Help Glasgow Wood Flourish

You can help make a real difference.

We need your help. To the many customers, partners and companies who continue to support us, we have to say we've been struggling through a very quiet trading period. As a result, we're asking for your support to help us get through to Spring 2024 and the promise of fresh growth for our charity/social enterprise.

Who we are

As many of you know, Glasgow Wood is part of a national network of Community Wood Recyclers and has been collecting waste wood for 18 years, successfully rescuing thousands of tonnes of wood from the waste stream. With an army of brilliant volunteers over the years and a dedicated team of staff, we've transformed this 'waste' wood into quality garden & indoor furniture and a huge range of bespoke timber solutions, big and small. 

We're proud to say that over 50% of our 20 employees were previously volunteers or have joined us via a supported programme. Besides paid employment, we’ve also provided hundreds of volunteers and trainees with an opportunity to become part of a family, build confidence and learn new skills. Continuing to offer this remains one of our core goals as a charity.

Throughout this journey, we wouldn't have survived without the support of our returning customers, both individuals and businesses. Whether it's purchasing our handmade furniture, commissioning us to collect waste wood or simply purchasing timber to build their own furniture and structures, we're eternally grateful to all for this.

Besides all these great individuals and businesses, we have still a number of key partners, funders and collaborators who have also been committed to creating a more sustainable environment and community with our help.

Our challenge

For 18 years, Glasgow Wood has evolved into a social enterprise that works hard to improve the health of our people and planet. In recent years however, the cost of living has impacted us and our customers, and the job of keeping things ticking over financially has become challenging. Over the last few years we've been striving to become more operationally sustainable, however too many external factors has made this particularly difficult. To continue to operate at a healthy level, we need to secure some help carry us through the traditionally quieter winter period into spring next year. Historically we've always been busy through spring and summer, so by asking our community for support just now we're confident we can make the improvements we need in the short term to allow us to keep going in the long term.

Our vision for the future

To keep our environmental and social activities here on South Street as sustainable as possible. We strive to continue offering over 80 volunteering opportunities for vulnerable and disadvantaged adults in the community while at the same time improving our recycling and reuse capacity. Our aims are to be completely self-sustainable, re-investing all of our time and resource into doing good for people and planet.

How you can help

Whatever you can donate will go a long way to keep us doing Good with Wood. Whether you're donating with or without one of our special rewards, we're eternally grateful for your support. With your donations, you can be confident that we'll continue to put the community and environment at the centre of everything we do.

And if you're unable to help financially yourself we'd really appreciate a share with your network to get the word out that we need extra support.

A final word from Frank, our longest serving Volunteer

What difference has Glasgow Wood made?

"How can I put it? Coming in every morning… it brightens up my day. The only thing I always see is smiley faces and instead of unhappy faces and negative talk.

You want to be positive all the time. Try forget about all the negatives and turn it into a positive.  Getting a bit of rapport with everybody and just enjoying working. It's like any normal day. You just come and look forward to seeing the boys. A wee bit of banter and a laugh and a wee cup of tea. How's your weekend and everything else.

My dad used to say, if you achieve something in your workplace, the next year after that you've got to try and achieve even more and you want to try and get better as the years go on. You've got to try and drive yourself forward and make sure the positives come through. 

Because if you don't have any standards in life where would you be? If it wasn't for Glasgow Wood, I think half of us would be sitting in the house watching telly every single day"