Thank-you for visiting us today to find out what happens Behind The Stable Door!
Here on our family farm we want to include others more with our farm activities, we work mainly (but not exclusively) with people who have an identified social need. We would love to share our farm experiences with you, but more importantly we hope you will get involved as well
"Our work Behind The Stable Door
Has social involvement at its core."
If you want to know more about the history of Behind The Stable Door click on the link below:
What happens at our Social Farm?
Since we started Behind The Stable Door we do not like to exclude anybody from attending our farm, for the majority our participants attend on a referral basis. The reason for this is to make sure they get the best out of their sessions with us and they are supported according to their needs.
Can You help us with "Our Waste to Zero Trace" campaign?
Our new project to make shredded animal bedding out of waste egg cartons was to be a very exciting addition to our Behind The Stable Door family! Sales of our bedding support our persons with social needs with employment opportunities so that they could provide customers in Northern Ireland with a fantastic recycled animal bedding made from our own waste! This bedding is made exclusively out of unused wasted egg cartons (seconds that come direct from the manufacturing plant), and our social farmers were going to shred it and bag it to make fantastic absorbent and comfortable animal bedding for our beloved pets! Watch the video below to see how this is done:
We were offered a grant to aid the costs for a commercial machine to recycle egg cartons into animal bedding, and to create jobs for our special needs adults and work experience for special needs children. This was to be the biggest thing to ever have happened to the social farm and we really thought it would put us in a strong position to be self-sufficient going forwards:
"We were so excited about this project that recycles local waste and creates social employment and inclusion at the same time, what could be better than this?!"
Sadly this euphoria to get a grant for this project wasn't to last long and our euphoria turned into a real nightmare when it came to getting our licences to get our project up and running, read on!
Unfortunately because our social enterprise is in Northern Ireland we are being forced to spend nearly £8,500 on licence costs to get our animal bedding project up and running. If we where based in England, Scotland or Wales the licence costs would be free, yes you read this correctly, FREE, FREE, FREE, NADA, ZERO, NOTHING! Sadly we have discovered we are not a United Kingdom in this case and we have the misfortune of living in Northern Ireland with a lot more obstacles in the way to recycle our local waste. Recycled animal bedding is readily available for sale from England, because it's easy for them to do it, but we have customers here in Northern Ireland ready and willing to buy our bedding, keeping our local waste from having to travel out of NI and rehoming it on our doorstep! We can buy recycled animal bedding in from England, and use it for our pets and animals here, we just aren't currently making it here in NI because our Department of the Environment makes more difficulties for us! We like this to change for every individual and community group that wants to be able to do something with our local waste, environmental change starts on our doorstep and we should not all have to be registered as waste companies to do something with our own waste!
Currently our waste has to travel to outside of Northern Ireland (creating more carbon footprint and landfill). NI businesses are being put off with all this licencing protocol and expenses, understandably! Imagine how much we can cut this waste figure by allowing us to do what we can without the burden of such hefty licencing protocol:
Coming out of a pandemic £8,500 to give to licencing costs to get our project off the ground is a lot of money and we have asked our Environment Minister could he please just help us to understand why we have to spend all this money to recycle our local waste when it is free for others in the UK to do? It's hard enough to get any business off the ground and that's a massive amount of upfront costs for a small socially driven start up.
We set up Behind The Stable Door because we want our social needs participants to have meaningful employment and create opportunities for others going forwards - And we want to help lower our waste in NI by making high quality animal bedding from it!
We aren't the first to try and make bedding out of waste for a social cause, this lovely lady in the UK is making blankets for the homeless out of crisp packets, amazing!:
To help get waste to zero trace we are going to need you!
So if you have heard of our story through the local media, here we are asking for you to get involved! Asking for public support is new to us so we need YOU to guide us on how we might gain your support!
Our target is £8,000, all monies received will go into overcoming obstacles to getting waste recycling projects like our own off the ground, supporting persons with social needs, and supporting the environment by reusing our waste here at home!
Cash for Trash Target to Reach!
12/07/2021
Here's our two ideas to try and gain your support!
Idea One
Have a personalised video book created by us at "Behind The Stable Door". Our social farmers are willing and ready to create a short story made for you. If you have a special needs young person or adult that would like a personalised story from us, or a granny or an aunt or even your good self would like a personalised story, sign up below! You you will be sent a private video link that is yours to keep! We can create a bedtime story or a birthday message - you tell us what you want! We are willing to work with care homes/hospitals/hospices, to create your story. We can involve your loved one and/or pets in the story (via photo sharing). Our social farmers are very friendly and they love sharing their stories with others so please just let us know what we can create for you, we are waiting for you to get in touch!
Video of our social farmers waiting to meet you:
Idea Two
Buy our Recycled Animal Bedding in advance - Pay it Forwards!
If you would love your pet to have our comfortable, absorbent recycled animal bedding, we are offering the opportunity to pay it forwards. For a £10 donation we will send you a bag of our animal bedding. £5 of this will go towards the costs of getting it to you, while another £5 will help us get our project off the ground. We hope to get you this animal bedding in the post as soon as we can and we are offering a money back guarantee! Our social participants are here wanting to serve you and provide you with fantastic animal bedding, so please support them and our waste crisis by buying this bedding, your pets and the environment will thank you for it! Also shredded egg cartons make fantastic parcel packaging if you have no pets and you still want to support us!
