Turning the tables: fighting furniture poverty through social enterprise

This project, developed collaboratively between the University of Liverpool and Liverpool's Furniture Resource Centre (FRC), explores how FRC fights furniture poverty - the inability to afford or access furniture and furnishings that facilitate a decent quality of life and the ability to participate in the norms of society - as a material dimension of austerity through which the material anchors of familiar, and necessary, furniture and furnishings are degraded or lost.

The project examines diverse economies perspectives, the role of social enterprise and circular production to understand how furniture and furnishings in the home facilitate a decent quality of life within the norms of society. The project aims to enhance academic understanding of how diverse economies perspectives and material practices research can be brought together to understand how social enterprises support people to make a home and combat furniture poverty in austere times. The project will examine competing pressures on social enterprise in terms of 'doing good' while working within the bounds of what are seen as good business practices.

In addition, the research explores new geographical knowledge about the lifecycle and use of material goods , extending understandings of the work of 'scavengers' who locate and reuse unwanted material goods, the 'decomposers' who pull them apart and reuse the materials in them or return them safely to the environment, and the networks in which they operate.

Contribution to knowledge

Social enterprises like FRC need to respond to funder's priorities, available resources and prevailing orthodoxies about how to meet needs and deliver services. In the current context, austerity has meant that more must be done with less, and trade-offs made. Although social enterprises are well used to balancing competing pressures, they can start to suffer from - and recognise that they are suffering from - mission drift as financial pressures crowd out social and environmental concerns. This can be especially problematic when austerity has severely constrained their capacity to act.

While critics of social enterprises consequently see them as an inadequate response to continued destitution in an austere society, or even complicit in it, they have also been conceptualised as valuable emergent or generative spaces, grassroots innovation niches or 'transition labs' pioneering novel ways of delivering services and meeting needs - in this case providing furniture to people who don't have it.

A diverse economies perspective suggests how these competing pressures affect how social enterprises act in concrete ways that cannot be specified in advance from above, but need to be unpacked through empirically-based, detailed, or 'thick' descriptions of the ethics, everyday practices and activities of specific social enterprise embedded in places - emphasising their creative potential in solving problems.

Impact and dissemination

As well as the thesis and academic outputs, a final report will be produced for FRC. I'm currently working with FRC staff to support their campaigning work and to support the drive towards creating resilient communities and better support for families in need.

The research results will be disseminated through reports, policy briefs, blogs and content on FRC's End Furniture Poverty website and presentations at social enterprise and housing - especially social housing-focused conferences.

At a city level, I will work with the Liverpool Social Enterprise panel, which brings together social enterprises in the city region. Both the primary and FRC-based supervisors sit on this.