AL-KO Vehicle Technology Group celebrates apple festival with St Clara children’s home in Gundelfingen

An essential aspect of the AL-KO Vehicle Technology Group’s (AL-KO VT) brand is that it actively participates in community life, having a positive impact on its social environment and helping shape it. The company supports local social organisations to this end, and has just launched corporate volunteering programmes as a new project. These call upon AL-KO VT employees to support charitable organisations together on a voluntary basis. 

The pilot project started in the AL-KO VT headquarters in Kötz with a Christmas gift campaign for the St Clara children’s home in Gundelfingen back in winter 2021. Around 50 children from infants to teenagers live at the home. The AL-KO VT Apple Festival took place on Sunday, 23 October 2022. The AL-KO VT employees spent the day busy with the children making handicrafts, planting an apple tree, eating the apple pies they had baked together and playing sports on the ‘Apple Course’. 

Slawek Koszorz, Head of Human Resources at AL-KO Vehicle Technology, said: “We were delighted to start this collaboration and would like to expand it continuously – with our employees’ support. Once we have gained more experience from this pilot project, we want to roll out the corporate volunteering programme worldwide so that we can give colleagues across the world an easy-to-use recipe book to implement at their location.” The home’s warden Stephanie Punzmann commented: “It was a successful afternoon all round, making so many children’s eyes light up and warming hearts big and small.” Dominic Kreutle, one of the volunteers, said: “I had so much fun and the kids’ joy was really infectious. We'd love to do more!” The project supervisors Melanie Pahr and Theresa Pfitzmayer from AL-KO Vehicle Technology’s Human Resources department explained what will happen next: “The children and our employees wrote down their wishes for the next actions on slips of paper and hang them on the apple tree that had been planted. We will now consider which of the wished-for actions will take place next.”