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Mill View Care Home

Our biggest project to date was for one of our customers, Mill View care home. It’s a home that works very hard to make life for their residents more enjoyable and they do their utmost to bring the local community inside for the people who can no longer go outside. The employees there have put in lots of hard work into achieving their vision of making the home a fun and vibrant place to live in. They have created an enjoyable and even recognisable space for the residents, many of whom have dementia.

The employees have built a shop for the residents to work in and buy snacks and essentials and there is also a cinema. All the work they have done has been funded by selling snacks, cakes and raffle tickets. What they have achieved with this little funding over just 18 months is really humbling.

The latest project the team have worked on is an American diner style café where residents and their family and friends can go to enjoy tea, cakes and sandwiches away from the usual `lounge’ rooms. Outside the café doors is a lovely garden space which ACS have helped to regenerate. The garden is very much a continuation of the café and is perfect for the residents to sit and relax but where they can also work and help maintain the garden.

Many of the ACS employees have been involved in the garden regeneration project, spending a whopping collective 306 hours (250 hours in work time and 56 hours outside of work) designing, sourcing goods, gardening, jet washing, sanding and painting furniture.

The garden regeneration was challenging for our first project and took 35 litres of paint, 7 tonnes of soil, 2 tonnes of bark, 1,205 stone of sleepers- the equivalent to our entire workforce and ½ tonne of gravel.

The result of this hard labour is a colourful, sensory garden with a water feature. There is a strawberry and herb garden which residents can help maintain as it was designed for chair height, lots of seating for the diners (including memorial benches) and loads of other bright features to attract the birds and butterflies.

We think you’ll agree that the transformation is fantastic and fits well with the retro diner theme. The design was created by one of the talented Account Executives here at ACS, Brian Comber. He took inspiration from the existing colours inside the diner to make the garden as colourful as possible for the residents. Dave Renaud, of our Managed Print Services division, then headed up the gardening part of the project. His expertise and faultless enthusiasm were essential to make the vision a reality.

We are so proud that this amazing care home was the first ACS CSR project and will be the first of many. Special thanks must go to Shipley College and Kate Falkingham from Brother for their volunteering and Keelham Farm shop, On the Dot Skips, Estate Sawmill and The Canal and River Trust for their kind donations.

Testimonials

“The residents at Mill View are absolutely loving being able to spend time with their friends and family in the garden and this has a huge positive impact on their well-being being able to spend time engaging with others in such a magnificent place. The garden is really more than we could have ever have hoped for.” - Tee Tatum, Manager, Mill View Care Home.

Gardening Gallery