The Jackie Marshall K&S Award

Leicestershire & Rutland Remap Were Awarded £30,000 !

How it happened and what we did with the money

It was in 2019 when one of our engineers, Dick Goodey, was attending the funeral of his niece Jackie in Scotland. 

Kate, the granddaughter of another of his nieces was also at the funeral, they were catching up when Dick mentioned his work with Leicestershire & Rutland Remap.

The next day Kate contacted Dick to suggest that his Remap group may well be a good candidate to apply for her company's annual award from the...

Kilburn & Strode Innovation for All Foundation.

Kilburn & Strode Intellectual property attorneys promoting innovation

Who are Kilburn & Strode?


We care about the wider innovation and technology community; that’s why we donate 1% of all annual profits to the Kilburn & Strode Innovation for All Foundation – thereby giving everyone the chance to both innovate and prosper. Our company’s existence is not isolated. It’s part of a wider system of people, values, other organisations and nature. We truly care about more than just partner profit.

Their theme for the 2020 award was 'Technology for Good' and candidates that apply are voted for by K&S employees.

Our noble Treasurer Martin Grant who, courtesy perhaps of his surname, has an excellent record of successful applications for monies was unleashed on to this task, and did the necessary application and pitch. We were up against several other worthy, much larger contenders but the good employees of Kilburn and Stroud recognised the work of our group and the greater Remap community and voted us first !


IIn memory of Dick's late sister we like to refer to the donation received as 'The Jackie Marshall K&S Award'

But £30k for one panel was out of proportion to our local needs and we had told K&S that the bulk of this money would be passed on to our central office as it duly was.

We understand that £20k has been allocated to re-establishing Remap panels in regions where they have disappeared which we are pleased with.

We had a discussion on how much of this funding might stay local to us as that was what K&S had initially intended. We would keep some to boost our reserves but it was thought a good idea to make an investment on kit that would benefit our immediate East Midlands Remap neighbours.


This would seem to be an elegant split for our good fortune, but what could we share?

A Good Idea…

A few years ago our group had come up with a rather useful design for a system of mounting things from a wheelchair; it is a generic system that did not involve modifying the chair. This is used for mounting that old favourite, a baby or young child in front of the mother. A popular Remap challenge but it can also be used for many things such as trays & cameras. We use it routinely where a mother books the job via a referral for just after her due date, as it is a generic solution we pop round and fit the baby seat and usually about a year later we change the seat part for the 15kg child seat. After around two years we can reuse the system on the next mother or sometimes a new child with the same mother. This works very well and it was great to roll it out to our neighbouring

panels.


Our solution was well documented at the time and you can see it in the Leicestershire & Rutland section of Makability. It involves the manufacture of fabricated steel parts welded together and uses modified chairs intended for shopping carts and cycles. The capabilities within our group confined us to using painted mild steel, and the resultant devices, although reusable, always quickly became tatty and tired.


Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a batch of these manufactured in stainless steel using a professional fabricator?


The K&S funding provided the perfect vehicle to let us do this, and we contacted the chairs of the Coventry & Warwickshire and the Derbyshire panels who were very receptive to this idea.

As with all things in 2020 it was hard work and moved slowly, but finally in the early summer of 2021 we found ourselves in the position of handing over several beautifully manufactured Generic Mounting Systems along with seats suitable for babies and toddlers with instruction manuals. One of our happy clients also attended, demonstrating the baby version installed a few days previously.


We also had a stock of spares manufactured and held here in Leicestershire which should allow us to maintain this highly reusable asset across our areas of the East Midlands for many years to come.

Hand Over Day

Left to right

  • Coventry & Warwickshire Chair: Robin Kenward

  • Coventry & Warwickshire Engineer: Gary Wooding

  • Remap clients: Dad, Mum & Baby

  • Derbyshire Chair: Allan Sutton

  • Leicestershire Secretary: Graham Law

  • Leicestershire Treasurer: Martin Grant

Some of the kit


Child Seat up to 15kg


Baby seat up to 9kg


MakeAbility Link:

www.makeability.org.uk/project/16092/mounting-baby-child-seats-to-wheelchairs/

Note the version we had manufactured professionally was based on this design (with some minor modifications).

Who We Used to Manufacture:

If any other panel is feeling wealthy we can recommend the fab shop New World Engineering to you. We use them in Leicestershire but we have no vested interest in them. They are a small father and son company specialising in high quality stainless work and who gave us a very fair deal. They are charitable, friendly guys that we have known for years.