On this page:
Saved from the skip
Rachel Burden hears from Kate Taylor-Smith who co-founded Second Life, a recycling shop in Forest Row. The community interest company started after the local tip was closed, and also acts as a hub and meeting place for the village, as well as giving out grants to community sustainability initiatives.
About Cafe Hope
Café Hope is a virtual Radio 4 coffee shop, where guests pop in for a brew and a chat to tell us what they’re doing to make things better in big and small ways. Think of us sitting in your local cafe and celebrating the people making the world a better place.
We’re all about trying to make change. It might be a transformational project that helps an entire community, or it might be about trying to make one life a little bit easier. And the key here is in the trying. This is real life, not everything works and there are struggles along the way. But it’s always worth a go.
Transcript
Rachel Burden 0:09
Hello, welcome back to cafe hope. I’m just giving the place the once over scrubbing down the table tops fixing a couple of chairs. Even though we’re a virtual calf, we’re all about breathing new life into old things. And hopefully the stories we bring you are a breath of fresh air to. These are the stories of ordinary people who go out of their way to do extraordinary things, and give life a new meaning a new purpose stories to make you think, and maybe offer a bit of inspiration. And our guest today was inspired to get in touch with the cafe HK team. She wanted to tell us about how her community took control when one of their vital local resources was taken from them. And she’s just about to come in.
Hello, Kate Taylor Smith, welcome to cafe hope.
Kate Taylor Smith 1:01
Hello. Thank you for having me.
Rachel Burden 1:03
Come and sit down. I hope you approve of our upcycled if slightly rickety furniture. It’s fabulous. So a confession from Me, Kate, I grew up with a mother who was a proper tip scavenger. And it’s still one of the joys she has in life. And she’s passed on to me going to the tip, finding something to love to repurpose, is it the same for you? Absolutely.
Kate Taylor Smith 1:23
And I am surrounded by people who do exactly that. So people put themselves into the skip, take it away, or things are left on the side of the street, and make use of them or give them on to other people, which is lovely. So
Rachel Burden 1:35
when you found out that your local tip was being closed down, how frustrating was that?
Kate Taylor Smith 1:41
So in 2018, our county council had to get rid of three tips and ours was one of them. The thing about the tip is that it was a community hub. And so people will go there, they bumped into each other. And there was a big shed, and people will come and their rubbish was somebody else’s treasure, it’s always the way and suddenly they were closing it. And the community were not happy.
Rachel Burden 2:07
Because this was more than somewhere you just go and dump your rubbish.
Kate Taylor Smith 2:12
Yeah, it was a way of people being able to support their, their lifestyle. Also, there were often things that you’d never seen before, there was always an extraordinary artefact, or to everybody knew who the person was, who was organising all of that in the shed. And if you wanted something, you could ask for it. And if it turned up, they keep it behind for you and you’d have it, you just knew that you didn’t have to go out and buy something brand new, which in this world right now is something that we should do more of.
Rachel Burden 2:39
So you really wanted to take over the space yourself in some way. But that just proved too much, didn’t it.
Kate Taylor Smith 2:46
But it was a very interesting journey for us. Because there was so much consternation about the this tip had been taken away from us. And we wanted it back. And so we put together a group called the Waste Recycling Action Group (WRAG). And that required us to understand every level of authority that was involved in this, to start networking to start talking to people and we did a survey ourselves to ask people do you want this? Do you really want this and it went to every household. And we had over 700 responses to that. That was a lot of response. And then we were told, Well, actually, if you really want to be clear that the community wants it, then you’re going to have to work with the authorities to do that. So then we commissioned a separate survey via the authorities. And they went and asked questions that we didn’t ask they were totally independent questions. And it came out the same, the community really wanted it. So then we said, Well, okay, we put together a business plan, we could see that this would give us the opportunity to really offer the community a whole range of other services of recycling, upcycling reimagining, where we could perhaps encourage other community interest companies to do other things we could see it become a really good hub, not just a community hub that would give people opportunities. But it will be a great place where things could begin to froth up and find other ways of doing other things. And what happened was that the County Council put the tip up for sale, and we put in a community bid. And unfortunately, we didn’t have enough money. And so it was sold. So in December 2021.
It was a no after all this work. Now what
Rachel Burden 4:38
after all those years are the weekly meetings, the effort that all of you put in, it’s so disheartening,
Kate Taylor Smith 4:45
but we’re quite resilient crew, and we saw there must be another way unlike many high streets up and down the country. There were a few shops empty, and we went to meet the landlady, who turns out to be our Empress mumble by the way, she’s an amazing same lady. We went to meet her to see whether or not we could lease the shop. And I’ll never forget, there were three of us who were there. We sat around this table, pull your knickers up your big girls knickers up, just go for it, you can do this. We had all of the business information we needed. We knew where we could get funding. And so we said, Okay, let’s go for it. So we met again with the council several times. And they very kindly gave us a grant, we signed the lease. And we opened in June 22. We had people put up shelves for us painted for us, gave us things. It was an extraordinary community effort. That’s
Rachel Burden 5:43
the thing when you start a project like this, that it often activates something in other people who want to get involved and want to help too.
Kate Taylor Smith 5:53
And I’m a great believer in that we all need to feel that we belong. Community is really important. Often people want to do something that they don’t know what there is they can do. And
Rachel Burden 6:05
from what I understand, Kate, this is a real treasure trove. It’s an Aladdin’s cave. So you’ll go in and find everything from clothing to I think there’s a denim bar there. You’ve got jewellery, makeup, bedlinen, electrical items, children’s toys, all of this stuff. But what is it that makes it unique to any other charity shop that you might see on the high street? Well,
Kate Taylor Smith 6:28
this is about our community. This is a shop where we raise money through the sale of the donations. And that money, then goes back into the community. So we support other initiatives in the village.
