Southsea charity store gets a fresh new look thanks to COPC and Dulux

A chance email to City of Portsmouth College has led to a Southsea charity shop getting an interior makeover in time for Spring.

The store manager of DEBRA on Elm Grove emailed the College on the off chance its Painting and Decorating department could offer some help or advice on repainting its large store.

What followed was a chain reaction of help and support from both COPC and the local Dulux Decorator Centre – and two weeks later, the entire project was complete.

“The College is local to me so I knew it had a painting and decorating department, so I thought I’d try,” said store manager Sam Muscat. “I never expected a reply, let alone what’s happened since. It’s been amazing.”

DEBRA area manager Noel Fawcett added: “For a charity like ours, where our margins are so small, you’ve no idea how much it means to have work like this done on our stores.”

Sam’s email dropped at a time when Painting and Decorating Lecturers Craig Palframan and Dan Graham were seeking more hands-on community projects for their learners.

“Our students need to undertake a spell of work experience during their course and often that becomes time in a retail setting. So, we’ve been looking for community projects so they can get more realistic real-world experiences,” said Dan.

“Thanks to the Dulux Decorator Centre and their manager Aaron Viebranz-Hodge, we got all the supplies we needed, and we were able to get everything done in eight days. It was a fantastic experience for everyone. It took a couple of days for students to settle into it, as many work on their own in class, but by the end we had an excellent team dynamic.”

In total, 17 Level 1 students took part, and 12 Level 2 students joined in too. They worked on repairing a range of paint defects, from damp spots to peeling paint and cracks, using a whopping 60 litres of paint to give the store a fresh look and feel.

If you have a community project that could involve our COPC painting and decorating students, email Dan at daniel.graham@copc.ac.uk, and to find out more about DEBRA, visit www.debra.org.uk