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Magenta and Box Aid
A partnership that keeps on giving
Here at Magenta, we believe it’s important to be part of our community. In the digital age it can feel very easy to be out of touch with your real-world community, both at home and abroad. We think the best way to celebrate community is to give back whenever we can. We know the importance of community spirit. What better way to pitch in than to support a charity that does so much at home and abroad? Box Aid are that charity.
Meet Box Aid
Box Aid is a charity dedicated to supporting those in our community who really need it. On top of this, they also do their bit for the environment. The charity is part of The Share Zone, a project being developed to help communities share resources amongst themselves. This is to help communities develop self-sufficiency. It also helps them lessen reliance on the usual charity route. This is to avoid funnelling more money to charities that either waste money or build up millions in reserves.
This movement towards community empowerment and self-reliance helps struggling people find community again. It also helps make sure everyone has what they need.
Box Aid find and repurpose goods bound for landfill and then redistribute them. These goods go mostly to struggling individuals and families in temporary accommodation. These people often include front line care workers or other key workers in the community.
Some goods that are non-essential and are in good enough condition to re-sell are sold locally. The profits cover transport costs, shipping fees, and other overheads, rather than being wasted on admin and bureaucracy. In doing this, Box Aid runs on a low carbon footprint and decreases the amount of waste bound for landfill.
Here’s how the Box Aid process works:
1: Rescue goods and essential items bound for landfill.
2: Provide them to struggling individuals and families.
3: Reduce our carbon footprint by reducing and recycling.
As well as helping out the local community here in Chiswick, Box Aid also sends essential items (including clothes and materials) to individuals and communities abroad. For example, Box Aid has been helping the Batwa Tribe by providing clothing and other essentials, as well as materials for the tribe to use to create art and other goods that they can sell.
The Batwa Tribe are an indigenous Ugandan tribe who lived for decades in their ancestral forest lands in the Congo alongside silverback gorillas. They were displaced due to war in the Congo. To make matters worse, to make way for the famous mountain gorillas in Bwindi and Mgahinga forests, the Batwa were relocated without their informed consent or a public hearing. In the early 1990s, the Ugandan government declared the Semliki National Park a protected area and evicted all those who had entered and settled in the area, including Batwa.
The Batwa had depended on hunting and gathering from the forest, but today they live as squatters on the land of others. They are prosecuted and shunned by their surrounding communities and have no land to call their own.
The help that Box Aid offers them allows the tribe to work towards a more self-sustaining lifestyle in an empowered way, whilst ensuring that they are provided with essentials to keep them going.
How does Magenta help?
At Magenta, we’ve got facilities all over the country. Everyone here believes it’s important to really dig our company into the local communities around our centres – and this means offering a little community support. We pride ourselves on our charity work.
We offer free and heavily discounted storage to charities in all our local areas. Across our stores, we currently offer over 15,000 square foot of storage (worth around £23,000) to charities in an effort to support our local communities and beyond.
This support helps charities like Box Aid (and other community projects) to continue operating and helping others.
Each of our self storage centres can support causes that are important to the team there. This enables us to address issues that affect the people living in the communities we’re based in.
Read more about how we help our communities here.
Our partnership with Box Aid
Here at Magenta we adopted the cause in 2013. We help to provide Box Aid with a base of operations both locally (from our Chiswick location) and abroad. During our time working with Box Aid, we won the Rhinestone Sisters Award for supporting charitable work in Africa.
This partnership is mutually beneficial. When we have abandoned units that need clearing out or customers who want to donate or get rid of unwanted items (either from their units or their homes) the team from Box Aid gets stuck in. This helps us avoid wasted materials and goods that could be useful to others. It also helps us cut down on our carbon footprint. It also helps us turn over abandoned units quickly and make storage even simpler for our existing customers. In turn, it helps provide Box Aid with more resources for their mission.
We always monitor free or discounted spaces occupied by charities. This helps us ensure that we’re helping in the best way we can. If you’re from a local community group or charity that would like to know more about how Magenta can support you, get in touch by contacting your local store. Let us help you make a difference!