News & stories

I recently visited sunny Sheffield to catch up with some of our wonderful community partners and Good Life School groups.

First up was King Ecgbert School, whose large Good Life Schools group enthusiastically told me about their plans to make and share recipe cards for their school community, making use of a currently unused greenhouse space to grow their own vegetables, in order to address the issue of food waste and the rising cost of food.

Thinking about ways to save money in the current economic climate is only one element of the ways in which our Good Life Schools groups are taking positive action. Our six ways to wellbeing are embedded in the Good Life Schools programme: Connecting, being active, taking notice, keeping on learning, giving and caring for the planet.

The meaningful relationships we create as part of the ‘connect’ strand are apparent in the partnerships we are making with our local community, and I was lucky enough to meet with two of our partners to see first-hand the brilliant work they are doing.

Glistening Kicks is a shoe restoration shop in South Sheffield. Owned by Phil who started the business after his son wore his fresh trainers to his first job on a building site. He realised that with the right knowledge and resources he could make trainers look brand new again. And thus Glistening Kicks was born. Phil believes that giving new life to footwear is an excellent way of tackling the gargantuan amount of waste caused by buying and discarding trainers once they get a little bit dirty:

“I think it's a great thing to get kids involved in understanding how we're such a throwaway society and it doesn't have to be that way.”

Meadowhead School, one of our Good Life Schools, thinks so too and are currently working on their own community's trainers, giving them a new lease of life and saving parents huge amounts of money in the process. Phil will be visiting the school to give them a workshop on how to perfect their craft later this month.

Finally, I visited Reyt Repair (‘Reyt’ rhymes with ‘great’!), a volunteer-run organisation who work out of a beautiful building in Abbeyfield Park north of the city centre. They fix people's things like toasters, lights, toys, computers, and clothes. We chatted with the coordinator Gareth Coleman and some of the volunteers about what being involved in our project means to them, and why tackling the overconsumption of "stuff" is so important.

“It can be a bit of a toxic blend where if you're not very secure in your identity, advertisers can take advantage of that, promise you to feel better if you just bought a new iPhone or Beats headphones or whatever.“

Did you know when lightbulbs were invented, they were designed to last 100 years? Then they quickly realised no one would buy more and there would be no profit, so they engineered the breakdown of them to be much sooner. And thus ‘planned obsolescence’ was born. Think about every Apple product you've ever owned, and how eventually you can't update it anymore, so it becomes a glorified, and expensive, brick. Big, multi-million-pound organisations want you to keep spending your money with them, which you can’t do if your product lasts forever.

Gareth and the volunteers also rate the satisfaction gained from repairing broken ‘things’ in terms of well-being:

“often once you start looking inside of things and trying to figure out how they work, it can be a bit addictive. I don't do very many puzzles anymore because I get all my puzzle satisfaction here at work with toasters and vacuum cleaners!”

I’m looking forward to seeing what our young Sheffield changemakers create going forward on their Good Life Schools journey and celebrating how they are inspiring their communities to reimagine ways of living and learning that are good for us and the planet.

Find out more about Good Life Schools