Everyone at Crow Recycling knows the muscles in their legs are stronger than the muscles in their backs thanks to a grant for manual handling training from the Heart of England Community Foundation. The cash from the Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire Communities Fund has paid for one of the Crow staff members to train as a manual handling instructor. Once he had done the training he teamed up with fellow staff and some of Crow's trustees to devise and teach a course tailored to the needs of Crow's volunteers. Most of the Crow Recycling volunteers have learning difficulties so the course included lots of practical skills, plenty of time to learn key theory and verbal rather than written assessments. Office manager Lucy Lynch said: "The course means trainees can tackle a wider range of tasks at Crow. They have the knowledge, the practical experience and the certificate to prove it if they want to move on to a more demanding work placement or a paid job."

A grant from the Eveson Trust is helping Crow Recycling provide work placements for people with disabilities.The trust has made a generous donation towards running costs at the Coventry based charity. The money will help with costs such as insurance which are essential to keeping the charity up and running.Office manager Lucy Lynch said: "We run various commercial services which bring in an income but it's not nearly enough to cover all our costs. The Eveson Trust grant, along with grants from other similar organisations, means we can bridge the gap."We're particularly grateful that the grant is for general running costs such as insurance. Those costs can be hard to find grants for but are an essential part of any organisation."Crow Recycling is a registered charity providing volunteer work placements for disabled people. Crow does this by providing a commercial service destroying confidential waste, processing non confidential paper for recycling, crushing and baling aluminium cans for recycling and selling animal bedding. Crow also runs a Scrapstore selling reused items to use for arts and crafts and processes used books.Volunteers include pupils from special schools, college students and older people on longer term placements.

The fire doors at Crow Recycling have been upgraded and replaced thanks to the Screwfix Foundation. A generous donation from the foundation has paid for some of the fire doors to be upgraded and others replaced at Crow Recycling's warehouse in Sparkbrook Street, Hillfields, Coventry. Office manager Lucy Lynch said: "Funding for fire safety measures can be difficult for charities to find even though fire safety is a vital part of running any organisation. So we are particularly grateful to the Screwfix Foundation for providing us with the money for this work." "The new and upgraded doors will help keep our staff, volunteers, customers and visitors safe as well as protecting the building." Crow Recycling is a registered charity providing volunteer work placements for disabled people. Crow does this by providing a commercial service destroying confidential waste, processing non confidential paper for recycling, crushing and baling aluminium cans for recycling and selling animal bedding. Crow also runs a Scrapstore selling reused items to use for arts and crafts and processes used books. Crow Recycling is funded by income from commercial services along with grants and donations such as the grant from Screwfix.

If you fancy making your own beautiful and unique patchwork bag from scraps of fabric, this is for you! Fabulous for yourself or as a gift for someone special, and another great way to upcycle fabric scraps. Our lovely, talented volunteer Tracy will take you through how to make them from start to finish on our morning workshop held at CROW on Saturday 18th March from 10am to 1pm. All tuition, materials and refreshments are included. We do have a couple of donated sewing machines that should be available for use, however we recommend you bring your own sewing machine if at all possible. The cost of the workshop is £15 per person, with a £10 deposit to secure a place. You can book either by popping in to the Scrapstore in person and paying by cash or card, emailing us at info@crowrecyling.co.uk or calling on 02476 552444 and we can provide you with PayPal details. Spaces are limited, so let us know if you're interested! We can't wait!

We are all about reuse and upcycling, as well as recycling at CROW! So we are excited to be running a morning workshop on Saturday 18 February, where you can make your own beautifully decorated bird feeders under the expert tuition of one of our talented volunteers. Using nothing more than some empty, plastic pop bottles, string and paints, you will be guided through the process of transforming them into something practical and attractive for your garden. You can apply your own creative flair and make something truly unique. Places on the workshop cost £15, with a £10 deposit when booking, and include all tuition, materials and refreshments. You can book in person at the Scrapstore to pay by cash or card, or contact us at info@crowrecycling.co.uk or on 02476 552444 to pay via PayPal. Places are limited though, so if you are interested, get in touch!

