A long-standing charity partner, Haven House Children’s Hospice, were looking to refresh and upgrade items of their furniture in their hospice. They were hoping to make improvements particularly to their family flat, with items to be refurbished in bright colours to suit their branding, and wipe-clean fabrics in light of the heightened risks caused by COVID.
Our Sustainability Coordinator – who manages our Giving Back Project with a UK-wide charity network – and our Renew Centre team worked together to arrange the refurbishment to fulfil their requirements over three phases. In total, 33 items of furniture were recovered with new, long-lasting and wipe-clean fabrics in the hospice’s choice from an extensive range offered by Camira.
Providing vital care for families since the 1990’s
Haven House provides essential care to children and young people up to the age of 18 with life-limiting or life-threatening conditions, with their services ranging from day care, planned respite and end-of-life care. They are able to offer their services to a huge geographical area, working with families in Waltham Forest, Barking, Dagenham, West Essex, Havering, Redbridge and East Hertfordshire.
They are passionate about ensuring that those who make use of the hospice are able to enjoy life to the fullest which is represented in their colourful play areas, surrounding gardens and various activities offered to those they care for. For instance, they hold music therapy sessions for the children, held in a music room which was generously funded by the Amy Winehouse Foundation.
Like many organisations delivering healthcare, funding is not always easily available for interior upgrades, and so they are especially grateful for initiatives like our Giving Back Project as it allows them to direct resources to providing vital care. We estimate that in total, we were able to save the hospice around £5,000 on furniture and logistical costs. Furthermore, by keeping items in use for longer instead of buying new, the hospice saved around 1.16 tonnes of CO2e which is around 4 double decker buses in volume.
Revamping a social space for post-pandemic use
This project helped the hospice with upgrading their café, training room and family flat – with the café as a particular focus.
Pre-pandemic, the café space was a thriving social area with coffee mornings, support groups and visitors – but as COVID rates skyrocketed, social events in the hospice became a health risk to residents. As the pandemic dies down, the hospice have become keen to revamp and adapt this space for increased use. We were able to help transform this area by refurbishing three of the existing sofas in a purple leather-look material designed for hygienic and heavy duty use in sectors like healthcare. The hospice were able to choose from 51 colours in this material type to suit the space.
Below is the café before and after:
Refurbishing in process:
Building on a valued and long-standing relationship
We have been supporting Haven House for a number of years now through various projects around their interiors.
In 2014, the hospice received funding from the Department of Health to build a new wing, the Holistic Care Centre, but this did not include furniture and equipment needed to fill the space. This would have placed significant strain on their finances and so they turned to Crown for assistance with the much-needed items, such as desks, chairs and reception furniture.
Following an initial meeting, we committed to providing as much quality used furniture as possible for the new wing. This involved the refurbishing of items donated by clients to Haven House’s requirements, as well as creating bespoke furniture in the Renew Centre. In total, it was estimated that this project alone saved the hospice around £23,000.
Since then, we have been able to deliver donated items from our stock to the hospice on with various other projects and otherwise on an ad-hoc basis as their needs change.
“This partnership has enabled our hospice to benefit from upcycled office furniture for our holistic care centre and training room. We also received vital support and storage when we undertook a major renovation in 2018. More recently Crown has supported us with upcycling our existing furniture in our family flat and café so that we can ensure the highest standards of infection prevention and control with wipe clean fabric.
We look forward to continuing our partnership working with Ellie, Ann and the team at Crown. This vital support will ensure we prioritise a sustainable and more environmentally friendly future at Haven House for the life-limited and life-threatened children we support.”
Elieen, Head Nurse at Haven House
“I am so pleased the Giving Back Project has been able to support Haven House again. Their work is so important to our community and their teams are dedicated to supporting children and families facing the most challenging of times. By providing refurbished furniture we can not only save significant funds for the charity we can also help improve the hospice experience. I look forward to continuing to support the Hospice with future projects and furniture.”
Ann Beavis, Head of Sustainable Development at Crown Workspace
The Renew Centre
The Renew Centre is the UK’s leading independent commercial facility dedicated to remanufacturing, refurbishing and repairing desks, chairs and other office furniture. Our state-of-the-art facility and dedicated team enable us to make the most of our clients’ office assets and return them to shop-floor condition at a fraction of the cost of buying new.
Find out more about what we can offer for your workspace here >
The Giving Back Project
Our Giving Back Project helps our clients ‘give back’ as part of sustainable clearances by helping them to donate furniture, IT and electrical equipment from office clearances to local charities, schools and social enterprises. Through this initiative, we work with over 165 charitable organisations across the UK, and last year alone were able to donate over 4,200 items on behalf of our valued clients.
Thanks to this initiative, we have been able to develop close relationships with many of the charities, schools and social enterprises we support and are so pleased we were able to support Haven House in this project.