Ship SHAPE

Yesterday was our first day really helping out at SHAPE. Their facility is an old primary (elementary) school. They have a break room, classroom, big open studio spaces, a kitchen attached to (a room that will eventually become) a cafe and a large separate building for all of their textile work (flax, aloe and wool) and agricultural supplies.

SHAPE at the old Sandy Bay primary school

We met the other employees and the clients and it was a great time of sharing ideas. Basically SHAPE provides job training, life-skills training and a safe, fun and loving day time place for disable people, teenagers and adults, while their full time caregivers are at work.

Although they produce a number of handcrafted items, they are not self supporting and as a non-profit depend on grants and other funds to continuing function and growing. As more funds become available they hope to provide more and more services to more people.

They've had an Etsy shop for a while now but due to a banking/Paypal mix up they were not receiving payments. So my husband worked diligently for about 4 hours and finally solved their problem - with a power cut and internet going down in the middle of it all. If you're on Etsy they'd love it if you would favorite their shop and I'll post here again when we start getting items listed.

View looking out from SHAPE - what a view.

Thanks for reading from so far away!