Interview with Anna O'Mahoney, Chief Executive, Hollybank Trust

Hollybank Trust helps people to live and learn and provides quality life for life by providing teaching, residential care, plus a range of therapies and enrichment activities for children, young people and adults with profound and multiple disabilities and sensory impairments. We spoke to their Chief Executive, Anna O'Mahoney to find out the impact of being an industry partner with the programme.

The connection between Hollybank Trust and the programme began with a group project. A small group of students from the 2021-22 programme conducted a group sustainability project at the Trust as part of their degree, which provided them with excellent concrete examples of what sustainability means in practice.

One of the project students then went on to develop an individual project with Hollybank as part of their Masters dissertation. The initial plan was for the student to work together with Hollybank to help the Trust build its vision and a basic sustainability plan, but what they ended up with was a wonderfully comprehensive sustainability policy which was ratified by the Hollybank Trustees. The Chief Executive, Anna O’Mahony said “[The project’s] very much fulfilled and gone beyond our expectations, if you think that we now have a fully ratified sustainability policy for the organisation and the student only started with us a few months ago, which is fantastic.”

It was the first time Hollybank Trust had a student working with their executive and senior management team, having previously only had students as trainee nurses, teachers, therapists and on apprenticeships and Anna was very pleased with how well the placement went, with the quality of both the input and output from the student exceeding their expectations.

Hollybank made the decision to treat the student as a normal member of staff, which allowed the student to fully immerse themselves within the Hollybank Trust, which really benefited the staff at Hollybank by giving them a single point of contact and one person to build a relationship with. The executive and senior team recognised the student’s time with them would be limited, so Anna noted that they tried to be as flexible, available and responsive as they could when the student needed their contribution and input to the project.

The Trustees of Hollybank stated how impressed they were with the policy, and how both the student and the Trust managed to complete an important piece of work in a time when there’s been a pandemic, a financial crisis and a recruitment crisis in the third sector, and have been able to not lose sight of something that is critically important to the future of the organisation. Anna commented that had been due to the students' infectious passion and excitement, and his influencing skills and ability to hold his own in discussions with staff and other stakeholders, which was a huge help in gaining staff support for the project.

Anna said “Overall, It’s been fantastic and impacted everything we do. We had our first meeting on Monday about planning for Christmas and because we have 10 care homes, schools and therapy centres, that’s a lot of Christmas trees to consider. A member of staff asked in the meeting if instead of buying 10 7ft trees and disposing of them afterwards, whether we could use a company that lets us use the same trees each year. This would not only fulfil a good part of our sustainability plan but shows the underlying values are filtering down… I want it to be embedded as a way of working rather than us having to keep checking we are fulfilling the plan.”

This has clearly been a positive experience for both the Hollybank Trust and the student. Anna hopes to continue having a student each year to help them build upon the work of this first placement. As Anna herself said “It’s just ignited that excitement and we’ve been really, really pleased with it and would absolutely like to be part of it again in the future.”

If this has piqued your interest and you’d like to be a future industry partner of the programme, get in touch via environment-careers@york.ac.ukenvironment-sublim-ilo@york.ac.uk