Kitty's Laundrette
From an article by the School for Social Entrepreneurs
Kitty's Laundrette is a community launderette and social space in Liverpool. It is run by the community for the community. They offer high-quality, affordable ecological laundry and dry cleaning services, as well as an accessible social space for people to gather, talk and learn.
It is a social business and worker-community cooperative, run by a small team of local residents and guided by a wider community membership. Everything they do is to reinvested back into their community, helping to make more good things happen. They work to make broad community impact in four key ways:
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Quality laundry services for everyone in the neighbourhood while supporting people in hygiene poverty, fuel poverty and financial hardship in particular.
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An accessible, welcoming social space for everyone in the diverse local community through a engaging program of social and creative activities.
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Creating quality, flexible Real Living wage jobs for people in the community, in particular those who may face additional barriers to work.
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Meaningful democratic participation through their worker-community co-operative structure.
They always wanted to be able to make their own money through trading in order to have both long term sustainability, as well as the autonomy to operate their organisation as the community decides. However, they started with nothing other than an idea, creativity and passion for making positive social change. Over the early years, they did have to learn how to build broad support for the idea, raise grant finance and develop working partnerships.
They did this through talking to everyone they could in the community and city, listening to their opinions and suggestions, inviting them to contribute and help shape the vision. Finding out what matters to them and building that into their plans. Of course you meet some people who tell you all the reasons you can’t do it, but mostly you will meet people who want to offer you their support in whatever form, simply telling friends and neighbours and sharing on social media, to investing their knowledge, contacts, time or money.
Plans built slowly at the beginning as they all had other jobs, but once they started to secure some start up funding to pay for work on building the business plans, things started to gather pace.
They ran a project about the social history of launderettes and washhouses, commissioned laundry themed rewards (soaps, washbags, linen scented candles), an animation to bring the idea to life and a well publicised crowdfunding campaign. Access to larger funding pots helped buy equipment and renovate a space. After 6 months of renovations, they opened their doors for washing in May 2019, and have been open 6 days a week ever since.
They've now been trading for 5 years and currently derive roughly 70% of total income from laundry based activity, with the other 30% coming from small grant funding pots.
Grants/funding have played an instrumental role in helping them turn vision into reality, however sometimes this can come with constraints and conditions which can make one feel like you are jumping through hoops or squeezing yourself into boxes which don’t quite fit. It’s important to hold onto your communities' vision of what you are trying to achieve, while being flexible to the opportunities and support that may be on offer.
Read the full article here.
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From an article by the School for Social Entrepren, 23/10/2024