We Make Good is Ireland’s first social enterprise design brand. It exists to support the development of Irish social enterprises which provide people from disadvantaged backgrounds with opportunities to develop their skills as makers and craftspeople.
Meaningful employment provides people with hope and a chance to create a future for themselves and their family. We believe that products should look good, be well designed and stand for what we care about – a society that looks after people and the environment. We Make Good is a project of Quality Matters, a charity that exists to develop solutions to social problems in Ireland, improving services to Ireland’s most vulnerable populations. Quality Matters, is a registered charity, which employs 8 staff and operates a commercial social enterprise model providing services to numerous government departments/agencies and charities in Ireland.
Caroline Gardner (Co-Founder)
Caroline has co-founded a number of social enterprises and charities including Quality Matters, The Sex Workers Allaince of Ireland, and We Make Good. Caroline’s career has been centred on social justice and equality and the theme of bringing business practices to charitable work. Social enterprise is the embodiment of this approach, a topic central to her current work. We Make Good is a project that brings all these strands together as well as her interest in design.
Joan Ellison (Co-Founder)
Joan is a creative project manager and worked in creative agencies and design retail over the last 15 years. She has been a maker since an early age and remains fascinated by how things are made and where they come from. She joined the team at Quality Matters in 2016 and with Caroline, developed We Make Good, where these fascinations have been generously fed and she has been able to apply her commercial experience to projects where equality and fairness is the heart.