Chopsticks started about ten years ago when a group of people who used to access the Mencap centre were bored and wanted something to do. They went outside the back and started chopping scrap wood with a hand axe and then we started to sell the wood as kindling for fires.

All the people at Chopsticks are adults with learning difficulties and some have physical disabilities as well. Chopping wood was more fulfilling than what they were doing - sitting about in a day centre and pottering all day.

For some members it acts as short-term training before moving into proper work. Although it isn't formally work our members describe it as their job ... it gives them a sense of pride. Members are paid what used to be known as therapeutic earnings, a small amount covering the cost of transport to get here.

It is very difficult to quantify the effect that Chopsticks has. You could say it's the difference between someone just getting out of bed in the morning and someone who gets out of bed thinking: ‘I have got to go to work.' Our members are being like everybody else and going out to work.

Some are with us permanently but others just come for six or 12 months. They may simply pack sticks. One lady who comes to us, if she fills three bags of sticks a day she has done very well, but there are others who are trained to operate our machinery. We also run a garden maintenance service for the elderly.

Our building was Dickensian. We were working at capacity and the building restricted what we could do. We couldn't accommodate wheelchair-users because the floor was uneven and the toilets weren't wheelchair-accessible.

We moved into our new building in September and our new workshop has full disabled access. It was partly funded with a loan of just under £200,000 and a grant of £40,500 both from the Adventure Capital Fund.

When Chopsticks first started members were chopping enough kindling for their own or for friends to use. Now we make £40,000 a year from sales of kindling and reinvest the money in Chopsticks.

And we produce wood pellets also for biomass boilers using a chipping machine that we bought for £13,000 from Germany.

Fresh start

"Chopsticks was in a dilapidated old building on a scruffy industrial estate,” says Sue Peters, managing director of investments for the Adventure Capital Fund. “What they are really doing is giving people with learning disabilities precious opportunities to work. And the garden and maintenance project is helping elderly people to stay in their own homes for as long as possible.

“The building next door to their old site, a wood factory, had a fire and they lost supplies of materials. They came to us to ask for funding so they could move. Now they have a wood factory across the road from them and should anything go wrong they are next to a fire station, so it was quite a clever move. They have space to expand and diversify so they can become a stronger organisation making a real impact in the community.”

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