History
COPE Ltd (Community Opportunities for Participation in Enterprise) is a Community Enterprise established in 1998 to offer training, support and employment opportunities to adults with disabilities. We currently employ 54 members of staff, eleven of whom have a disability and we additionally support 50 adults with disabilities.
At COPE we have a policy enabling anyone in the Shetland Islands who supports the organisation and can benefit from the activities on offer the opportunity to become involved. Referrals come from Social Care, Education, Careers, the voluntary sector and directly from the community.
Based in the Shetland Islands we are a vibrant business (voted Best Community Business in the Highlands and Islands 2004) commitment to developing the skills of our workforce through innovative enterprise activities and we are now recognized as a model Social Enterprise with a number of outstanding entrepreneurial strands.
The company emerged from a pilot project operated in a day care center under the Local Authority. The ‘Best Bite’ was the first of our small businesses making and delivering sandwiches and as you see still operating today but on a much grander scale. With plenty of drive and a vision of creating new opportunities, we formed a Limited Company with Charitable Status. A grant from the Lottery ‘Community Fund’ and support from both from the Council and Local Enterprise Company enabled us to convert a former oil service building to an Enterprise Centre. From this location in the heart of the town’s industrial area we operated a number of small business components some of which grew and have become very successful and some of which failed. We have learned a lot over the past 10 years, the failures also playing a valuable role in our development. This site is still the heart of our catering and administration departments but we now have plans to erect a new build designed to be both more user friendly and satisfy the needs of a growing business.
COPE now fulfils a diverse range of social, environmental and economic aims and we have been able to achieve this through a variety of trading activities particularly aimed at niche markets. Our objective as a community based organization is realized in the form of an additional three retail operations in the town centre, all designed to provide a service and each a valuable resource for support, training and employment.