Riley, aged nine (left) and Archie aged six Meet Archie and Riley who are some of Crow's youngest suppliers of empty aluminium drinks cans. The pair along with three-year-old sister Izzy-Kay have been saving any they use, picking them up off the streets and asking their grandfather to save any he comes across. They're bagging them up and bringing them to Crow Recycling where they get 30 pence per kilogram. They're aiming to raise some extra pocket money and to contribute to their local rugby club. Disabled volunteers at Crow Recycling will crush and bale the cans and sell them on in bulk to be recycled. The proceeds will help to keep the charity up and running. Office manager Lucy Lynch said: "At Crow we pay 30 pence per kilogram for aluminium cans brought to the warehouse and 25 pence for large loads collected locally in our van. "It's great to have the three children bringing us cans. Aluminium is ideal for us because it's infinitely recyclable - recycled cans are just as good as new ones - and it's cheaper to recycle to extract from the ground." Crow is open for drop offs of aluminium cans Monday to Thursdays 9.30am to 3.30pm except for bank holidays and an annual summer shutdown. More information here.

Work for a small organisation on a budget and need to sharpen up on the General Data Protection Regulations? Getting up to speed on the basics with an online course doesn't have to cost anything. A good place to cover the basics is this course with the Netherlands based University of Groningen. The time estimate is a total of 16 hours recommended as four hours a week over four weeks. As it's completed independently online with no live interaction the 16 hours can be done in a shorter time period than four weeks. The catch with the free version is it can't take longer than four weeks. The free version doesn't include the course assessments and has no certificate at the end. If Another drawback is that it was written in the early days of GDPR when Brexit wasn't a current issue. That means the section about European courts is not all that relevant to people working in the UK dealing with data from UK customers. But apart from that it's a useful summary for those working in small organisations who deal with customer e mail, invoices and contracts. Another plus point is that it's a university course so the information is coming from legal academics who scrutinise and interpret detail of legislation for a living. If you want to do it hurry though as the free version will be taken down on February 9. For those short of time as well as money Irish workplace training company Alison has a free online course here. This one rather grandly claims to teach everything participants need to know about the GDPR in three hours or less. There's no extra charge for a certificate - useful for [...]

Zarah meets staff, volunteers and customers at Crow Recycling Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana saw how waste paper is sorted for recycling and shredded for animal bedding when she visited Crow Recycling. Crow staff and volunteers explained how confidential waste paper is destroyed and packaged by Crow’s shredding and baling machines. That makes it ready to be used as packaging, as animal bedding or sent to a paper mill to be turned into toilet paper. She found out about how non confidential paper such as surplus flyers is sorted and sold on for recycling. She also saw how used aluminium drinks cans are crushed and baled to be sold on to metals dealers ahead of being melted down to make new cans. Zarah met some of the disabled volunteers who sort, shred and bale paper and help with can crushing and baling. She met some of the volunteer trustees and staff. Zarah also visited the Crow Recycling Scrapstore, a shop selling reused materials for arts and crafts. She met some of the customers and enjoyed browsing the jewellery making supplies. Chairman of trustees Bill Smith said: “We were delighted Zarah could visit us and we value her continuing support as our local MP. “ Zarah also offered useful advice about fundraising.

Earlier on this year copies of one of Ireland's daily papers kept dropping through a neighbour's door in our Coventry street. Increasingly frustrated he kept coming round with them. He couldn't understand why we'd ordered a paper covering a country we don't live in any more to be delivered to a house we don't live in any more either. The trouble was we had neither ordered the copies or paid for them. It was a situation where applying the principles of the GDPR would have saved everybody time and the newspaper's management quite a bit of money. Storage limitation, in other words not keeping data any longer than it's needed, is one of the principles of the GDPR. It seems sensible enough but the legislation isn't all that specific. It's worded so that organisations can decide how long they need data for their specific circumstances. The catch is business owners and managers are expected to be able to justify it. Most organisations pick a way through it by having a written data retention policy and adhering to it. The new year is a good time to get started, especially if it's a quiet period for your organisation. The Irish daily newspaper that dropped through the neighbour's door came unstuck for two reasons. First of all it was more than 13 years since a relative had bought a subscription as a present. It seems unlikely they needed to keep the data for that long. So they hadn't complied with a reasonable data retention policy. There comes a point where it would have been fair enough to treat any repeat business from us as that of a new customer. They just had to decide when and do [...]