her own experience using the app to inspire her customers to consider it as an alternative.

Alongside Tia Evans, Service Manager for Restart Liverpool, they regularly incorporate conversations around climate change into meetings with customers to support them in their sustainability journeys. They share information and documentaries to help with understanding and introduce a carbon calculator to help customers better understand their carbon footprints. This approach is also incorporated into ‘job club’ group sessions to encourage wider discussions and idea sharing.

In Liverpool, Tia has introduced a ‘Think Green’ board which features QR codes to resources to help customers be more green around the city, including transport, food, shopping, and activities to get involved in the community. The monthly calendar is also incorporated for both customers and colleagues to see and get ideas about what is going on in the area.

Alina said: “I like to incorporate sustainability as part of in-person sessions because it usually gets better engagement and is a nice way to build rapport with customers. Some of them have never thought about climate change before and so it can be quite a shock, but I’ve had some really great conversations, and they normally go away feeling inspired.”