How trading helped us build a business that is led by the community

Written by Grace Harrison, Organisational Development lead at Kitty’s Launderette.

We are a community launderette and social space in the Anfield/Everton area of Liverpool. We offer high-quality, affordable ecological laundry and dry cleaning services, as well as an accessible social space for people to gather, talk and learn. 

Run by the community for the community

Kitty’s Launderette is a social business and worker-community cooperative, run by a small team of local residents and guided by a wider community membership. Everything we do is to reinvested back into our community, helping to make more good things happen. We work to make broad community impact in three key ways:  

• Quality laundry services for everyone in our neighbourhood while supporting people in hygiene poverty, fuel poverty and financial hardship in particular.  

• An accessible, welcoming social space for everyone in our diverse local community through a engaging program of social and creative activities.  

• Creating quality, flexible Real Living wage jobs for people in our community, in particular those who may face additional barriers to work. Meaningful democratic participation through our worker-community co-operative structure.  

Trading gives you autonomy

We always wanted to be able to make our own money through trading in order to have both long term sustainability, as well as the autonomy to operate our organisation as our community decides. (In a climate of reduced public funding, competition over grants and shifting funder priorities, we felt the model of social enterprise/Co-operative/Community business enabled us to best deliver our objectives)  

However, we started with nothing other than our idea, creativity and passion for making positive social change. So over the early years we did have to learn how to build broad support for our idea, raise grant finance and develop working partnerships. 

Giving our community a voice in our work

We did this through talking to everyone we could in our community and city, listening to their opinions and suggestions, inviting them to contribute and help shape the vision. Finding out what matters to them and building that into our plans. Of course you meet some people who tell you all the reasons you can’t do it, but mostly you will meet people who want to offer you their support in whatever form, simply telling friends and neighbours and sharing on social media, to investing their knowledge, contacts, time or money.  

We connected with and studied similar organisations, learning from their successes and challenges, building our professional networks of peer to peer support.  

 Our plans built slowly at the beginning as we all had other jobs, but once we started to secure some start up funding to pay others and ourselves to work on building the business plans, things started to gather pace.

Building up to a bricks and mortar business

As we didn’t actually have a launderette to start with, we had to try to bring the idea together with creative and social events, we ran a Heritage Lottery funded project about the social history of launderettes and washhouses. We commissioned local artist to make laundry themed rewards (soaps, Washbags, linen scented candles) as well as local filmmaker to make an animation which brought the idea to life. We ran a Crowdfunding campaign to generate lots of interest in our plans and get ourselves in the local and national press.  

This then helped to secure larger national funding pots which helped us invest in our equipment and renovate the space we had negotiated a lease on. After 6 months of renovations, we opened our doors for washing in May 2019, and have been open 6 days a week ever since.  

A bright future built on trading

Our team, community of supporters and collaborators continues to grow, we learn from each other and we never stop growing our knowledge and skills for how we can work most effectively and deliver meaningful social impact in our community.  

We’ve now been trading for 5 years and currently derive roughly 70% of our total income from laundry based activity, with the other 30% coming from small grant funding pots.  

Grants/funding have played an instrumental role in helping us turn our vision into a reality, however sometimes this can come with constraints and conditions which can make you feel like you are jumping through hoops or squeezing yourself into boxes which don’t quite fit. It’s important to hold onto your communities vision of what you are trying to achieve, while being flexible to the opportunities and support that may be on offer.  

Trading for Good: funded programmes for people who want to improve our world

Gain the knowledge, skills, and confidence to develop and grow projects that tackle social and environmental challenges through strong trading income streams.

Trading for Good provides funding, education and support for social entrepreneurs and community businesses across England. It consists of three programmes aimed at different types of projects at differing stages of their journey.

Each programme has the following specialised support:

• Learning and development programme.
• Match Trading Grant™.
• Ready-made network of people like you. 
• Expert insights. 
• Peer-to-peer learning. 
• Join our community of 3k+ SSE fellows.

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