Message in a Bottle is a free scheme for residents who are aged 60 or older and live alone, or have an illness or disability.

The scheme (which is run by Lions) enables people to keep their personal and medical details in a recognisable plastic bottle in the fridge, where they can easily be found in the event of an emergency.

Two green cross stickers are provided so that emergency services will know that you are signed up to the scheme – one for the inside of your front door and one for your fridge.

At Work-Shop, our participants prepare the bottles by placing the stickers and leaflets inside. This is a job we have been doing for nearly 10 years now and it is one that our participants really enjoy as it is engaging and allows them to work together in groups.

Look Local is a much loved community magazine with each leaflet bursting with stories of local interest, useful contacts, event listings, recipes, competitions and advertisements from local businesses.

At Work-Shop, we place leaflets inside the Look Local booklets and then hand deliver around 800 booklets every month! This is another job that allows our participants to work together in groups as well as staying active when delivering the booklets.

With the help of our brilliant work supporters, our participants have taken part in a number of exciting woodwork projects over the years. They have made countless items such as: bird houses, bug hotels, tea light holders, a notice board, planters and much more! Each project is different and of varying degrees of difficulty meaning all our participants are able to get involved in different parts of the process.

Over the past year, we have been making especially great use of our new pyrography pen. This has allowed us to decorate some of our woodwork projects in a unique way which was not previously possible for us. Our participants love doing pyrography and they have created many signs for our garden as well as unique personalised signs for themselves such as ‘Toby’s Farm’ which you can see here.

Each Christmas, we enjoy making various festive items such as our popular wooden Christmas trees and this year our participants made wooden Christmas mantle decorations (which were of course finished off using our pyrography pen). You can see examples of the mantle decorations below as well as plenty more photos of our hard working participants in action!

As well as the Lions ‘Message in a Bottle’ task we complete at Work-Shop, we have recently taken on their ‘Glasses’ task as well.

This activity involves sorting through large boxes of glasses and separating any gold coloured glasses from the others. Lions then receive a donation for the gold and use the money to fund eye camps and cataract operations.

So far they have shipped glasses to Bangladesh, Mali, Chad, The Gambia, Nairobi and Kenya and they all help people who don’t have access to the same eye care that we do in this country.

This is another brilliant group activity and, when completing the task, our participants make sure to put coloured ribbon on their own glasses so that they don’t get mixed in with all the other pairs!

We are very fortunate at Work-Shop to have our very own garden. This allows our participants to get involved in a number of physical activities such as watering, planting, mowing and much more!

Earlier this year we even found a new watering method which allows our participants who struggle to lift heavy watering cans a fair chance to join in too!

In June 2023, we hosted a plant sale in our garden. We allowed people to check out the plants we had been busy growing before coming inside for a coffee and a cake! The plant sale was able to help us raise over £500 and you can find out more about it on our previous events page.

Make sure to look closely at the photos below and see if you can spot some of the garden signs that were made using our pyrography pen!

Our participants create a great range of handmade products at Work-Shop using our sewing machine.

These products include: bags, key fobs, Christmas decorations and plenty more!

We often sell these products at our coffee mornings and it also gives us a chance to show people the impressive work our participants have been doing.

We like to do our bit at Work-Shop to keep Stratford clean!

We regularly take group trips out to do some litter picking whether that is just round our business park or in different areas across the town.

As well as keeping our town beautiful, litter picking has a number of environmental benefits such as preventing our wildlife from getting hurt and stopping their habitats from being disturbed.

As much as we’d rather people didn’t litter at all, litter picking also has benefits to our participants as it ensures they stay active and is a very rewarding activity.

One of our more technical activities is our ‘Gear Trays’ task that we complete for Smart Systems.

Our participants assemble the gear trays which are then used as emergency lighting in hospitals.

This is a great task that offers a unique challenge to our participants as well as our work supporters!

Throughout the last 10 years we have made cards for every occasion such as Christmas, Birthday’s and everything in between.

To reduce waste, we make our unique card designs using recycled tea bags! This means part of the creating process involves ironing out and then painting the tea bags.

We have made hundreds of individual cards over the years and to celebrate 10 years of Work-Shop we offered people a random selection of Christmas designs from the last decade, which you can see amongst the photos below.

Caffeine & Machine, in their own words, is “a place to enjoy wonderful food and drink, soak up an ever-eclectic display of brilliant machinery, and above all else, come be around friends, whether they’re ones you’ve known for years or ones you didn’t know you had yet.”

At Work-Shop, we assemble their takeaway pizza boxes as well as folding napkins for their wooden cutlery.

Here you can see one of our work supporter’s cars full to the brim with some of the pizza boxes we have prepared!

As well as the work-based activities we do within Work-Shop, a number of our participants take part in various, external volunteer placements.

These placements range from shifts at the Pavilion Café in Meon Vale to working at the DCS factory in Redditch, as well as plenty more. To view our full list of partners, click here.

Maddie, who is one of our participants, said that these placements are great fun and have helped her grow in confidence whilst also learning valuable new skills. She enjoys working as part of a team in a real-world environment and now feels better equipped to deal with members of the public. If you would like to find out more about Maddie, as well as more of our participants, you can check out our Participant Stories page.