Twelve years ago, Community Housing Cymru set up an Award scheme to recognise housing innovation in memory of a special person - Pat Chown. Pat gave a big part of her life to helping others and spent much of her working life in helping to meet people's housing needs in Wales.
Gwynedd-based horticulture, catering and joinery social enterprise tells us what makes the business a success, and about its plans to grow the organisation further.
Top Welsh social enterprise leader, Sharon Jones, speaks to WSEC
Date: 21.03.2011
As Wales’s number one social enterprise leader, Sharon Jones of Crest Recycling will go head-to-head with three leading UK social entrepreneurs at the national Social Enterprise Awards next week. We grabbed five minutes with her, below...
Congratulations Sharon (pictured). What makes a good social enterprise leader?
Someone who can adapt and react quickly to different ideas, someone who is not afraid to take risks and is entrepreneurial. You’ve also got to be compassionate because a lot of the time you’re working with people who are disadvantaged.
Have you had any management training?
I haven’t got a formal management qualification. I did look at a management degree but I’ve been so busy concentrating on the day job I haven’t had time! Virtually everything I know is from experience. I’ve been on some useful courses, though, including those which work on leadership styles and motivating staff. I’ve found WVCA (Wales Council for Voluntary Action) training sessions very good.
I also think it's helped to have worked in different sectors before I started at Crest 13 years ago. Prior to that I'd worked for a charity, for a local authority and also a private company.
What's the hardest lesson you’ve learned/most difficult experience you've had?
I think this would have been about 18 months ago. We’d been running a green waste collection service locally for seven years and then the contract went out to tender and we lost out to Verdant – a major national company.
The contract had accounted for a significant portion of our turnover so it was extremely tough. The day we found out was perhaps the hardest in the history of the business. The worst bit was knowing that there would have to be a restructure with redundancies.
However, we’re now stronger than we were before. We learned a heavy lesson and that is to not put too many eggs in one basket. Losing the contract has encouraged us to develop new services, offer further community benefit and more jobs. In particular, we’re running the Fareshare food recycling franchise in Wales, doing textile recycling, and we now have a popular children’s clothes shop.
What does winning the Welsh social enterprise leader of the year award mean to you?
I wasn’t expecting to win. It was very humbling to see what my staff had said about me. We have a great team, and I wouldn’t have won it without them. I’m don’t for a minute think I could win the national award, I’m just very happy to be up there representing Wales.
How do you keep your team happy?
We have regular team and department meetings and I listen to what they want. We also do quarterly appraisals, which is time consuming but worth the effort.
LINKS
See more on Crest Recycling here.
See more on the Welsh Awards here.
And, the national awards here.
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