The Lil Hub

Aim

Everyone can get more involved with Lower Impact Living through the new Lil Hub, a fun, friendly space to make eco-living even easier

Lil is an East Lothian based social enterprise passionate about making Lower Impact Living easy. Making changes for the benefit of the planet and people can be tough so we do this through fun events, advice and education and access to a wide range of eco-friendly products. We invest every spare penny in outreach and access.

So far Lil has stopped over 1,000,000 pieces of plastic from polluting our environment. We can do way more and we need your help!

Do way more what?

With your support, we can create a space, a Lil Hub, in a central location from where we can support communities to do more Lil things. To do more we need a more accessible space, a place where we can welcome you, host events, run community projects and stock a wider range of eco-friendly products. Right now we are squashed in to two small spaces with no public access and no room to grow.

A new base will allow us to better serve all of East Lothian, Edinburgh and beyond. We are aiming for a Haddington high street location, because we love East Lothian and want to help rural and urban communities in our local fledgling green economy. If by seeing us people start to think about changes then we have helped them take that first Lil step to bigger things.

Creating a central Lil Hub will enable us to:

• Deliver more events and workshops, bringing skill sharing and expert advice to our local communities to develop 'make, reuse and repair' skills.
• Create jobs and volunteering opportunities both in the Hub and on external events and initiatives.
• Raise more funds for community eco-initiatives – 100% of our profits are invested in education and practical activities.
• Contribute to community resilience by bringing people together in the face of climate change impacts.
• Create more opportunities to make low impact living affordable and enjoyable by hosting produce swaps and reuse markets, such as our popular clothes swishing events, boosting our buy one gift one schemes and collaboration with others. These events save everyone money and bring our communities together.
• Expand Lil’s ability to make low waste shopping easier for those who cannot readily access a zero waste shop due to a rural location, illness or disability, Covid restrictions or limited time across Edinburgh & East Lothian through our delivery services.
• Make us more visible and accessible to people who would prefer to visit us in person through retail days, open days and evenings.
• Further extend our range of products with expanded storage supporting more local producers and makers.

Why is this needed?

We have a chance to change, we can make better choices, we can learn the skills we need to be resilient in the face of change and we can support each other.

We can do all these things, but we also know it can be hard! Life is a juggle, the issues are overwhelming. That’s where Lil comes in – making it easier to make good choices for you and the planet. 

What have we done so far?

Lil has grown from a few small pop up events and selling toilet rolls to friends and family, and we are now bursting at the seams with over 450 stock lines plus all our gear for community education and events! We need to move to expand what Lil does. Without your help today, we can’t continue the giant leaps our Lil community has already taken:

• Stopping 2640 shampoo bottles entering waste streams by buying shampoo bars and refills
• Avoided the use of disposable partyware through a subsidised reusable party kit hire scheme.
• Preventing 80,000 plastic razors entering the market and subsequently landfill.
• Attending over 100 events to help our environment: litter picks, beach cleans, nurdle hunts, mini beast hunts, seaweed specialists and alternative Christmas gift wrap, second hand clothes swishing, 1:1 individual consumer changes through support and advice, corporate events and school visits, community workshops and public speaking.
• Delivering hours of kids play in Lil’s pop-up mini beach, teaching the difference between natural and man-made, ‘beach cleaning’ plastic and nurdles (lentils!) and teaching their parents too.
• Over 2,500 zero waste shopping orders delivered helping the Lil community live a Lower Impact Life and reducing the 650,000 tonnes of carbon emissions that Scotland produces from grocery single-use packaging annually! 

"Lil offers great ethical products and they make it SO easy for you to do your bit for the planet and feel good."

• Introducing a three year old to her first crab, and us learning that some local kids have never been to the beach.
• Supporting our community with zero contact, zero waste essential supplies through lock down.   

“Lil has been much appreciated over the last few months helping us to continue to do low waste shopping and keeping us topped up with Steampunk beans. We’ve been trying to avoid supermarkets as both of us have asthma so the contact free pick up has been excellent as well. Keep up the good work.” 

"The service they provide has meant that I haven’t had to visit a supermarket for 6 months."

Please help!

We really need your help to make this happen. As a social enterprise we put every spare penny in to helping people live a Lil life. Please pledge what you can and share the living daylights out of it with friends, family and total strangers! Most importantly, come and visit us when we open. 

With more than a Lil love

Sarah & Louise x

Who are we?           

We are Louise and Sarah. Sarah comes from a conservation and policy background and is currently trying to convert her garden to a permaculture ‘food forest’ (it’s early days!). Louise is from the community engagement & communications world. She has a charity shop/Freecycle addiction and is consequently on a constant mission to live more simply and declutter her house.

We are mums, with four kids, three dogs and a couple of husbands between us! We’ve made a whole load of changes to our own lives to move us closer to being as low impact as we can be – but we’re not perfect by a long way! We want our kids and their kids to grow up in a healthy environment, with an appreciation of the beauty and value of nature, with the skills they’ll need for the future. We want that for all of you and your children too. Please help us bring that closer to reality.

What is Lower Impact Living?

It’s not reducing your annual plastic waste to one Mason jar full or knitting your own yogurt! It’s a realistic, do-able approach for everyone to make a difference by taking one Lil step at a time. It’s about understanding how your individual choices add up to a collective result, how we and the world around us are connected and how we can contribute to a fairer and healthier environment we can all thrive in. It is definitely about celebrating positive change (any excuse for a party!).

Check out some of our great rewards

Lil is delighted to show our thanks with some special Lil rewards, such as tickets to events when we're allowed to party again, corporate level opportunities and even the cutest door hanger to remind you to take your shopping bags and keep those plants alive!  We're particularly excited about our Thanks a Million campaign. Send a big thank you to that person who, in their own way, Lil or large, made your 2020 that bit brighter. Just £5 - but please do also share your stories with us!

Lil absolutely loves our partners and suppliers who have been so generous! Checkout the new batch of rewards: a Coast2Coast Surf Voucher! Some money towards a wreath or seasonal bunch of East Lothian Flower Farm flowers, a seat at a coveted Fresh Green Clean workshop, an origami workshop or lovely soap and skin sets from Anam Cara Naturals AND Lather&Smudge. 

This project successfully funded on 7th December 2020