Supporting communities to live more sustainably
Posted: 04 July 2022, in News
Remake is a community reuse charity and social enterprise, established in 2011 and based in Crieff in Perthshire. We were delighted in 2021 to win the Scottish Social Enterprise Award in the Environmental category! At Remake, we are all about supporting sustainable living and promoting a circular economy within our community. We support our community to live more sustainably through our Reuse Hub where we save around 40,000KG from landfill each year. We also run a free Community Tool Library, which enables our community to share occasionally used tools and equipment rather than always buying new.
We aim to improve knowledge and skills within our community by running reuse and repair workshops, which support people to repair broken items and help them live more affordably and sustainably. We run a bike project, saving old bikes from landfill for community use and run an inter-generational volunteer programme, which is open to anyone in our community and specifically engages people experiencing disability, poor mental health, or low income. We also promote skills development opportunities for young adults experiencing disadvantage through volunteer placements and supported work placements with us. In 2020/21 over 7,000 people were supported to live more sustainably through our work.
The pandemic was a difficult and exhausting time for Remake, as it was for so many social enterprises. We had a significant change in leadership during this time and our team also shrank significantly. Despite these challenges, the team worked incredibly hard to ensure that our community services remained available, and that the most vulnerable members of our community were supported by ourselves and other community partners. On the back of a very trying two years, receiving the Environmental Social Enterprise Award was just the morale boost that the team needed! It reminded us that the hard work is worth it and of the impact that we have.
Since receiving the award, we have been motivated to introduce even more sustainable living services for our community. Firstly, we plan to build on our Repair Workshops to introduce monthly Repair Cafes for our community and also introduce regular Climate Cafes to bring our community together to develop proactive responses to the climate crisis. We are also in the early stages of introducing plastic recycling into Remake. This project will enable us to utilise non-recyclable plastics to make beautiful, long-lasting items for people’s homes. We also plan to introduce a Refill Shop into Remake, enabling our community to access affordable, ethical, package-free consumables and we want to introduce a Reuse Brokerage System to help local organisations reuse and buy second-hand wherever they can. We are also excited to be expanding the range of workshops that we offer and to be running our first ever Design Challenge this summer, which will engage our community in creative reuse of carboard and textiles. We’ve also rebranded this year, under taken a lot of recruitment and developed an updated strategic plan. So in short, there’s lots going on, plenty planned for the future and never a dull moment for the Remake team!
Amulree Welch, General Manager, Remake
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Applications for the 2022 Social Enterprise Awards Scotland are open and there are six categories to enter! Apply before 9am on Monday 18th July. Visit the Awards Website for more information and to start your application.