Helping children with creativity and developing social skills really matters and one of the best ways of doing this is having the opportunity to play with LEGO®.
We’ve been working with community organisations in Dublin’s North East Inner City (NEIC) to help as many kids as possible through LEGO® after-school activity. It’s part of our Project Bright initiative where KPMG people come up with great ideas as part of our commitment to the community.
We want to give a voice to the great ideas and passion for community that we have in our firm. We do this through Project Bright - an annual competition where KPMG people come up with their own ideas for helping make a difference in the community. This year’s winner was the KPMG Lego Club, and it really caught our attention from the start.
Its focus is on using LEGO as a way of helping encourage collaborative play. LEGO play motivates children to improve their emotion recognition skills, their social interaction, as well as their logistical and problem-solving capabilities.
We brought this LEGO play based idea to life via a partnership with City Connects - a school-based intervention programme that promotes equal equity of outcome for all children. Its’ mission is to have children engage in school by connecting each child with a tailored set of prevention, intervention and enrichment services so they can succeed and thrive. Last year City Connects asked almost 1,700 primary school children in Dublin’s NEIC to choose a resource they’d like to have access to and nearly 500 of the children chose access a LEGO® club. When our Project Bright winning team heard of the idea, they knew they wanted to help and proposed a partnership as the winning idea. KPMG’s Project Bright works directly with two City Connects members, Belvedere Youth Centre, Buckingham Road and Ozanam House, Mount Joy Square
We provided funding which went towards the purchase of LEGO® pieces, storage, cleaning equipment and initial youth worker training. During the course of this initiative, 7 youth workers were trained in a mix of LEGO® Play and LEGO® Therapy and have received certificates from The LEGO® Foundation. Teams from KPMG engaged in a 4 week challenge where the children had to build original creations with a sustainable, innovative twist and then upload pictures to showcase their work. After the 4 week sustainability challenge, the programme was handed over to the community to sustain and grow through local community youth centres and initiatives. Commenting on KPMGs support for this initiative, KPMG Managing Partner Seamus Hand said; “This programme is community driven, in-line with our corporate citizenship programme, it is simple, sustainable and we hope will make a tangible difference to the children within the North Easy Inner City.”
Finally, KPMG hosted a celebratory event in our Platform X Innovation Hub in the IFSC to acknowledge the participants in the programme. The event included the presentation of certificates to all the youth workers who completed their LEGO® training. Speaking at the event, Gerry Cullen from City Connects said. “Our partnership with KPMG has really helped make a difference. All of the children who have taken part have really benefited from the experience and importantly - have enjoyed themselves while learning.”
