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How green energy is fuelling charity success

Mendip Renewables, a community benefit society, raised £1.8 million on the Triodos crowdfunding platform in 2018 to finance a solar farm and to distribute the profits generated by the scheme for the benefit of the community

News

- 19 April 2021

It chose Key4Life as its main charity partner – a charity which aims to reduce youth re-offending through delivering an innovative rehabilitation programme to those in prison and those at risk of going to prison. The organisation is based in both the South West and London.

Since its inception Mendip Renewables has made £49,000 of community benefit payments to the charity, with another £12,000 scheduled later this year.

Key4Life’s aim is to rehabilitate young men in prison and those at risk of going to prison and to work with children under 18 who are either at risk or caught up in knife crime through its Seven Step Model. The cost of offending to the taxpayer is a staggering amount, over £18 billion annually. Those who attend the Key4Life programme are four times less likely to offend and four times more likely to gain fulltime employment or meaningful occupation.

Key4Life is enormously grateful to Mendip Renewables for their invaluable support over the last four years. The charity’s work in the South West, specifically in Somerset and Bristol, has worked with over 40 disaffected young men, many of whom have spent much of their early years in prison and have struggled to gain employment.

In their last programme, Key4Life worked with 14 young men with none reoffending and 72% who moved into meaningful occupation and employment, despite the challenges that Covid-19 has placed on both the charity and the people it supports. Some of the companies who have taken the latest cohort on placement or employment include Bristol Trade Windows, Wilmott Dixon, Bouygues, Yeo Valley, Montgomery Cheese and Sir Robert McAlpine.

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