Nhung Phung

Ripples Story: “The cycle of improvement”

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In this article, James Beecher, Project Manager at Creative Sustainability, shares how Profit for Good helped Access Bike recover from the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and find the road to sustainability.

Access Bike is a community bike workshop and youth space in an old Mill building in Stroud, Gloucestershire. Our mission is to reduce the financial barriers to owning and maintaining a bike. We’re part of a Community Interest Company called Creative Sustainability, which focuses on Inclusion, Empowerment, and Sustainability. We accept donations of old bikes and use them to engage and train disabled and otherwise marginalised people, predominantly those aged 13-25. Once bikes have been refurbished, they are offered to young people or sold to help fund the project.

Our aim with the Profit for Good scheme is to maximise the community bike workshop’s benefit by developing and extending our provision while organising processes to maximise earned income. The scheme has enabled us to reinvigorate the project after the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying restrictions. We’ve increased our opening hours through additional staff and casual employment time and invested in renovating our space – with a new coat of industrial floor paint and a wrap-around wall mural designed and painted in collaboration with our young participants. We’ve also taken on a new shopfront space in the nearby town centre, which will provide us with greater visibility and footfall and the opportunity to expand our stock of accessories and sales of these. In 2023, we more than doubled the number of bikes we sold to 115, giving a further 27 bikes away to young people and supporting another 200 people with bike mechanics.

Some of the young people we supported benefited from improvements to our mentoring offer – 1:1 ratio staffing for young and/or disabled people who need support to participate in the workshop for any reason. We produced a new leaflet and an online referral form, supporting more people and increasing our mentoring income. We are also collecting interview and observational data through the trial provision of bespoke ‘cycle buddy’ support that can help people understand what sort of bike they might need, how to check their bike for maintenance issues and develop riding confidence and road sense. Feedback has been very positive. Finally, we have started a process that will enable us to launch a membership scheme to generate further income—redesigning our logo and website and building a new email newsletter that now has over 200 subscribers.

We increased our earned income by £11,162 in total. This is excellent news, but it has been essential in a year when we received a £ 20,813 reduction in funding from grants, foundations, and the Lottery. The Profit for Good programme has enabled us to step things up at Access Bike! We’ve also received guidance to explore our stakeholder network and partner relationships, our value proposition – and develop skills relevant to managing the project. I’ve found participating in the programme beneficial regarding conversations with others.

James Beecher

Project Mananger at Creative Sustainability

Ripples Story: “The power of circular economies”

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In this article, Fiona Keir, Operations Officer at Green Hive, shares how the Green Hive workshop became self-sufficient in income from selling their recycled products, in order to meet their running costs.

Green Hive is a community development and environmental charity based in Nairn, on the Moray coast in the Highlands. We have been operating since 2015, with 2022 seeing the most significant evolution in the charity, which coincided with our becoming a Rank Network member.

We have two sites in Nairn. One is a plastic recycling workshop that upskills volunteers and empowers them to create outside furniture using recycled plastic. We can recycle plastic locally, and the volunteers love nothing more than a local project using locally recycled plastic with the new product being used in the community – an actual circular economy. The Green Hive workshop has always run as a social enterprise. In 2023, we became self-sufficient in income from selling our recycled products. This has been a target to reach in the four years since it opened and one we are proud of. Some of our recycled plastic benches can be found outside the Citizen’s Advice Bureau. A custom-made accessible picnic bench is on the riverside beside the kids’ play park, and we are about to install a newly designed table and seating at the beachfront as part of a new accessible path project.

We expanded in 2022 with the acquisition of Seaman’s Hall. We were successfully inducted into the Profit for Good programme at a timely point when we looked to create a sustainable community hub in a Victorian community hall that had been out of public use for some time. Last year was a whirlwind of learning for our staff as we appointed new positions and embedded an ethos of social enterprise across all business aspects. Even our Outdoor Volunteering section took on the task of diversifying income streams. It was successful in gaining commissions to teach other community groups how to create community orchards and to share learning about social media and volunteer tracking software that we use. With a new riverside location, our e-bike hires exceeded expectations, and we continue to look at ways to expand our offer to the community and visitors sustainably.

We were successful in securing a Time to Shine candidate in January 2024, and already, we have seen a significant increase in our capacity to run fabric workshops. Using fabric diverted from landfill, we’re teaching the community how to sew. One of our biggest successes in this area has been parent-child workshops, where parents and children learn together, and young people’s workshops, where the next generation begin their dressmaking futures.

One of the biggest challenges we have faced has always been how to create a social enterprise model without excluding the vulnerable and marginalised in our community through a fair pricing structure for our activities and workshops. We have managed to overcome this hurdle by predominantly using a ‘pay what you can’ offer. This has proven successful and exceeded our income projections in almost all areas where we have deployed this pricing option.

Seaman’s Hall is flourishing and has become a ‘much loved’ community asset. Hall hire from external groups continues to grow month on month. In our first year, we focused on community engagement, ensuring an open-door policy and offering events to bring the community over the threshold. Word has quickly spread, and we now have regular bookings every night of the week and a diverse calendar of external events using our space. We have formed a crucial connection and partnership with the local leisure trust, Highlife Highland. They use the hall six days out of seven for community fitness classes and will soon offer NHS classes.

Everything we have achieved to date, has centred the cornerstones of our work: we are entirely community driven and volunteer led, and we focus on environmental impact in all we do.

Fiona Keir

Operations Officer at Green Hive

Ripples Story: “Building relationships”

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In this article, Elenid Roberts, Transport Coordinator at Yr Orsaf, describes how her organisation transformed an empty building into the Cymru Fydd community hub, a beacon of support and opportunity in Gwynedd, North Wales with help from our Profit for Good Programme. 

