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