I spent 60 hours sat in a bathtub in Leeds to show how my soap company can tackle addiction

Between 7 and 9 August, Chris Sylvester spent 60 hours in a bathtub in Leeds City Square. He was there to raise the profile of Getting Clean – a soap company that he founded in 2021 on the principles of community, recovery and enterprise for sustainability – as well as raising money for a lived-experience recovery project, delivered in collaboration with Forward Leeds. He let Big Issue join him in the tub to learn more about his remarkable journey. 

Tell us about your experience of addiction and recovery. 

I was introduced to heroin in the high school toilets at age 12. That opened up the doors to 26 years of active addiction – that’s hospitals, jails, homelessness; a nightmare existence. I just couldn’t find a way out of it. And then, at the age of 36, by chance, I came across mutual aid, 12-step recovery. As I got clean, I gravitated towards support work, but I became very frustrated with the way that support services are run. It seemed like it was more about delivering outcomes and supporting the service than the individual. 

I know that everybody needs a purpose, and I also know that everybody has skills and strengths, and it’s about empowerment. So, while working a 50-hour week in a homeless shelter, I set up a group that allowed people in recovery to come together to support the community, to challenge stigma by being of service, by tackling environmental issues. We’re all products of our environment, so if we start taking care of our environment, we start creating cleaner, safer communities. 

We started simply by picking litter, and then we learned to recycle what we were collecting. Then we started doing conservation projects, started creating wildflower meadows, doing all this amazing work.

And as the group grew, so did the ability for us to be able to deliver more impact and to help people more. I realised that we could do jobs for elderly people, disabled people; fixing their fences, decorating their houses, doing DIY, focusing on people’s skills and strengths, empowering them to see that they were more than their past, and that they were assets to the community. 

This support costs money. To do these jobs costs money, but the value, the social value, is off the scale – seeing people learn from one another, helping each other develop. I realised that we needed an income stream that was separate to the grants and the funding. Enterprise had always been a part of my journey. It hasn’t always been legal enterprise! But I realised that the skills that I acquired throughout selling drugs, I could transfer into graft. I just needed a product, and I needed that product to carry the ethos and embodiment of what we were doing as an organisation.

Read more:

• What UK can learn from Portugal’s drug decriminalisation success
• Drug-related deaths in Scotland: Here’s what can be done now
• Put drug overdose kits in pubs, train stations and shopping centres to save homeless peoples’ lives

How did that lead to Getting Clean? 

While having a shower one day, I realised I could help people get clean with soap. I just needed to learn how to make it. The first bars of soap that we made, my recovery mates and I made them in my mum’s kitchen, and they were absolutely horrendous, but we took them to a craft fair and sold every bar. I realised, “We’re onto something here. We could build this into a social enterprise.” 

So I found a lady through networking who taught us how to make much better soap, and then we got a space in a charity shop, and on Friday afternoons I used to bring people together to learn how to make soap, and then we’d go to craft fairs and we’d sell it, and it’d fund all community projects that we were doing. To see people making this product, packaging it in ethical materials, and then taking it and putting it in a customer’s hands – I just thought, ‘This is so special. There’s so much value in what we’re doing here.’ And the public loved it. These bars of soap, they reduce crime and grime at the same time. You don’t get bars of soap like that anywhere else!

How has Getting Clean grown since then? 

We moved to a community centre, and then from there into a factory, and we employ six people in recovery to make soap. We’ve now got something called the Hope Works Project. We work with homeless people, giving them hope, helping them see that recovery is a reality. The therapeutic value of one addict helping another is without parallel. If you want a sausage, see the butcher! Nobody can support people in recovery like people
in recovery. But if you’re employing somebody just because they’ve got lived experience, you’re telling them that’s all they’re worth. What we need to look at is what skills people actually have. People with lived experience need to be helping to develop strategy and leadership. They need to be making decisions at the top, not just at the bottom, doing as they’re told. Getting Clean is a platform for success. We allow people to focus on their skills and strengths, and we work together as a team to support each other. 

What do you believe is the key to helping people into recovery? 

While in recovery, I realised community is the solution to the problems that we face in society. That’s why LEROs, lived experience recovery organisations, which we are, are essential for people to complete treatment and aftercare and exit that journey into a recovery that’s sustainable. 

Housing alone is not the solution. You could go around Leeds now and pluck any number of homeless people and put them in Buckingham Palace, and they would come back here to Leeds. Do you know why? Because they need community, and that’s where their community is. We need to start working as a community to support them. We need to understand. We need to learn. We need to help people find that new way of living. 

Make a donation at Getting Clean

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