Leger des Heils

Background

Founded in 1865, the Salvation Army is a worldwide charity working to eliminate poverty and social injustice, helping to enable communities to live and experience life in full. This support comes in many different forms, from providing a hot meal and someone to talk to, through to education programmes to promote self-confidence and encourage self-help. Leger des Heils, the Dutch arm of the Salvation Army, has around 110 community centre rooms, located to best reach more vulnerable residents.

Challenge

With strengthening care in the community, older generations can stay at home for longer, rather than moving into nursing homes, making easy access to Leger des Heils centres even more important. The organisation plans to increase their centres from 110 to 200 in the coming years to support this growing community need. Expanding into the digital age is important – for the centres to be able to educate and inform their visitors effectively and also to enable communities with access to connected technologies.

Solution

As a part of our CSR Foundation, PPDS has a focus on deploying displays and involving employees to support education and to bring tangible benefits to local communities. Understanding that the structure and needs of local communities is changing within the Netherlands, the sustainability team at PPDS focused on the work that Leger des Heils is doing now, and how that can be future-proofed to best support the changing needs of its volunteers and visitors into the future.

Initially working with five of the community centres, PPDS reviewed the work carried out for those specific communities and specified displays that would best suit the support given to them. A fleet of Philips professional displays – including Android-powered, Wifi enabled, large format D-Lines and education-focused T-Line interactive displays – was selected and installed, together with brackets and trolleys donated by their partner organisation, Vögels.

The displays, which will be used almost daily, were selected to enable easy management of content by the in-house Leger des Heils teams. This means they can have a range of purposes, providing entertainment – from music and movies through to engaging presentations, offering education – including life skills, vocational and digital language courses, and showing information – such as making applications for support, vaccinations, or showing social impacts from events to promote active discussion.

Eline Kraaijveld, Coördinator at Bij Bosshardt Ridderkerk, Leger des Heils, said: “For me as a location coordinator this partnership with PPDS means having a beautiful touch display in the middle of the community centre that gives us so many new possibilities. We can use it for social activities. We can now organise Dutch classes with a digital support, display music, videos, and we can share moments that have impact on people’s lives.”

Benefits

• Easy content updates: Centre coordinators and volunteers can easily customise and update content in-house to ensure their communities are always up to date.
  

• Multi-purpose displays: Displays integrated into community centres that can flex with the needs of the community – from education to information and entertainment.