Men’s Sheds: Craft, Connection and Community

In 1999, in a rural area of Australia, a woman noticed that many of the local retired miners and Vietnam veterans, really missed working with others. A workshop was put together where people could make and mend items often for themselves but also for the community. Others followed that lead. How did it start here? And why is it spreading?

Today we are joined by Founder and Life President of UKMSA, Mike Jenn, who has worked in practical social innovations for 50 years across community education (under-fives, truanting teenagers, families), and relieving deprivation ( crisis, homelessness, unemployment) and then he ‘retired’ to start something new.

In 2014, Professor Barry Golding coined the term “”shedagogy”” to describe “a distinctive, new way of acknowledging, describing and addressing the way some men prefer to learn informally in shed-like spaces mainly with other men”