Friday 10 December 2010

Let sheltered workshops help you

I visited Forest Farm around 1999 to take a batch of wooden building blocks for sanding. A few of the parents had got involved in helping our children's nursery school to spruce things up. The paint was peeling from the building blocks so I took them home with the intention of sanding and then restaining in bright colours.

I soon found out how much time sanding takes on small items. So I looked around for another solution. Forest Farm turned out to be the perfect one. It has a well run sheltered workshop where the residents work to contribute to the cost of running the centre.

I dropped the blocks off, explained to the workshop manager what I needed done and a few days later, for a very reasonable fee all was done. When I went to collect the completed job I also took my children along which gave them the opportunity to mingle with the disabled workers - helping them to be comfortable around people with disability.

The nursery school got their blocks back looking like new and the people in the workshop had another piece of work to help them feel useful.

An article on Forest Farm in our local paper recently reminded me of this experience. It said "We get contracts from companies that need services such as assembly and packaging of light components, paper folding and envelope insertions, repair and hire of wheelchairs and other assistive devices. We are looking for more of this type of contract work."

If you sub contracted some of your work out to a local sheltered workshop would it free you up to be more productive?

1 comment:

Partnerships With Industry said...

Great article, couldn't agree more!