Bringing toogoodtowaste 'home'
Shaun England CEO at toogoodtowaste
The smell of coal fires fill the air, dogs are barking in the back lanes and in the background there is the hum of the Six Bells colliery in Abertillery, that colliery took the life of my grandfather but I was dammed if it was going to do the same to me.
That was 1980, I was 12 and my day was going to be filled with riding round the streets on my bike in what I now see was an idyllic childhood.
I thought I was disadvantaged, my father didn’t have a job, well not officially and my mother’s job was to look after me and my brother and of course my father, after all he was the unemployed “ bread winner”!
Transporting my life to 2008 when I started at toogoodtowaste I finally realised that I had a very privileged childhood, after all my mother and father were together all my childhood days until my mums death separated them, my nan lived around the corner and offered a comforting shoulder to cry on, in the way that only a nan can, my brother was my brother and whilst we never had a joint on Sundays, we always had at least sausages, BUT I was loved, I had a roof over my head and I never went to school or bed on an empty stomach.
Today it’s a different life for people, with high unemployment, poor health & a deepening poverty crisis and whilst I “emigrated” to the Rhondda, I still think of Abertillery and the surrounding area as my home, after all I was born in Ebbw Vale in 1968 and lived there until I started work and moved in the late 1980’s but I still go back regularly to visit family, friends and to reminisce.
Being the CEO of toogoodtowaste I feel deeply honoured, I work alongside an amazing and inspirational team who join me in wanting to get safe, clean affordable furniture and electrical items from all around the country and bring it back to South Wales for local people, why else would they, like me, start every morning at 5:00 am.
So that’s why opening our first charity showroom in Tredegar in Blaenau Gwent has so much emotion for me, it’s like coming back home and helping my childhood communities access essential items that they would otherwise not been able to get hold of. My plan for the next 3 years is to open more showrooms in the neighbouring valleys as I know that peoples access to own transport is not always available and public transport between the valleys is at best hard going and at worst, impossible.
Whilst we cannot completely erase poverty we intend doing as much as we can to work towards reducing it, after all no family should not have a sofa to sit on, a bed to sleep on or a stove to cook on. After all this is no longer 1980 it’s 2019.
