Building Bricks at the Garden

At our Community Market Garden, we are always on the lookout for new ways our service users can learn and grow. Recently we were approached by a qualified bricklaying teacher, Maurice Mulvihill, who offered to run bricklaying courses for our service users on a voluntary basis. He then got in touch with Andrew Callaghan a Senior Quantity Surveyor at Bruce Shaw, who asked Dominic Anstey of Como and Victor Shearer of Leaner Logistics if they could help. These two companies agreed to provide all the materials and equipment needed to run the bricklaying course, between them, free of charge!

Since then we have run two taster sessions on bricklaying. These were so popular, we had to expand the number of places on each session! Feedback from those who participated in the sessions was overwhelmingly positive - of those who competed feedback forms, everyone except one person rated the session 10 out of 10 and the one person who didn't rated it 9 out of 10. Here are a few quotes from the service users:

'Would like to thank you for the effort made in this course that is very useful.'

'Enjoyed the taster – good to gain “hands on” experience.'

'It was very informative, interesting and exciting.'

Bricklaying is a particularly useful skill for our service users to learn as it could lead to employment. According to Dominic Anstey, Commercial Executive at Como,

'The skills shortage across the construction industry will mean there are real opportunities for people who want to learn a trade such as this.'

All of us here at New Hope are incredibly grateful to Maurice and everyone involved at Como and Leaner Logistics for providing the equipment and expertise needed to offer this amazing opportunity. We look forward to providing more bricklaying sessions in the near future.