Rachel Burden 6:43
Tell us a bit more about them. What kind of organisations are you helping? Last
Kate Taylor Smith 6:47
year, we put together a fund of 10,000 pounds sponsorship, where anyone could apply for up to 1000 pounds for an initiative that would fit with the vision that we have and the criteria that we’ve set for the shop. And our criteria is to reduce waste, reimagine things, reuse resources, and find other avenues for that resource to go to. We gave monies to the Friends of the River Medway, which is a group that’s working on cleaning and looking after the parts of our river and the river midway. We also gave some money to some artists to do a interactive art project at our forest road festival. So everyone can interact with recycled products that they can turn into a sculpture.
Rachel Burden 7:38
What kind of impact do you think this is all had on your friends and neighbours in the wider community, their
Kate Taylor Smith 7:45
people go in there, they know that they can give all of their things that they don’t want anymore. Knowing that the money goes back into the community. It’s created a family a second life family, we have this team of incredible people of every age, and they come in some will sort others will help hang things up. Others will serve behind the till. But whenever you walk into that shop, you get this wonderful high. We have some of the people in the village will come in and sing on a Thursday morning, I hear they come in and they sing along. It’s become a hub of information at the old post office would have been I guess, in days gone by. It’s again, it’s another sense of belonging.
Rachel Burden 8:29
The project has really grown, you’ve got managers, you’ve got a whole army of volunteers. Is it a bit like running your own business on the side? And how do you cope with that sort of workload? You know, when
Kate Taylor Smith 8:40
you love something, you don’t really calculate it. And it just works. And we are a great team. We just are passionate about the resilience of our community. Because we live in in crazy times right now. And we got to do it ourselves. And that’s okay. And I’m part of that community too. We do the governance, so we’ll meet with the team. And any issues or hurdles that they’ve got. They’re self sustaining the way that they run the shop, it’s their choice is what they want to do. They’re the ones who work them there every day. And what we do is try and take away the problems and the issues. And one of which, of course is always storage, the amount of donations we get, which we are so grateful for March, we received something like three and a half 1000 kilos of donations.
Rachel Burden 9:28
Wow. Well, it’s a problem you want to have even if it is a real challenge as well. Do you think there’s still a stigma around secondhand around recycled products?
Kate Taylor Smith 9:37
No, we are seeing gosh, we have a lot of our young people coming in, who basically want just to buy secondhand clothes. They don’t want to buy you. But it’s the same for lots of people who come in. Why
Rachel Burden 9:52
wouldn’t you? We’ve had a voice note from Anna who I think is one of your regular customers. Just have a listen to this.
Anna 10:00
Hello. Second Life really feels like some kind of third space that’s available for us. You know, it’s not work. It’s not the normal supermarket, it’s not school, it is a place where we can go and inevitably meet other people. We know in the village, you always get the chance to have a little chat, you get a huge sense of pride going in there and seeing stuff that you might have donated, on its way to going back around. It is just an absolutely lovely, lovely thing to have in your community. Well done Second Life, we love you.
Rachel Burden 10:39
Now, how lovely is it to get feedback like that? And how much does it make all the hard work worthwhile?
Kate Taylor Smith 10:46
It’s actually really quite amazing the amount of joy it brings to all of us that it’s happening, and that people are coming in and using it, and it’s helping their lives is helping the way in which they can manage their budgets, or whether they’re funding something for a festival or that extra special thing that would have been either put in the dump or incinerated. What’s
Rachel Burden 11:10
the best thing you’ve ever picked up from your own shop then.
Kate Taylor Smith 11:15
Gosh, wow, this is gonna sound ridiculous. Just before Christmas, we had this really old, retro, ugly it looked. It was been Crosby, this model that you would switch over and it would sing a song when a mic doesn’t work. So I’m gonna pop into the local repair Cafe one day. I just fell in love with it. And it’s simple. I learned and it’s ridiculous, but I love it. I buy clothes, jewellery, toys, I buy lots of Christmas presents from my friends and family from there.
Rachel Burden 11:46
I like the sound of the being statue singing a statue though. That sounds excellent. It was always me. Kate, our message board here behind me in the cafe is filling up now with notes of hope from our previous guests. I’d love you to add a little message there before you leave. What would you like to say some words of motivation that have kept you going?
Kate Taylor Smith 12:07
When the going gets tough? You just got to keep going and find some joy. Because it’s a lot of fun working in community.
Rachel Burden 12:15
Find some joy. I mean, that sums it all up, doesn’t it because you can find joy in other people’s junk joy in the jungle. Very much my kind of thing. Kay, it’s been such a pleasure to meet you and to chat to you. Thank you so much. I shall definitely be stopping by for a bit of a browse.
Kate Taylor Smith 12:35
We’ll give you a cup of tea.
Rachel Burden 12:36
Get me a new basket for my cat here in a cafe.
Kate Taylor Smith 12:40
Yes, I can actually.
Rachel Burden 12:44
Thank you so much for all your responses to cafe hope. It’s honestly been a privilege to share such a range of stories with you. From a nature guardian to a mother overcoming grief to pursue as have lost pets. I know many of you have laughed and cried and been inspired along the way. We want to be somewhere that you can come to to hear about people whose work often goes unseen, who give their heart and soul to others. Not for the glory. But just to make a genuine difference. If that’s you, or maybe it’s someone you know, please do share your story with us. Email cafe [email protected]. We’ll be taking a pause for a few weeks hanging up the closed sign on the cafe door. But we will be back soon. And you can listen to all of our episodes now on BBC sounds. Bye for now.