About Us

About First Fruit Warehouse

Summary:

· We employ people with a history of unemployment and / or homelessness.

· We provide training and support to help them move into wider employment.

· We re-cycle and re-sell office furniture from large corporate donors, in partnership with Green-Works.

· We sell high quality, good value furniture to members of the community.

In more detail…

First Fruit Warehouse was set up in November 2002 as part of the work of the East London based charity First Fruit. The focus is to develop training opportunities, employment experience, life-skills support and back-to-work initiatives for people with a history of unemployment and / or homelessness.

First fruit warehouse was set up in partnership with Green-Works (see ‘partners’, to store, recycle and re-sell office furniture. The furniture comes from a range of Corporate Donors who no longer need their office furniture. The vision for Greenworks was to divert as much office furniture as possible from landfill sites. This is proving hugely successful as mountains of furniture have been rescued and re-sold!

Most of the furniture we take in is suitable for re-sale, but some is inappropriate for use and is recycled. None of the furniture that we take in from Corporate donors goes into landfill. Scrap has also been used in the community for shelves and as artwork!

We store a large amount of furniture which is available for sale to members of the community, at a quarter of its original price. We stock a wide range of furniture, examples of which are displayed on this website, which is often of a very high quality. This is available for purchase by charities, schools, churches, businesses and members of the public. We do not sell on to furniture dealers, as we believe that they sometimes may not offer customers real value for money in the way that we can. Green-Works have calculated that in our first year of business, we saved the charity sector around Ł250,000 on office furniture!