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2024-03-31-accounts

ANNUAL REPORT

1 Apr 2023 – 31 Mar 2024

EXETER SCRAPSTORE

Belmont Park, Gordon Road, Exeter EX1 2DH 01392 661769 Company Number: 07619244 Charity Number: 1143182

CHAIR’S REPORT

In last year’s annual report I wrote about how we had enjoyed a stable year, with little change and a return to financial surplus, while our reserves remained very healthy. This year, while I am happy to repeat the news about financial stability, we have some change before and ahead of us.

Firstly the founder and long-time mainstay of the Scrapstore, Peter Vance, decided it was time to step back. We are all immensely grateful to Peter; he was manager of the Scrapstore for some years when it was part of Exeter City Council, and when the cuts of 2011 led ECC to decide to close it down, he stepped in, recruited trustees, and led the drive to set up the charity as we have known it for the last 13 years. That is some genuine achievement, and he left us with a viable community business, a good reputation and, remarkably, freedom from the need to chase subsidy and grants. Thank you Peter!

Peter has been ably replaced by Madalen Dixon, whose energy and ideas are building on Peter’s very solid foundations. We were pleased to welcome her, after a wellcontested appointment process, and she is working incredibly hard to develop the store, picking up some of our earlier ambitions and adding new ones with her fresh perspective.

We also welcomed a new Trustee, Johanna Korndorfer. She brings a huge store of experience in third sector management and development, and joins our other Trustees, Nik Pitcher, Anna Aroussi, Graham Kingdon, Stuart Crewes and me in overseeing our excellent project.

Nik and I have been Trustees of the Scrapstore since the very beginning, and we have both decided that now is a good time to move away and bring in new Trustees, so this AGM will mark the end of our own 13 years on the Board. Nik has been an excellent Secretary and has also played a huge pastoral role supporting our professional team – she will be much missed.

Which means of course that, repeating last year’s plea, we need some new Trustees. If you are a regular user of ours and share our interest in recycling with creativity, then we’d love to hear from you. You don’t have to commit straight away, we can guide you through the role, which is not onerous, but does have some responsibility. And I cannot end without also paying tribute to one of our most valuable volunteers, Jayne Shepherd, who is also taking a well-earned rest at the end of this year. She has compiled and interpreted financial figures for us for the last few years, and has become indispensable – please if there is anyone out there who knows about accounts and wants a fulfilling pastime/job, get in touch, we need you! And thank you Jayne, we’ll miss you as well.

Alan Caig, Chair of Trustees

STAFF REPORT

As we look back on another year it is satisfying to see that the Scrapstore remains in good financial health. As can be seen from the accounts, compared to the previous year income from memberships was up 12%, income from scrap sales up 21%, and income from shop sales up 16%. However, this was no cause for complacency as we continued to do whatever we could to keep costs to a minimum whilst hopefully providing a good, useful service to the local community and beyond. If we can keep providing a service that enough people want, at the right price, and in the right way, then this should stand the store in good stead for the future.

The pattern of the Scrapstore week continued throughout the year as in the previous year. I used Monday and Wednesday mornings to do collections, topping up, admin, and anything else that needed doing. On Thursdays the store opened 10-5 with Jayne our finance volunteer in during the morning doing a wonderful job keeping our book-keeping and finances in order. On Fridays the store opened 11-4 with our other regular volunteer Di coming in to sort, process and display scrap materials. Without Di’s amazing work the front office storage area would soon become overwhelmed, and we really don’t know what we’d do without her. Saturdays remained a great success and is especially useful to people who cannot get to us at other times. The store is open 10-1, in the very capable hands of Fiona.

Regarding scrap, we are very fortunate in having some good local businesses that continue to donate their offcuts and surplus materials to us. There are a couple in particular who provide materials in bulk that are always popular not only with our own customers but with other Scrapstores as well. This means we often get requests from other stores to do a swap either one-to-one or as part of a larger multi-swap event. It’s always satisfying to be able to offer other stores some useful materials that they want, and in return get a selection of their different scrap to display in our store. As always, I was grateful to Simon for his help at multi-swap events and at other occasional times during the year.

As in previous years the Scrapstore took part in the annual Respect Festival weekend in Belmont Park in June 2023. We used our new pop-up gazebo as a shop sales area selling a wide range of craft items and materials, which always makes a useful contribution to our income. The brilliant Kat and Sonia ran a free drop-in craft zone for children and families throughout the weekend, and the ‘Big Blue’ slide was a hit as usual. It’s always great to see (and hear !) just how much fun young children have sitting on sheets of card and sliding down a piece of fabric ! Huge thanks as always to Zoe, and her gran who was visiting from Wales, for helping out as volunteers on the Sunday.

