Clothing Donation Drive for Yorkshire Air Ambulance
The Yorkshire Air Ambulance runs on charitable funding. Every callout costs money — the charity needs around £12,000 a day to keep both helicopters operational, and it receives no government funding. It depends entirely on public and community support to stay in the air.
When the Wentbridge and Wentedge projects put out the word for a clothing donation drive, we didn't need much convincing.
How it came together
The drive brought together four companies working across the projects: National Highways , Octavius Infrastructure , Tarmac , and Civcon Civil Engineering. Staff from each contributed what they could over the collection period, and the bags steadily filled up.
In total, six black bags of clothing were gathered and delivered to Calder Park — home to one of the Yorkshire Air Ambulance's two operational airbases — where they were added to the wider YNE SDF community collection for the charity.
Why it matters
Clothing donations are converted into funding through the charity's network of resale partners. It's not a dramatic mechanism, but it works, and the cumulative effect across dozens of community collections like this one adds up.
The Yorkshire Air Ambulance responds to around 2,500 missions a year across the region — road traffic collisions, cardiac arrests, industrial accidents, falls in remote locations. In many of those cases, getting a critical care paramedic on scene within minutes is the difference between a full recovery and something much worse. The service is free at the point of use, which means every pound has to come from somewhere else.
Multi-contractor initiatives like this one are a practical way for site teams to contribute without it falling on any single company. The Wentbridge and Wentedge projects already involve close working between the principal contractor and supply chain — channelling that into a community effort is a natural extension of how those relationships already function on site.
We're glad to have been part of it.
