Charity crafts community DAN NORTHOVER wanted to help marginalised people in Durham, so he set up a woodworking and training charity called Handcrafted. He explains how his faith-based creative enterprise is transforming lives Interview by Emily Bright
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S someone who can barely build flat-pack furniture, I was feeling somewhat out of my comfort zone speaking to the founder of woodworking charity Handcrafted. But Dan Northover quickly put me at ease with his enthusiastic approach to his charity, which was established 10 years ago. ‘Some people who were living on the streets of Durham started coming into our church, wanting to turn their lives around,’ he recalls. ‘We gave them something to eat and somewhere to stay for the night. I was preparing meals for people who had previously worked in high-profile restaurants as chefs. We had a conviction that these people had a lot to offer. ‘We saw a lot of disadvantaged people who were having their hearts and minds transformed by the gospel and who were starting to see its message of hope. But we also saw that there are some terrible practical realities of turning your life around when you’ve lived for decades in a chaotic, destructive cycle. So we wanted to get alongside people.’ Dan and a couple of people from his church were keen to help people carve
Dan Northover
out a new life for themselves. They set out to find practical, rewarding and effective activities to do with them and organised sessions of woodwork and gardening. Since then, the charity has evolved into something much bigger. It now has three training hubs: one for woodwork in Durham, a training kitchen in Chester-le-Street and a makerspace in Gateshead for woodworking and working with plastic. Handcrafted has also partnered with a café called Refuse, which recycles spare food that would otherwise go to waste, to develop products such as pickles, jams, sauces and soaps. It runs a training kitchen out the back of the café. What is striking is not just the range of
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31 July 2021 • WAR CRY • 9