Kennet Furniture Refurbiz (KFR) was established in 1996. They accept donations of furniture and white goods, which they refurbish and sell at affordable prices to the public, or at subsidised prices for people experiencing hardship. We initially provided them with a grant in 2000. Here, General Manager Dan Thompson discusses how our funding has supported their organisational development and how recent grants are enabling them to reach those most in need:

“Our Crisis Provision Fund was created in 2018 to provide white goods for free to those in severe deprivation. Wiltshire Community Foundation gave us a number of grants from 2020 to help us grow it and more recently through the Wiltshire Energy, Food and Community Support programme. We’ve teamed up with multiple agencies from around the county who refer their most needy clients to us for help. The referrals are made for urgent situations such as domestic violence, marital/partnership breakup, loss of job or physical or mental illness.

“When we first started the fund, we never imagined we would be getting the level of requests that we are now. We’re getting about three or four referrals a day at the moment. The cost of living has just seen poverty off the scale. That’s why the provision’s become so busy. I never realised there was this much poverty in Wiltshire. In Swindon and Trowbridge there are so many wards that are really struggling, and we do our best to try and resolve that.

“We’ve had referrals from schools, kids not having any school shoes because for Mum it’s a choice of repairing the washing machine or buying school shoes. You’ve got kids sleeping on concrete floors, you’ve got people who have used the microwave for six months as they haven’t got a cooker, you’ve got people moving into new allocated homes, especially the homeless who have got nothing to put in it. Without those basic facilities at home, a washing machine, a cooker, a bed to sleep in, a sofa to sit on, how do you live? You can’t live.

“It is so important to make people’s situations better otherwise they don’t feel part of society, they isolate themselves as they are embarrassed about their situation – you won’t invite someone into your home if you can’t offer them a place to sit. Part of what we do is to give them back their dignity and hope. We start right at the bottom of the problem, to try and resolve  that so they can then deal with some of the other issues in their life. We catch people when they are at their lowest but if we weren’t here to catch them, then nobody else would.

“I had the joy of being out on our vans recently, delivering a bed and a cooker to a family, the little boy was jumping up and down ‘I have a bed to sleep in’, the ladder on his bunk bed had broken and he was unable to get into bed unassisted, their gas cooker, the door was hanging off. The family were in receipt of benefits and could not afford to buy new.

“Over the last seven years we’ve been building towards where we are now, as a charity we’re totally self-sufficient. Year on year we’ve been able to make a little bit of surplus which has enabled us to develop certain areas. We are even putting 4% of our total revenue in a separate pot which helps fund part of the Crisis Provision.

“We’ve come a long way. We’ve got a great staff and trustee team, and we are ambitious for the future. I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of the amount of poverty in Wiltshire, so I want KFR to keep growing. I already have plans for how we might do that. Without Wiltshire Community Foundation being there in the early years when we were growing, we would never have got to this point. They’ve been a part of that journey, enabling us to evolve to where we are now.”

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