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CIP Case Studies
- Grant Support 'Conway Furniture Reclaim' Case Study
- Starter Investments 'Tyddyn Mon' Case Study
- Loan Finance 'Moelyci' Case Study
Awards are being used to ensure that the scale of recycling activities is increased. Conwy Furniture Reclaim aims to help local unemployed people back into work and disadvantaged families in the Conwy area by collecting donated furniture and re-distributing it to help local families furnish their homes. Part of their work is to test, repair and recondition a whole range of electrical appliances such as refrigerators, fridge freezers, cookers, washing machines, dryers T.V’s and hi fi’s. The organisation is licensed to undertake recycling of these items - termed WEEE.
A £10,000 grant was used to fit out their new WEEE treatment centre helping them increase the number of items they are able to process and to enable more training placements to be supported. The new centre opened on 1st June 2010 and the resulting increase in the tonnes of WEEE treated has been dramatic with a trebling of the tonnages of WEEE processed from 24.3 to 86.7 tonnes per quarter.
Colin Bowler, Project Manager at CFR commented ‘We are very pleased with the result of the award and feel that it has helped us to significantly increase the tonnages we are able to process. This in turn means we are able to contribute more to the reuse targets in the Waste Strategy and also be able to help more local people through the provision of good quality low cost white goods. My experience of CIP has been very positive, it was straightforward and I would recommend other projects to apply.’
In Anglesey, Tyddyn Mon have used a starter investment from CIP to help set up a new textile recycling project in partnership with the local authority and schools. This has seen the distributed all some very distinctive purple clothing banks in local authority and community sites and 28 wheelie bins have been placed in schools to collect unwanted clothes, textiles and shoes.
They now employ 3 full time staff members on the project and have provided 4 training placements and 20 full time equivalent places for adults with learning difficulties to work on the project. The first month they collected about 1 tonne of textiles per week but from month 2 they have consistently been getting 4 to 5 tonnes per week. This means that over the first year they will have diverted 250 tonnes of textiles as well as bringing the social benefits of providing jobs, opportunities for their service users and community engagement in recycling and reuse.
This successful partnership has been recognized when they won the Local Authority Partnership Award at the Wales Recycling Awards 2010.
Stephen Mcenhill, Managing Director Tyddon Mon says: "The starter investment from CIP has enabled the company to establish a very successful operation without putting the main finances of the charity at risk. The income from the textile recycling will make the company more financially sustainable in the future. You do need a good business plan or model to ensure that you are able to meet the loan repayments and the assistance given by Sara Main from Charity Bank and Calvin Davies from Cylch was invaluable in this aspect".
With the majority of the funding going out as loans this means that the programme is able to use the loan repayments to provide an ongoing source of funding. So far a total of 54 awards have been made to 41 different organisations distributing over £2million to enable organisations to become stronger, improve their existing reuse and recycling activities, try new ideas and increase the impact they have on minimising waste and engaging their local communities.
Moelyci Environmental Centre manages a community based farm in Bangor, Wales, aims to create local regeneration through organic farming, waste management and recreation . They have received both a grant to improve their IT capacity and financial recording and also a loan investment to ease cash flow whilst developing a barn into a field study community centre at their farm base. Moelyci was the first CIP recipient to fully repay their loan investment of £50,000 in December 2009.
Many of the projects have had an economic impact in their local areas also with job creation and the provision of training placements being a positive spin off from the investments made. From our evaluation of the CIP we know that from just 12 of the grants awarded about half secured new jobs with 16 jobs being created and similarly about half created training placements with 6 organisations creating a total of 74 placements.
For more information about applying for any of these programmes then please contact Sara Main, Programme Manager Charity Bank Wales, Telephone: 07961566417.