What a fabulous week! Kaefer pledged to help Goodlives as part of their Health & Safety Environment Week in September 2022. Goodlives is a 1.6acre site on West Lakes Science Park, donated by BEC. It is used for commercial growing of crops and plants. Run by the charity, Home to Work based in Cleator Moor. The project focuses on helping unemployed people, breaking down their barriers to help them with the next step on their personal ladder. Some really struggle with poor mental health and Goodlives is a great place to have some focus and learn new skills. Its also a great place to have some calm and ‘time out’ when this is needed.
Kaefer wanted to have something a little different as a challenge, so what better team building exercise than making a polytunnel! Unfortunately, the wind was against this idea! As we got more into the winter months, it was worse and worse! Kaefer being the great sports they are, still visited site as planned, and despite the rubbish weather had a great competition with each other pulling out dock weeds! What a brilliant help!
Towards the end of January, Goodlives was desperate to move on to the next stage of development and needed the polytunnel up. Kaefer came back and amazed everyone with their speed and attention to detail. They did a fantastic job which means Goodlives will be able to plant produce in more commercial volumes.
Everyone at the charity is so very grateful for their donation of manpower and time. Since Goodlives was born there has always been an uphill battle. There is still no water or electricity on site – however there is hope at the end of a very long tunnel that this may soon be changing!! Kaefer have offered to pay for the water to help Goodlives, after some more hurdles, there is hope this might be connected by summer!
Winter has been hard; with flooding ruining some of the crops but lessons have been learnt from this. It is now even more important that the remaining polytunnels are erected as soon as possible. Funding has been secured for 3 more polytunnels. Learners are so excited to be able to start work on a new polytunnel. They are brilliant and want to push to make Goodlives a big of a success as possible!!
