Elaine Randall
Elaine Randall grew up in Birmingham. She came to Bristol in the 80s and worked at Silai for Skills on a secondment from Bristol East Side Traders, as a Women's Business Advisor. She is now the Director of Babeco, the real nappy company; a social enterprise that began at Silai for Skills.
"I heard about the Nappy Project as it was called then and got involved as a volunteer on the steering group who were trying to make it into something, I think it had been going for two years before I got involved.
So the board developed a role for a manager and advertised it, I applied and got the job and here we are today. We've been going four years, when we left Silai I think we took £700 or something in that first year and I fundraised to get us out of Silai, not for any negative reasons but we just needed to stand alone. I put together a website and we started to get a bit of income through that. I think our first order was from Austria and you think, my God, who's looking at the website. It's terrible and they're still buying our products, it's amazing!
Why I'm passionate about Silai is...I wasn't always deaf, my hearing went in the last year of my degree. I'm dyslexic and I'd always relied on hearing and remembering instead of writing. They used to give me tape recorder, so if I played it back and listened I'd remember. I had a very good memory. What confounded me is, if I couldn't hear, I couldn't remember, it was really devastating. So coming to a place like Silai, coming to BEST and coming here, I'm very passionate about taking people as they come and accepting people for what they do have rather than what they don't and working with "
