On 3rd October 2016, The Zygos Partnership will be 14.1 years old, and Mary Baxter, Emma Combe, Kerynne Metherell, Steph Mounfield and Laura Sanderson will be celebrating by running 14.1 miles through the Royal Parks of London. 

We will be taking part in the Royal Parks Half * on 9th October to support Resurgo Spear, an organisation based just down the road from us in Chelsea which runs pre-employment training programmes for 16 - 24 year olds.  Spear equips young people with the hard skills they need to find a job, including CV writing and interview training.  Their approach tackles the attitudinal and behavioural issues that employers cite as major barriers to long-term success in their young recruits, and each Spear attendee leaves with increased confidence and skills to find work.  Spear’s work is very effective: 75% of those who complete the programme not only get into work or further training, but are still there a year later.

An unofficial motto of The Zygos Partnership is “Do Hard Things”; whether that be finding a CEO for a company in the middle of a rescue rights issue, assembling a high quality Board for an IPO that will improve the float price in just a fortnight, coordinating conflicting schedules to arrange an interview process that delivers results, or solving otherwise seemingly impossible searches. None of these things is as hard as getting your first job when you have left school with few or no qualifications.  For the past 18 months we have been proudly supporting Spear in their outstanding work.  We’ve had the
privilege of getting to know Spear students though practice interview sessions, we’ve run an afternoon of work shadowing for a Spear programme group, and we employed a Spear apprentice in 2015.  We’ve also raised money to support Spear in running their programmes, and with your help we’d love to do more.  It costs £1,500 for each student to participate on a Spear course so the target we’ve set ourselves to raise in this half marathon is £7,500, which will enable each Zygos runner to sponsor one student through a course.

This is the first half marathon for some of us, and one of our running team recently completed her first 2 miles ever(!).  While trotting round the Royal Parks is not exactly climbing Everest, for the five of us involved running a half marathon is without doubt doing a Hard Thing.  We are very grateful to you for all of your support of The Zygos Partnership and of each of us over the years, and we’d be so grateful if you would join us in celebrating Zygos passing the 14.1 milestone by supporting Spear. 

When you make your donation through Just Giving, you’ll be prompted to leave a comment if you wish.  If you would like to, to motivate us further, please leave us a comment reflecting on how getting your first job made you feel.  Or please do suggest a piece of music that you enjoy for us to add to the playlist for the big day. Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe; JustGiving will never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity and make sure Gift Aid is reclaimed on every eligible donation by a UK taxpayer. This makes it the most efficient way to donate: we raise more, whilst saving time and cutting costs for the charity.

With our sincere thanks, 

Laura, Steph, Kerynne, Emma and Mary

*the eagle eyed may spot that the Royal Parks Half is 13.1 miles; we'll clock up the extra mile in our final training run earlier that week.