From 2025, our social enterprise model at Page & Bloom is changing. Read on to find out what this means for our customers and beneficiaries.
Six years ago, we set up Page & Bloom, a social enterprise created to support survivors of domestic abuse. Since our small beginnings in our founder’s living room, we gradually grew to an organisation that has helped 40 women to gain confidence, self esteem and practical job skills, building up CVs to help them take the next step into sustainable employment.
This has included:
19 trainees on our employment training programme
15 women who have done work experience placements with us
16 survivors of abuse who have gone on to be employed as staff members in our team
In addition, more than 120 women have joined community flower making workshops run by Page & Bloom, providing a space for creativity and community.
During this time we have also made over 12,000 paper flowers, saving an estimated 36,000 book pages from landfill- equivalent to 102 paperback novels! Here are some of our favourites.
But it hasn't been an easy journey. Since we started in 2018, we have negotiated the Covid Pandemic and the cost of living crisis, both of which have put a heavy burden on our team and required constant changing and adapting. The wider needs faced by the women we work with, from housing to mental health and childcare, that create real barriers to employment, have grown. At the same time many of the services to support women in these areas have been eroded by cuts and staff shortages.
After a lot of thought, we have sadly come to the conclusion that P&B needs to change. It has become harder and harder to run a profitable social enterprise in the current climate, which we need to do to fund the training, support and other work we do with women. For the last two years, the only way that it has been possible for us to continue functioning in our current model as a social enterprise has been through a huge amount of unpaid time from our team, which just isn’t sustainable. We are passionate about what we do and have been happy to do it, but sadly we have decided that we are unable to carry on in this way at the financial and wellbeing cost to our team.
So, in the last year, as the last of our current batch of trainees was ready to move into work elsewhere, and when the funding ended for out current term of community workshops, we realised it was the right time to change our social enterprise model and find ways to create our social impact in different ways. Page & Bloom will return to our roots to where we started, as a small family run wedding paper flower business.
This means that we won’t be able to run the training and work experience programme that has been part of Page & Bloom since 2020. And for the foreseeable future we won’t have the staff team to be able to continue creating employing for survivors of domestic abuse to make our flowers. We will continue as a mother and daughter team. operating from home to create beautiful and sustainable paper wedding flowers from recycled materials.
We continue to be passionate about supporting survivors of domestic abuse and while we won’t be able to do this through creating employment for a while, our social impact will continue through donating a percentage of our revenue from each wedding bouquet to charities working with survivors.
Where we can, we will continue to offer free flower making workshops on a voluntary basis for community groups working with women in our local areas. And of course, our environmental impact will remain by continuing to save books from landfill and transform them into everlasting flowers.
We are hopeful that these changes will allow Page & Bloom to continue and survive in a different way in the current climate. In the longer term, if circumstances change and we are able to return to a different model of social enterprise, we’ll be open to possibilities.
Thank you to everyone who has been part of our journey to this point, whether that’s through buying our flowers, volunteering with us, or encouraging us from the sidelines. We are all so proud of what Page & Bloom has achieved over the last 6 years, through all the highs and the lows.
Most of all we are proud of what the women who have been part of Page & Bloom have achieved- these wonderful, powerful, resilient women. So let's give the last word to them:
“[The training] coincided with a really difficult time for me, but everyone’s so lovely and so patient and it’s given me a chance to look ahead to focus on other things because it’s a positive experience; being part of the team and making flowers. It’s been a window of positivity for me through very dark and challenging times and has given me a sense of normality.”
“I started here for a four week course, and then I finished that, and then the six week internship. I've learnt so much: I've learnt how to make beautiful flowers out of paper, I've learnt about myself, I've got some self esteem, patience.”
“I've been going through a difficult time in my life and being at Page & Bloom has been a sort of an anchor for me in terms of self-identity. To be physically part of a team and doing things together has brought me a lot of hope and confidence and helped me to re-focus on myself.”
Comments