Hailsham Community Shed
Join the up-cycling movement!
A safe space to meet new friends, learn new skills, and have a cuppa while up-cycling pre-loved furniture, at the heart of Hailsham town centre.
Would you like to volunteer? Contact us:
The project aims to offer people in the community a safe space to socialise and learn new skills/share their skills.
Furniture Now! will share part of the Hailsham shop to include a Community Shed within our walls. Community Now! will start the shed a few days per week, run by volunteers.
The Community shed will up-cycle our existing furniture (donated to the shop) and will be re-sold by the shop.
Why Community Shed?
The concept of Men in Sheds is quite popular throughout Sussex and the concept is to reach out to isolated men and offer them a safe space to socialise, volunteer, and gain new skills.
However, the concept of Men in Shed does not fit with the Now! Charity’s value of inclusivity and a community shed would imply that everyone is welcome, not excluding any gender.
Still in 2023, the concept of making furniture, DIY, even up-cycling is very gendered, and often thought about as “manly tasks”. Opening our community shed to everyone and helping women get more diverse skill sets is crucial.
What issues does the project tackle?
1- Improving mental health/ lives in the community:
In 2022, 49.63% of adults (25.99 million people) in the UK reported feeling lonely occasionally, sometimes, often, or always.
Approximately 7.1% of people in Great Britain (3.83 million) experience chronic loneliness, meaning they feel lonely often or always.
The Tackling Poverty Report, launched by Sussex Community Foundation in 2023, found that elderly people, people from ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+ people, as well as people with disabilities were more likely to be socially isolated and live in poverty.
In their report, Campaign Towards Loneliness (charity) explains that:
“The close relationship between loneliness and health is well-documented. In 2023, people who said they had a physical and/or mental health diagnosis were over three times as likely to be chronically lonely than those who said they did not. “
Our Community Shed offers a safe space for people from all backgrounds to socialise and learn new skills, indirectly tackling both mental health and employability/ local poverty.
2- Environment:
Furniture Now! will provide the Community Shed Volunteers with second-hand furniture and all necessary equipment to upcycle them. The Community Shed feeds our “No-landfill policy”, helping us give a second life to pre-loved furniture.
The visibility of our Community Shed will also help Community Now! in our activism against single-use and promoting a re-use, re-fresh, re-cycle system.
Do you like this initiative?
You can help us make sure that the project will run all year by donating a pound or two to help us with the project costs. We have set up a crowdfunding so you can choose how much to donate, when, you can make a pledge, and you can even get fantastic rewards for helping us reach our goal!
And if you can’t donate, you can also help us raise funds by running, walking, baking, or do anything that you like to do, whilst posting it on social media - we will be happy to send you t-shirts and all fundraising materials & Facebook friends will do the rest!