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'

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?

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.