Hazelwood’s world mappers help Lubrizol hit its global volunteering target

Staff at a Belper firm helped their company achieve its volunteering total for the year when they carried out potentially life-saving work to help rescue teams operating in remote areas - without even leaving their desks. Fourteen workers at Lubrizol’s UK headquarters in Hazelwood gave up their day to help others by participating in the Red Cross’s Missing Maps project, a worldwide initiative designed to update free online maps by drawing in buildings, roads and natural features.

The work, which is part of the charity’s contribution to ensuring that the free OpenStreetMaps tool can be used by humanitarian workers all over the world, was part of a designated day of action organised by Lubrizol as part of its commitment to helping local communities. Lubrizol, which has employees all over the world, set itself the target of providing 2,020 hours of worth of virtual volunteering hours this year, and the staff at Hazelwood were joined in their efforts by workers at its other UK sites, including those in Manchester and Huddersfield.

In total, Lubrizol’s UK staff contributed 100 hours to the global effort, which was matched by a further 600 hours by staff elsewhere, who also took part in the mapping project as well as sewing face masks and making comfort blankets and quilts for sick and traumatised babies, children and teenagers. The total was enough to see Lubrizol achieve its 2,020 target for the year.

Claire Hollingshurst, a quality systems manager at Lubrizol, said that although the maps are ideal for rescuers and medical teams heading for the world’s most remote communities, there are many places in the world where the corresponding map is empty of the kind of geodata they need in order to prepare for their missions. She said:

“Usually we’d undertake volunteer work outside but that wasn’t possible this year, so we spent the day mapping a remote area of Indonesia for the Red Cross.

“There was literally nothing on the maps representing these areas, so we had to use satellite images of the same locations and then draw all of the houses and shops and other features we could see onto the empty map.

“We’re so used to seeing and using detailed maps of this country so and, although this was thousands of miles away and was somewhere I’d never heard of, it was really rewarding to give up some hours to help map these faraway locations while helping Lubrizol hit its volunteering target for the year as well.”