RISE Social Enterprise Case Study Films

[Julian Williams]
Sofa is an acronym for ‘shifting old furniture around’, and Sofa Project was founded about twenty-five years ago here in Bristol and we still do now what the founders did all those years ago: we collect furniture and appliances from people who don’t want it anymore, we bring it here to our shop, and we make it available for people on low incomes top buy at affordable prices.

It started in 1980 and became a company in 1983. We are an incorporated charity so we’re both a registered charity and a company limited by guarantee.

Sofa Project’s got a high profile in Bristol having been here so long, and having helped not only needy people but many youngsters who are students or have come to the city from other parts of the UK. Being called Sofa Project it can be misleading though, is that people think we just sell sofas, but Sofa, I stress, is an acronym not a noun and it’s for Shifting Old Furniture Around and we sell a whole lot of different stuff including these days white goods of all kinds.

(Piano music) 01.24
Social aims are to help people with not much money to live in comfort through buying goods that they need from here at prices they can afford. But we have other aims beyond the social benefits that we aim to deliver: we have environmental purposes as well and they’re served really by helping the people from whom we obtain the goods in the first place because if they don’t give them to us quite likely they’ll throw them away to landfill and that would add to all sorts of environmental problems.

01.53
Also, we are able here to offer a lot of people who are not in work the opportunity to get used to going back to work or to resettle after a difficult time in their lives. I’d like to say our social objectives come first but without getting the business objectives right they can’t, so a lot of my time as the director is spent business planning, strategic planning, management accounts, cash flows, and all the other things that a business needs to make sure that it can continue to function properly.

(Piano music) 02.33
Sofa project has about eighteen on the payroll at the moment but any one day we need thirty-five people to make the whole operation tick, and we make up the other seventeen with volunteers, with people from new-deal programs, people who are excluded from college, young people, a large number of offenders who are sent to us by the probation service to work out their community service hours, their unpaid work. And lastly we have at the moment four prisoners from Layhill Open Prison who come here each day and get used to being back in the open world and back to work.

(Piano music) 03.15
Looking ahead I would like to see Sofa Project as a self sustaining social enterprise needing no grants at all to keep it viable, sustained by the surpluses that are generated for it by the contracting half for this enterprise which will be taking advantage of all sorts of new opportunities arising in the environmental sector.

(Lorry engine) 03.49
Two agencies in Bristol have helped Sofa Project with business advice over the last couple of years: one of those is the Brave agency who helped us with a specific project on a due diligence issue which the trustees had a very satisfactory report from. And the other is the Social Enterprise Works who’ve been helping us over many months on a quality improvement program and most recently on social auditing and how to add financial indicators to the social benefits that we produce.

(Clashing metal noises)
Sofa Project couldn’t do what it does on its own; we need partners to work with us to make us a success. And locally here they include the four unitary authorities in this area, a number of other charities and housing associations all involved in housing the homeless and looking after refugees and new arrivals. We have people we partner within the employment sector: new deal providers, job centre plus, the probation service and the prison service I’ve mentioned. And lastly but by no means least the Furniture Re-use Network which is our national representative organisation who are actually co-located with us here in Bristol and are a source of great assistance to us.

05.08
Like many social enterprises currently we’re looking for ways to supplement our trading income with contracting income, and the most potentially fruitful area for us is in waste matters, in particular the waste in electrical and electronic equipment area, WEE it’s called, where we’re setting up a depot here in Bristol to work with local authorities and other agencies in collecting and sorting unwanted electrical goods, taking a proportion out for re-use, and sending the rest on to be recycled so that none of it goes in to landfill. The real advantage for Sofa Project from that is that through a community interest company that we area setting up we will be generating surpluses which can be passed across to the charity to sustain and supplement the charity’s own income from other sources.

[Paul Townsend] 06.01
Here we do two main activities: one is the WEE activity where we’re collecting waste electrical equipment for old disposal and then we do a refurb and repair activity for our shops in our next area, so if you’d like to come through to the next area we’ll go through there.

06.17
This is the workshop and the preparation area. In the area outside here we have white goods which have been repaired in our workshop, tested, and are now being prepared for the shop, so they’re been cleaned, wrapped, priced, that sort of thing.

(Piano music)
This is our cooker test facility. All the cookers have to be checked for earth leakage before we actually test them ourselves to make sure they are safe to try. Then we got a test, we check oven temperatures, we check hob temperatures, we make sure that they switch on and off, and the thermostats. If they pass all those tests, then they go for cleaning, and then finally for preparation for sale in the shops.

[Julian Williams]
For both the last two years Sofa Project’s had a turnover over a million pounds. It’s been steady at about a half a million of trading income from dealing in what we deal in. We’ve had about a quarter of a million each year in contract income from using our vehicles to assist a whole range of authorities and agencies. And lastly the balance from grant income which two years ago was £400,000, this year £300,000, and next year I hope will be £200,000 and we’ll go on reducing.

(More piano music) 07.40
Sofa Project is a reuse and recycling enterprise and it’s fairly obvious that we re-use and recycle furniture and white-goods. But what I’m most proud of I think is the fact that we recycle people more than that. we give opportunities here to people who are coming through difficult stages of their lives, we help them get back on the rails, get back into work if they wanted, and re-build the self confidence that they most likely have lost through the instants they have suffered.