Collection: The Good Stories Podcast
Cathy Benwell, founder of A Good Thing: ‘Every donation creates a relationship’
Good Leaders Podcast: Could every unwanted laptop, pillow or furniture item spark something bigger? A Good Thing’s co-founder Cathy Benwell talks to Tim West about how the social enterprise’s circular economy model turns would-be waste into social impact.
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What if every cupboard of corporate clutter was actually a catalyst for social change? In this episode of Good Leaders, the co-founder of social enterprise A Good Thing, Cathy Benwell, explains how a cupboard full of old laptops became the seed for a UK-wide platform connecting businesses with surplus goods with local charities that need them.
A Good Thing was launched as a pilot project by Cathy and her husband Richard in 2020, a few years after co-founding a software company together, and is now operating UK-wide. The platform operates like eBay, enabling businesses to list unwanted items online and match them with nearby charities who need them.
The impact of the social enterprise goes beyond reducing waste: Cathy explains how donations often foster longer-term relationships between businesses and charities. Businesses often discover local charities they know little about, and find out they can also support them in other ways, for example through volunteering or lending of office space.
I've always worked really hard in whatever I've done to solve problems and to try to make things happen… With A Good Thing, it feels like I've really been given the ultimate opportunity to do that
Powered mostly by volunteers (the organisation has a single employee in addition to the two co-founders), A Good Thing is using AI to enable it to grow operations – and impact – without increasing costs.
Her aspiration? A future where businesses genuinely feel part of their communities and engage with local charities, in meaningful ways. “I see a lot of the businesses that want to do things differently: they want to be sustainable, they want to take care of the people around them, they want to take care of their own people, they're becoming B Corps. I find that very encouraging.”
Listen to the podcast to hear about:
- How A Good Thing has built a model to support both the circular economy and businesses’ social responsibility
- A Good Thing’s volunteer-backed, tech-enabled approach to growth
- Why Cathy thinks measuring impact with numbers rarely tells the whole story
- What Cathy’s career has taught her about entrepreneurship and leadership
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