Contributing Back – Pro Bono Work
The Imaginarium Pledge is to deliver an hour of voluntary work for every day booked by our clients (paid for in-house training, coaching, facilitation or consultancy).
You book a day’s work with us and we will contribute an hour to a cause.
We are making a statement about wanting to contribute back to charities, communities, social enterprises, individual resilience and the environment.
Examples of volunteering we do:
- Running a workshop/training session for a charity
- Running a free open course to help participants build resilience
- Coaching/Mentoring on a 1:1 basis to help an individual
- Running workshops to raise money for a charity
- Giving time to add value to a community/group
Recent examples
- Making Networking Easier for Turning Tides
- Influence & Persuasion for Aldersgate Group
- Networking Confidence for Bloomin Arts
- Dealing with Difficult People for Skills For Care
- Negotiation Skills and Psychology of Influence for Reigate & Banstead Business Learning Lunches
- Resilience Workshops for Cranfield University
- Mentoring individuals and groups for Gatwick Diamond Business
- Presentation Skills for Family Support Network
- Resilience Session for Action Medical Research
- Wellbeing Toolkit sessions for St Catherine’s Hospice Sussex and Surrey
- Mentoring L&D professionals (with CIPD)
- Self-Motivation session for the Central Bedfordshire Swim Squad
- Career Presentation for Reigate School (careers week)
- Resilience Seminar for Stronger Kent Communities conference
- Business Mentoring for Children with Cancer Fund (with East Sussex Charity Mentors)
- MCing charity NLP Awards Ceremony – proceeds to Mind BLMK
- Persuasion/Influence and Futureproofing Yourself sessions for RSPCA
- Managing and Supporting Staff one-day workshop for Team Domenica
- Engagement & Influence spotlight session for Children’s Trust (Tadworth)
- Career mentoring and interview preparation for members of TOPRA
- Strategic Influence coaching for World Animal Protection
- Coaching on Negotiation & Influencing strategies for Sussex Wildlife Trust
- Mentoring MSc Students (Uni Sussex Business School Mentoring Scheme)
- Presentation Skills spotlight training session for RSPCA
- Presenting to CIPD groups on ‘Managing People Through Change‘
- Guest lecturing for Universities of Sussex and Kent
- Trustee and editor for LCS.
- Council member and ambassador for gdb.
We are currently looking for local charities (East Sussex/West Kent area) that we can support. Please contact us if we can help.
Joe took our team on an entertaining and informative journey through influencing and persuasion, opening our eyes to the different approaches and theory behind landing your points successfully. We now have a useful structure to use when we are planning our external affairs and communications work, so thank you for stimulating us so effectively.
Feedback from other team members: “A great session – would love to borrow even 10% of his energy levels.” “Thought provoking, I hadn’t considered thinking about the donors behind the people we are influencing before.”
Anne Smellie Assoc CIPD
Head of Operations
Aldersgate Group
Thank you again for a really interesting session. There’s a lot of chat going on in our wider team chat now! We’re very grateful for your time.
Sarah Palmer
Fundraising Manager
Turning Tides
Joe’s natural personality put me right at ease. A skill as a coach that enables honest conversation. Joe shared examples and switched between being coach and mentor. My horror of networking events, and how to join into conversations, in fact turned into a much lesser burden. I came away with ideas of questions and even how to bow out gracefully!
Ria Dannan
Community Development Manager
Bloomin Arts
Joe you were so natural; so witty and you just struck the right cord of acknowledging the pandemic but using comic relief to put everyone on Zoom at ease. You were fun, light, easy, right on with your comments.
My fav part tho that always made me laugh were the “asides” to the person who was off stage to your right I believe—it was cool, crazy—because I couldn’t tell if I was laughing because you were pretending to be “hallucinating” or if you were pretending we couldn’t hear them but you could.
Julie Silverthorn
NLP Awards Attendee
Thank you so much for having us, and for such a great training session it was super informative and engaging and we really appreciate your help with this.
Aaliyah Carter
gdb
Huge thanks to Joe for providing three pro bono sessions on wellbeing, resilience and managing change for colleagues here at St Catherine’s Hospice. I personally found the range of tools and ideas so helpful and Joe’s training style really engaging. Wonderful to have this support for our team here in these challenging times!
