In part two of this series we are going to talk about the first of our four case studies (part one).

I’m Daniel, Head of Customer Happiness at Warp It, and I’m the narrator of this article. What I encourage you to do, before or after reading this article, is to watch the video of the people from these organisations talking about how the system works in their city. These videos are between 3 & 5 minutes long.

Our first case study is the City of Sunderland

So, a while back, the City of Sunderland’s Municipal Council were closing down a lot of their buildings.The Municipal Council were the first to support Warp It, and then the university, and together they developed a system and strategy to be rolled out across the city. 

What’s really important is that this was a strategic partnership between all the big players in the city, as you can see quite clearly the value from an environmental and financial point of view. You can see the value of reuse in the city, with 100 jobs secured and 3 new jobs created. This came simply from starting to maximise the reuse of surplus assets between agencies.

Key lessons from the City of Sunderland are proving that it works within one organisation, and can then influence other organisations. Start small and grow incrementally on a micro level within an organisation, so department by department and then also externally with other agencies bringing in one at a time.

Helping charities

In the City of Sunderland, a really important part of the project was the charity sector umbrella organisation, which is called VCAS, Voluntary & Community Action Sunderland. They have a membership organisation which all the not-for-profits have joined. This shows there’s already a really good communication network between the charities and the city. Also, when the Municipal Council joined the system, they brought in all the schools as well, because they manage those. So now there’s a lot of schools and charities on the system too.

In part three of this series, we will be taking a look at a famous Scottish university.

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project in Sunderland?