URBAN MUSHROOMS - Growing jobs for young people

Film Credit: Reuters

Urban Mushrooms is a social enterprise operated by YMCA Newcastle. We grow specialty oyster mushrooms on used coffee grounds that are collected from coffee shops around Newcastle City Centre as a way to combat youth unemployment. We then sell our fantastic quality mushrooms back to the restaurants.
Local youth unemployment in Newcastle varies between 20-25%, add to this a huge student population of over 50,000 people and it leads to a very competitive environment for young job seekers. Through our social enterprises we provide real opportunities for those with the most barriers to employment. We offer access to training and education with the provision of volunteering opportunities, traineeship, apprenticeships and even employment.
Urban Mushrooms as a social enterprise model gives the YMCA a large platform on which it not only delivers its services to young people but creates an enterprise model and revenue stream for re-investment into the organisation. The uniqueness of the project itself is none competitive with other organisations and is on trend with current agendas surrounding the environment. The uniqueness of the project has allowed us as an organisation to engage with a very wide audience.
The unique story behind Urban Mushrooms
Coffee is big business with around 55 million cups drank per day in the UK, that's 350,000 cups daily in Newcastle alone! All this creates a lot of waste, with over 500,000 tons of coffee grounds making its way to landfill every year. Urban Mushrooms was set up to tackle youth unemployment through the cultivation of speciality Oyster mushrooms using clean coffee waste.

Our mushrooms are grown on used coffee grounds that we collect by foot from our Coffee Partners around the City Centre. Coffee Partners are restaurants and coffee shops that help our social enterprise by supplying us with their used coffee grounds. So far we have enlisted the help of Starbucks, Costa Coffee, Vicilo and Flat Caps Coffee onto our Coffee Partner scheme, to name a few.

Once back at our urban farm the coffee grounds are cleaned by our team of young people, mixed with mushroom spawn, then left to grow in perfect conditions for the next few weeks before being carefully harvested.
Some of our impact so far:
6,000kg coffee collected and prevented from going to landfill
300kg of quality oyster mushrooms sold
2413 hours of training, education and employment provided to young people
4 new employee posts
Cross sector engagement with multiple stakeholders, increasing our supporter base and overall profile of the YMCA
Setting the foundation for a new operating model for the charity

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