I wanted to say a huge thank you for your presentation yesterday, it was really informative and we have had some great feedback from the session too:
“Thanks so much for organising Joe to come in today… These learning lunches are so valuable for me (particularly as a one man band!) because I’ve got limited resources, I have to do the sales/pitches/negotiations that aren’t necessarily in my comfort zone or specific field of expertise.”
“Once again I’m leaving with a number of ‘take aways’ and in this case tactics to get 5% 10% (more?) out of the deals I make. Fantastic!!”
Economic Development & Markets Officer
Reigate & Banstead Borough Council
Marvellous seminar from Joe Cheal: ‘Wellbeing: Resilient You!’ at our Living Well at Any Age conference to support the voluntary sector. Feedback includes:
“insightful and invigorating session”
“lots of useful tips”
“really fun presenter and great feel-good content”
“inspiring facilitator”
Thanks Joe.
Emma Cooney
Event Organiser
Stronger Kent Communities
- “Excellent, entertaining and engaging”
- “Excellent, engaging, funny, knowledgeable”
- “Excellent, right balance”
- “Amazing – really fun and knowledgeable”
- “Excellent, very good balance of listening, engaging and interaction. All good!”
- “Friendly, warm and approachable. Very clear and positive approach”
- “Excellent – one of the best!”
- “Thank you for a great day!”
Nikki Kerr MCIOF
Director of Fundraising and Marketing
Family Support Work
I had the opportunity to engage with the Kent CIPD mentoring partnership as a mentee when I was going through a career transition and was teamed up with Joe Cheal. Joe’s background in learning and development combined with a wealth of coaching experience really helped support me during an extended time of uncertainty. During our sessions together Joe asked questions that helped me to reflect and to think about my goals. His playback allowed me to see my progress and build confidence for interviews which did help me to secure a L&D role. During our mentoring sessions, Joe also offered insights and academic references on a variety of topics all combined with good humour.
Elizabeth North
Joe was a fantastic mentor who really listened to me, who provided supportive challenge and who always brought joy and enthusiasm to the session. I thoroughly enjoyed our mentoring sessions and the tools he gave me have helped me to think differently when faced with difficulty.
Sam Stuart
L&D Advisor
Joe led two fantastic sessions for us during our Learning at Work Week at the RSPCA. Joe is always so engaging and is such a warm, fascinating presenter that you can’t fail to be captivated by what he has to say. He really listened to my plans for the campaign and facilitated sessions on Developing Resilience in Your Career and Persuasion and Influence, which were relevant to the campaign’s theme and well attended. The feedback was excellent – I received many comments on how there were plenty of takeaways and everyone enjoyed how accessible Joe’s sessions were. He knows so much that it was shame we couldn’t keep him all day to tell us more! I can’t wait to work with him again.
Kerry Gabriel O’Sullivan
L&D Manager
RSPCA
Joe led a management course on structuring supervision and appraisal sessions, understanding the importance of performance management, setting objectives and targets for teams and individuals, how to motivate and development staff, dealing with poor performance, action planning and delegation. The full day session was hugely valued by our staff who left feeling more confident and driven as managers. Would highly recommend.
Jo Cook
Executive Director
Team Domenica
You supported me to think through two complex situations, which both require negotiation and influencing skills. I felt challenged in my previous thinking, saw the situations from the perspective of the ‘other’ and left the session feeling that I had a new approach to bring to both conversations. I also became clear about my expectations. Your help was invaluable.
Tor Lawrence
Chief Executive
Sussex Wildlife Trust
Your session was excellent, some of the swimmers feedback was ‘he was my kind of guy, loved scooby doo voice’. So high compliments indeed. Coaches also enjoyed it and we have since had a coaches meeting to discuss how we can implement some of your tools. Again we really enjoyed your session and are very grateful.
Tom McManus
British Swim Coach
A big thank you from the MSc Human Resource Management team at University of Kent. We’ve had great feedback from the students about the interactive and engaging session you did about managing performance. They’re all asking you to come back so we’d love to get you booked in again for 2019!
Madeleine Wyatt
Senior lecturer in Human Resource Management
University of Kent
It was pitched just right. It’s just a shame we didn’t have more time!
Ally Grew
Careers Officer
Reigate School