Aug 21 2013: Emmaus Sheffield launches £1.7 million campaign
HOMELESS charity Emmaus Sheffield is launching a £1.7 million campaign to extend its services…and help save a major city industrial heritage site for future generations.
Based in the historic Sipelia Works, a former cutlery factory close to the city’s Canal Basin, Emmaus Sheffield provides a working community of previously homeless people with quality, self-contained accommodation, training facilities and a workspace.
It aims through its Social Enterprise to provide meaningful work for beneficiaries and enable the people it supports – known as Companions - to eventually become self-supporting once more.
The charity currently has space for 13 Companions and wants to raise that number to 17.
But Sipelia Works, a Grade II listed building and one of the last surviving 19th century cutlery factory sites in the Steel City, has structural problems that need to be resolved before work on the new project begins.
“We are working all the time to raise the £312,000 we need annually to continue providing the full range of Emmaus services to the Companions,” said manager Graham Bostock.
“We have extremely popular second hand, vintage and furniture stores and we also provide a range of services including gardening and grounds maintenance as well as PAT testing which guarantee that our work can continue.
“These business streams are now well established and provide the foundation for everything we do at Emmaus Sheffield.
“But if we are to expand and develop this much needed service we need to utilise all the space we have here and that means a major investment.”
Architects anticipate that carrying out a full programme of refurbishment and conversion to create further accommodation as well as working space and meeting rooms will cost £1.7 million.
“This site has the potential to become not just the home of Emmaus for many years to come but also a major public space for people and organisations to use,” said Graham.
“Obviously we have a funding campaign that continues all the time but for this next phase in our story it would be great to get the people of Sheffield behind us.
“The whole ethos of Emmaus is about encouraging the Companions to support themselves and make this an entirely self-sufficient organisation but we do need some help with such a large amount of money and we’d be happy to talk to anybody who is interested in supporting us and fundraising in any way at all.
“We have already done a great deal to secure the future of this historic building but now we need that extra support that will help save protect this site for many more generations to come.”
Anybody interested in supporting the Emmaus Sheffield campaign can contact Graham on 0114 272 0677 or visit: www.emmaus-sheffield.org.uk
