EY’s Summer interns braved the British summer weather to volunteer their time and support local charities across the islands with projects aimed at enhancing and protecting local biodiversity.
The team in Jersey supported the National Trust with its hedge maintenance project, helping to conserve the area surrounding the hedgerow to ensure they have the best opportunity to grow and ultimately enhance the biodiversity. In Guernsey, the team supported La Société Guernesiaise with maintenance of one of their orchards, removing honeysuckle and vines from the trees to make room for the trees to grow, and participating in a butterfly survey project to assess and record the population of butterflies.
These volunteering days were part of EY’s internship programme, which takes place annually throughout July. The paid internship is open to all university students and is designed to give a taste of what a career at EY could look like. During the programme, the students had the opportunity to work with EY teams across audit, tax and tech risk to find out more about each service line, as well as take part in management shadowing, team building days and networking events.
By participating in these volunteering days, the interns contributed to EY’s global corporate responsibility programme, EY Ripples. This programme aims to positively impact the lives of 1 billion people by 2030, with one of its core pillars being accelerating environmental sustainability.
Fiona Morton, EY’s Assurance Partner and CI Talent Leader, said: “Supporting and giving back to our local communities is so important to us, so it was great to see the interns fully embracing this and working together to support local charities and contribute to our sustainability goals. Throughout the month, the interns fully immersed themselves into EY’s culture and it was great to see their confidence and skills grow throughout the programme. We wish them all the best with their continuing studies and future careers.”