Find a fixer, get something made – supporting social enterprises benefits all

We are social animals. Things are easier to fix when we tackle them together. It’s something we see in Pocket Forest projects all the time. Team work, meitheal, or whatever you want to call it, there is a moment in every job when a hive flow begins. We become an orchestra without a conductor.

Social enterprises are businesses, rather than charities, providing a product or service which aims to tackle a social problem. We tend to be collaborators. At Pocket Forests we have worked with the Men's Shed in Dublin's Walkinstown to source comfortable benches. We have used horse manure from the Cherry Orchard Community Garden and the spent growing medium from Upcycle Farm where they grow mushrooms in used coffee grounds and woodchip. Earlier this month trainees from Liberties Training Centre in Dublin made a timber surround to keep dogs and footballs away from new plants in the Oliver Bond flat complex. It was a tricky brief, this protective boundary. We did not want it to scream "keep out", or discourage people from interacting with the plants and seeds they had worked hard to put in empty tree pits. The trainees, guided by woodwork instructor Adrian Moriarty and youth worker Gayle Cullen, executed the job beautifully. And the pictures of proud girls working with tools made our hearts sing.

The Liberties Training Centre trains young people in catering, media and pre-apprenticeship basics of wood, metal and plumbing work. They welcome work from local businesses or private individuals. Real paying commissions support the training centre. They are training young women in these trades. Ireland’s building workers are predominantly male. A new generation of women fitters, carpenters, plumbers and plasterers would make sites much fairer and more pleasant places to work.

We value “professions” rather than “trades”, but skilled tradespeople are going to be the force that gets us out the other side of so many tasks ahead: retrofitting homes, building active travel infrastructure, regenerating ecosystems. The people who climb into work trousers early in the morning are going to do more than their fair share of digging us out of unsustainable holes.

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Also in Dublin 8, The Solas Project has a side project called The Yard where trainees learn to make beautiful things with wood. The bowls and key rings and doorstops are available to buy from solasproject.com. We can spend it better when we support social enterprises. A new campaign will help you find a social enterprise in Dublin and is encouraging consumers to share their purchase with the hashtag #GetSocialDublin. Commissioning a social enterprise to make your corporate gifts or maintain your property (check out the brilliant Clean Slate cleanslateservices.ie) means your money spreads its benefits so much further. The new website is socialenterprisedublin.ie

Catherine Cleary is co-founder of Pocket Forests