Community Partner Spotlight: Katy Ridsdill-Smith, Community Furniture Stores
Introducing this month’s Community Partner Spotlight blog! This feature is designed to give an insight into one of our Community Partners, to find out a bit more about what they do, and to learn about their experience of working with York Cares.
This month’s feature is written by Katy Ridsdill-Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Community Furniture Stores. Katy came to our first Operations Board meeting of the year back in January and our Ambassadors were really keen to find out more about how to get involved in their amazing work. We’ve been working in partnership with the organisation over a couple of years now and are looking forward to continuing to work with them going forward.
Community Partners are vital to our work as they’re our links into the community and allow us to get people involved in activity across our programmes. Thank you Katy for taking the time to write this feature and for being one of our wonderful Community Partners.
Katy writes, “Hello! I’m Katy and I’m the Chief Executive of Community Furniture Stores, a charity which works to fight furniture and digital poverty across North Yorkshire. We have stores in York, Scarborough and Selby where we sell donated items of furniture at affordable and means tested rates to the community. In our Selby and Scarborough stores, we run carpentry workshops to upcycle and repair items for resale and in York we have IT ReUse, a project which refurbishes IT equipment and distributes it out to people at risk of digital poverty. We offer a range of volunteering opportunities across our stores and workshops to the local community.
We have been working with York Cares for a while now across a range of different projects. Since IT ReUse began in 2022, they have helped us secure corporate donations of IT equipment which has hugely increased our capacity to support more people in York. We have also been part of their Social Connections programme and have launched Coffee Mornings every third Thursday of the month to provide people in the community with a safe space to drop in for a cuppa and a chat. More recently, York Cares have supported us to organise corporate volunteering days which has been a great way of getting local businesses involved in our work, raising awareness of the challenges of furniture and digital poverty and a huge help in our warehouses!
I’ve been in post for around 6 months now and was struck by how friendly and forthcoming the York Cares team have been since I started. The team are proactive, organised, receptive to new ideas and creative in the way they approach challenges in York. It is clear that what binds the team together is their passion for their local community and desire to make a difference.
If you are a local business, charity or organisation in York and aren’t already working with York Cares, I would highly suggest you make contact to see how they could help – they’re a fabulous organisation!”
If you’re one of our Community Partners and you’d like to feature in an upcoming Community Partner Spotlight feature, we’d love to hear from you. Contact Georgia via info@yorkcares.co.uk for more information.