Located in the heart of Dyffryn Nantlle in Gwynedd, North Wales, Cymru Fydd is part of Yr Orsaf, a community enterprise providing support and opportunities for the community. This includes an accessible community hub for friendly advice and support with everyday needs such as cost of living, meeting spaces for people to hire for various activities, workshops, and workspace. It also houses a co-working space for individuals to use. There is an enterprise centre for young adults to develop the skills and confidence to start and run their own businesses. We also provide a community transport scheme using our electric vehicles for vulnerable people. It targets those affected by lack of public transport, a growing problem in rural parts of Wales. We also run an electric bike hire scheme to encourage people to reduce their carbon footprint and improve their health.

Last year, we were fortunate to be part of Rank’s Profit for Good Programme. It has allowed us to gain not only financial support but also provided us with the tools and a safe space to develop the skills and knowledge that are required to run a successful and sustainable business.

When we started the Profit for Good Programme, we were in the early stages of our enterprise, which was transforming an empty building (Cymru Fydd). During construction, we faced many uncertainties and delays. During this time, with Profit for Good guidance, we built relationships with skill-set organisations such as local colleges to offer varied workshops and training for young entrepreneurs. We also partnered with three other like-minded community transport organisations based in Gwynedd. Together, we are expanding our services and developing new bus routes that will allow us to help and reach more individuals. Through collaboration and intensive marketing, we have generated interest and have started to receive bookings ready for when we open.

Our enterprise is more effective due to the learning through the project. I have gained confidence and increased my knowledge through participating in the session and learning from other experiences. I have had the opportunity to raise problems I have faced with the Action Learning Set and have been supported in thinking about practical solutions to these challenges. As a result of the programme, Cymru Fydd and I have increased our impact. We are confidently looking forward to opening our doors at the end of the month.

Elenid Roberts

Transport Coordinator at Yr Orsaf

Learning Through Leadership Talk 2023

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‘If not you then who?’: Rose Fitzpatrick CBE QPM

In this blog post, John Hind, our Director of Education and Leadership, shares his thoughts on our recent Learning Through Leadership talk, “If not you then who?” by Rose Fitzpatrick CBE QPM. The event took place on 21 March 2023.

Rose Fitzpatrick CBE QPM giving the talk

Late March saw a first as the Fellowship’s ‘Learning through Leadership’ programme transferred to Rank’s Garden Walk Headquarters. Those present were privileged to hear Rose Fitzpatrick, Foundation trustee and member of the Fellowship Leadership Team, share her experiences of over 30 years of service in the City and Met Police forces, culminating in her role as Deputy Chief Constable of the newly formed Police Scotland service in 2013.

A pioneering meeting at Garden Walk chimed with pioneering aspects of Rose’s career. A Theology and Philosophy graduate, she joined the city police at a time when only 2% of recruits held degrees and only 8% were women. As a relatively mature recruit with clear potential she was promoted to inspector in less than five years when the average time taken was ten. Her role with the City force was challenging: the force’s counter-terrorist role being stretched by incidents such as the Bishopsgate bomb, but it was the impact of the Macpherson report following Stephen Lawrence’s murder that persuaded Rose that her real passion was for community policing. Transferring to the Met force as a Superintendent, she became the Borough Commander for Tower Hamlets in 2002 as at that time the only female officer in such a position in the Met force. 

Her description of working in a diverse ethnic community as ‘mind blowingly interesting’ is testament to her commitment to true community work and it was this interest that took her out of a very brief retirement from her service into her role in Police Scotland.  Here – pioneering again – she faced the challenge of how best to make the new unitary national force address the differing needs of its various component communities – the needs of policing in Glasgow, for example, being radically different from those in Highland communities. Five years of facing the cultural and political challenges inherent in her role left her fulfilled but exhausted though a second retirement was even shorter than her first. Two days into her family holiday she was asked to establish and chair a new National Suicide Prevention Leadership Group for Scotland, a role which she still holds.

In all of this, a clear part of the answer to Rose’s title question lies in the manifest sense of duty and service that clearly drives her. Indeed, a crucial point she made was the need to reflect before taking on some challenges and to recognise when others may be better placed to take them on. Listening to one’s instinct was vital in such cases and Rose made the point that one can practise this, not least when facing up to the ethical and moral challenges leadership presents. Avowedly assuring us she was not the hero who ran into danger – though some of her colleagues were – she nonetheless showed real moral courage on a number of occasions when determined to do what she believed to be the right thing – even at the cost of temporary unpopularity. That leadership can be lonely is true – especially in situations where one has to stand up for one’s principles – and this was compounded for Rose by the lack of female peers at her level within the organisations she served. She did however make the point that asking for help is vital when facing challenging decisions is in no sense a sign of weakness: rather, it is a way of developing strengths.

Rose spoke on the day the Casey report into the Met police was published. Clearly digesting the report in full was impossible: however, in response to questions from a thoughtful and engaged audience, she did stress the need for proper resourcing of the police service, especially with regard to recruitment, vetting and training. In keeping with our theme, appropriate leadership is vital too. Looking back on all Rose said, it was clear that her moral purpose and sense of duty, coupled with a genuine understanding of the importance of the police’s relationship with their community, made her the kind of leader the police need. Those of us present were fortunate indeed to hear what she had to say.

Ynglŷn â'r awdur:

John Hind joined the Rank Foundation in June 2021 as Director of Education and Leadership. He is responsible for overseeing the School Leadership Award and Fellowship, following a career in teaching, most recently as Principal of Dame Allan’s Schools in Newcastle-upon-Tyne from 2004 to 2020. John studied history at Cambridge University, completed an MEd at Newcastle, and a part-time PhD at Durham.