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Meet the Neighbours - Community Manager Team Lead

By Isobel Gauld on December 20, 2023

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Isobel Gauld

Marketing & Communications Manager at Neighbourly

Meet Merryn - Community Managers Team Lead, Volunteering

For our final Meet the Neighbours of 2023, we’re very pleased to introduce Merryn Jones, our Community Manager Team Lead for Volunteering. Having begun her Neighbourly career as a Community Manager, Merryn’s hard work, determination and passion over the last year and a half have seen her progress to Team Lead, taking the volunteering proposition from strength to strength.

Where does your role fit in the Neighbourly machine, helping businesses support good causes in their local communities?

In my role as a community manager, I work with good causes, supporting them with using the Neighbourly platform and getting the most out of the opportunities available. In particular, I help them benefit from the employee volunteering on offer from our clients. This includes helping them to communicate volunteering events particularly for large scale campaigns involving thousands of employees in a short period of time, as part of an activation to create great impact quickly.

What do you enjoy the most about working on the volunteering team within community management?

I love speaking to good causes. They’re always very happy and thankful that there’s a team of volunteers able to support them. It's even more rewarding when they send an email afterwards or post something on social media letting us know the difference the team made to their organisation and beneficiaries.

I was particularly attracted to the opportunity to make a positive impact in the community

What attracted you to working at Neighbourly?

I was previously working in retail doing long hours with very few benefits so when I was approached about the community manager position at Neighbourly I thought it looked great. I was particularly attracted to the opportunity to make a positive impact in the community and to see firsthand the difference our work has on people in need. I had volunteered in my personal life a number of times before joining Neighbourly and was drawn to the idea of being able to support others to do this every day.

Can you share some of your personal highlights from your time working for Neighbourly?

In the last 2 years I’ve been lucky enough to support two significant volunteering campaigns for our clients Hays and B&Q. With over 3,500 employee volunteers between them, working on both of these campaigns involved a lot of hard work, but also a lot of fun. In total the two programmes supported more than 450 good causes, and seeing the impact delivered into communities by the end of it was absolutely phenomenal.

Seeing the impact delivered into communities is absolutely phenomenal

Is there a Neighbourly good cause whose work particularly inspires you? Can you tell us why?

There are so many brilliant good causes in the Neighbourly network that it's hard to choose! One that I have communicated with regularly and I find particularly inspiring is Freely Fruity. They are a charity based in Reading, set up to grow fruit and vegetables that can then be distributed for free to vulnerable people in their local community while also reducing carbon emissions through tree planting.

If you could positively change one thing about the world of business, and spread it across the globe, what would it be and why?

It would be to increase the focus on long-term sustainability and societal impact. At Neighbourly we’re lucky to see the difference that can be made by donating time, surplus products and money to a small good cause. If all businesses were to adopt one local good cause each in the future, they could help make a kinder, more positive world and create a more sustainable future for everyone.

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