Did you know that we were once in Portsea?
We started back in the 70's to aid the redundancies in the Dockyard. The Beneficial Foundation offered retraining in a range of skills from; brickwork and painting to office skills and English. A wide range of people could use the services, including the unemployed, the disabled and school leavers.
Our original founding members were Ken Hale, Howard Rees and Revd. Crispin White.
In 1982 - 83 with help from the Old Beneficial School in Portsea we continued to provide training on three different sites around Portsmouth. These sites offered training in lots of different areas all of which would be useful for anyone lacking employability skills.
The next stage for the Beneficial was something called the Treadgolds project in the early 90's. This project aimed to offer further industrial skills tailored around ship building. The main goal of this project was to ensure that past maritime related skills were retained for future generations. This project took place in a grade II listed building, which was the last remaining Victorian Blacksmiths and Iron Merchant premises in the south of England.
Our famous materials bank opened in the late 90's and we began to offer an arts and crafts service to the community. This materials bank soon became a very large and successful project and saw membership numbers rise to over 500!
Since those days we've opened and established a number of social enterprise projects, including cafés and garden maintenance schemes, all of which are successful and help our service users to develop skills they otherwise may never have acquired.
There's a lot more exciting history, too much to cover in a short blog, so if you wan't to know more, leave a comment and we'll see what we can find out.
Look out for the next related blog post which will be focusing on the very important and promising future of the Beneficial Foundation.
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