Kitty’s in the community

Did you know that, for every pound you spend at Kitty’s, you help us generate £7.11 of value in return?

Or that, over the next three years, Kitty’s is calculated to generate over £3.5m (£3,552,739) of social impact?

We’ve been working with Nick Small at Social Impact Consulting to create a social value report. It’s the measure that we use to calculate the community – or social – impact of a business, by putting a value against a range of positive impacts it has, like wellbeing, jobs in the local community, self esteem, improved confidence, family support – a whole range of things that can’t be measured in simple financial terms. But they’re the sort of things that can have a transformational impact on people’s lives.

Here's our lovely Lawrence on the left who does our free deliveries for elderly and vulnerable people and people in financial hardship within our community.

We have five key social impacts:

  1. Reducing hygiene poverty by providing high-quality, affordable ecological laundry and dry cleaning services in a friendly, non-judgemental, open community setting. ‘Hygiene poverty’ is having to make a choice between heating your home, paying your rent, eating or being clean. It includes not being able to launder your clothes, school uniforms or sports kits when needed and has a big impact on the confidence and wellbeing of people who’re struggling to make ends meet.
  2. Rebuilding a sense of community. Do we need to say more? We love to catch up with our customers, whether you’re popping in for a cuppa or calling to check if you’re laundry’s ready.
  3. Raising awareness of healthy living and wellbeing by encouraging people to come together in a community space and encouraging people to take control of their own mental and physical wellbeing.
  4. Creating good jobs with training and paying the real living wage as well as providing quality volunteering opportunities, all contributing to creating inclusive economic growth.
  5. We also have a good environmental impact – although it’s harder to quantify in numbers right now. We use pioneering ecologically-sound improvements to dry cleaning and use electric (not gas-powered) washing machines and driers, buying our energy from 100% renewable sources. Our plastic bags are biodegradable (and we offer canvas alternatives); our ecological detergent refill service cuts down on single-use plastic and we partner with Agile Liverpool, to use cargo bikes for laundry drops.
Here's some of the scrubs we did for the Royal hospital during the first lockdown of Covid19

Our social impact report is important, because it helps us to measure the things that are traditionally difficult to calculate – the difference it makes to people’s lives.

Most importantly, it helps us measure the impact of different things that we do, so that we have a way to keep true to our values and our vision here. It’s a way to show us the social value of different ways we spend our money, so our members can decide which has the most impact in our community. It helps us to see things in a different way.

Click here to read the executive summary of our impact report. Or get in touch if you’d like to see the full methodology behind it.