On the storage front, in the autumn of 2023 we were given notice to vacate a room we used for storing materials that was in a local factory as they needed it for their own purposes. The materials were gradually moved out during November, some of it going into the Scrapstore and the rest into storage at the cemetery buildings. The cemetery store continues to serve its purpose well, although I am looking forward to giving it a good sorting through and tidying up at some stage. The same applies to other areas of our storage that have got a bit chaotic !

On a more personal note, during the year I began reflecting on my life at the Scrapstore and decided the time was right for me to retire. I started there in 2001 when the store was part of the Leisure and Museums Directorate at Exeter City Council, before becoming an independent registered charity in 2011. I handed in my notice at the beginning of 2024 and the trustees began the process of recruiting a new Lead Worker. As a result of this the trustees and everyone at the Scrapstore were delighted to welcome Maddy Dixon to the role and the handover process commenced April 2024. As well as learning the day-to-day operations of the Scrapstore, Maddy has lots of great ideas for taking things forward and the Scrapstore is assured of an exciting future.

Finally, and as is often the case, I am writing these notes some months after the period that this Annual Report covers, which means I am now retired ! As such I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone I have had contact with during my time at the store for their support, encouragement and friendship. This includes all the trustees, colleagues, volunteers, members and customers of the store, businesses that donate materials, colleagues at other Scrapstores, funders, and anyone else I may have omitted. It has been an absolute privilege to work at Exeter Scrapstore and I take away many, many very fond memories.

Peter Vance, Lead Worker

Exeter Scrapstore Finances Year Ended 31 March 2024

INCOME £42,263

Total Income

Grants £5,858 Income from Charitable Activities £27,737 Donations £1,025 Membership £7,643

Grants

Income from Charitable Activities Donations Membership

£42,263

Grants

Exeter City Council Rates Grant £4,916 Other Grants £942

£5,858

Income from Charitable Activities Scrap Sales £24,151 Shop Sales £2,956 Liquidity Fund £630

£27,737

Donations General Donations £1,025 £1,025

EXPENDITURE £38,816

Wages & Salaries Rent & Rates General Running Costs

Exeter Scrapstore Finances Year Ended 31 March 2024

Total Outgoings

Wages & Salaries £23,783 Rent & Rates £6,593 General Running Costs £8,440

£38,816

TESTIMONIALS

(From artist members and organisations)

As an artist who works with various materials, I am grateful to Exeter Scrapstore for its extensive selection of local resources. It also allows me to continue creating in an environmentally friendly way and with low cost, as most of the items are surplus or offcuts from businesses and industries.

The Exeter Scrapstore has been instrumental to my art practice which is based on reuse. It’s a fount of not just materials but also inspiration. I initiated a whole project from some yarn I found. It’s also a pleasant place to be with friendly, thoughtful staff. I wish it could open more often.

As an organisation with an agenda to be carbon-positive in the next year, we are really glad to count Exeter Scrapstore as one of our main sources for materials. We’ve had a great relationship with the store over the years, through various projects, and have always found the staff team to be very approachable and super-supportive with requests to help us with sourcing materials, no matter how niche or bonkers! The Scrapstore is unique in the city as an independant operator which spans such a variety of sources and has an underlying agenda to facilitate play and fun whilst acknowledging the climate crisis and modelling a positive way forward - the reuse of previously single-use materials. Whenever we tell artists and organisations elsewhere about the Exeter Scrapstore they have usually heard about it and are a bit jealous that we have such a great resource on our doorstep.

TESTIMONIALS

(From new family members, individual members and non-members using the shop)

The Scrapstore is amazing. We have been coming here for years. We’ve had birthday parties, we’ve made marble mazes, rat mazes, fur creatures, wrapped parcels and so much more. We could spend hours wandering around, imagining all the projects we could make. The scrapstore is indispensable, inspiring and we are so lucky it’s right here in Belmont Park.

Scrapstore is the only place to get lots of wool on a student budget.

We love the Scrapstore! We have been coming here for years, I remember coming in with my daughter when she was a small child, now she is all grown up and comes to the scrapstore with her small children.

THANKS

The Trustees and team at Exeter Scrapstore would like to thank:

All our supporting companies that continue to donate such great materials – we wouldn’t be able to do it without you!

Hannah and the team at Princesshay for their support.

Exeter City Council and Devon County Council, in particular our ward Councillors, for their continued support.

And finally the wider cultural and creative community in Exeter and beyond, for their continued support, encouragement and goodwill - keep it up!

Alan, Anna, Fiona, Graham, Johanna, Kat, Nik, Peter, Simon & Stuart.

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