More Than Furniture Conference 2007

MTF07 collage The 6th annual furniture project conference, MTF 07, took place 30 August at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. The event was attended by over one hundred delegates, and this year the focus was on partnership-working, new opportunities and future strategy.

The CRNS also ran a pre-conference dinner on the night before the conference to give delegates a chance to network over a couple of glasses of wine.

MTF07 was chaired by Jennie Chapman, the FRN Social Inclusion Champion and Project Director of the Vine Project. As well as chairing the event, Jennie talked about her own project and how it strived to keep a focus on helping people in a climate where the focus seems to be on enterprise and financial sustainability.

The programme provided delegates with a wide range of strong speakers from within Scotland and around the UK, including this year’s keynote speaker Steve Beesley from the award-winning project Furniture Matters, a Lancaster district recycling, reuse and training charity. Furniture Matters has successfully managed to grow and diversify. It now helps 13,600 families a year and has 42 members of staff and more than 95 volunteers and placement workers.

Linsay Chalmers, the CRNS Furniture Projects Coordinator, gave an update on the opportunities that are open to furniture projects in 2007. The capacity of furniture projects has more than doubled in recent years and Linsay’s presentation opened up a debate on how the sector could maximise and develop these opportunities over the next few years.

Sophy Copland from Instant Neighbour in Aberdeen talked about Furniture Inc, a highly successful service aimed at housing associations in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. Instant Neighbour holds Service Level Agreements with 5 Local Housing Associations to store furniture for those people who are evicted and also provides removals for this service.

The event also saw Robert Stewart, the newly appointed Chief Executive, launch the Glasgow Furniture Initiative, which aims to provide a uniform service throughout Glasgow with regards to furniture quality, supply, delivery and support for Glasgow’s social welfare and housing associations. Andrew Henderson from the Glasgow Housing Association spoke about the impact and importance of this new initiative for Glasgow.

The final speaker of the day was Susan Aktemel from Impact Arts who talked about their Fab Pad project. Fab Pad gives vulnerable young people the chance to work with an interior designer who will help develop the skills and ideas to turn their house into a home.

Twelve round-table workshops gave delegates the opportunity to discuss and share information about particular activities and services, including WEEE, working with charity shops, working with Local Authorities, carpet reuse and marketing their projects.

Download the strategy session feedback

Download the strategy session summary report

At the end of the day, there was a chance for delegates to feed into the CRNS’s future strategy for furniture projects. Delegates were asked to discuss branding, diversification, supporting service users, increasing tonnage, partnership working and contracts.

CRNS would like to thank all the delegates, speakers and workshop leaders for making this conference such an exciting, interesting and productive event. We hope everyone was able to take something positive from it. We would also like to thank SEPA and Communities Scotland for their continually support of this event and the sector.