Fourteen months ago the social enterprise Acorn Reuse opened in Trinity, Jersey. It has been more successful than the charity could have hoped for but now it needs public support to help it grow in order to provide more opportunities for people who have a disability or long-term health condition.
Acorn is now launching its ‘Business For Good’ campaign because it wants more people to benefit from its life-changing opportunities.
The executive officer of the Jersey Employment Trust, Jocelyn Butterworth, said: “The support from the public in our first year has been incredible and the number of donations has been phenomenal. The success of Acorn Reuse has far surpassed all our expectations, not just in the amount that we have turned over but in the number of opportunities we have been able to offer, and it’s lovely to see the way we have changed people’s lives.
“We continue to need funds for our daily operation but we also want to do more, so we are now appealing for public support to help develop the organisation further. We want to provide more opportunities and also explore other ways of helping the environment.
“At the moment we are saving thousands of items from going into the waste stream, including wood, but we have always had the ambition to do white goods, we are looking into paint, and potentially other items that are not reusable at the moment. And we are hoping to do more in the Woodshack. With its forthcoming refurbishment, for which we have secured generous funding, we want to be able to offer more opportunities but this will be dependent on finding the funding for more support staff.
“We have a waiting list through Acorn Training & Development, and that doesn’t sit well with us. The key to unlocking opportunities is more support staff, to enable people to move on through the system to gain employment. And the thing is, our clients can be anyone from any walk of life. We are here for a very diverse range of needs including, increasingly, mental health issues.”
In its first year, Acorn has:
*Created 50 new jobs and 410 training opportunities.
*Removed more than 585 tonnes of waste from the incinerator, which means that Acorn is on target to double its forecast monthly figure.
*Donated to many other different charities.
*Benefited low-income families in Jersey.
Jocelyn added: “Acorn brings people together and is now very much part of the community, particularly as it now has a post office on site and visits from the mobile library twice a month.”
Acorn have put together a ‘shopping list’ of items that they require, details of which are available on their website www.acorn.co.je. As part of their Business For Good campaign, they are illustrating what they do by running short videos on social media. The videos were created by Studio M through their initiative Studio M for Change.
Steve Pearce, general manager at Acorn Enterprises, said: “We are seeing an increasing demand for our services and although we are always looking at ways to generate income for the charity, it’s still donations large or small that really help us get things off the ground and expand the training and development we provide.”
The Business for Good video can be found on Acorn Enterprises’ Facebook page. For more information or to make a donation, contact Fundraising Officer Caroline Moody or go to https://justgiving.com/campaign/acornbusinessforgood.
