Social Innovation
How Orange Sky is fighting homelessness through laundry and love
This fleet of vans across Australia and New Zealand assists people experiencing homelessness through free laundry, showers and conversation.
The Hierarchy of Needs, created by psychologist Abraham Maslow, lists the essential requirements that a person needs to be a happy member of society. The first and most essential are basic needs — shelter, food, clothing and health — but the remaining levels of the hierarchy are emotional and psychological — including love and belonging, personal potential and self-fulfilment, and dignity, achievement, and independence — and Maslow claims they are equally as crucial.
It’s the important mix of physical and emotional needs that Orange Sky, the world’s first free mobile laundry service for homeless and displaced people, fulfils. A free mobile cleaning service, it provides both basic services and creates a space to restore people with community and give them somewhere to belong.
We quickly realised that Orange Sky only had a little bit to do with washing and drying clothes and sort of had everything to do with sitting down and having a chat.
Founded in 2014 by two 20-year-old friends, Nic Marchesi and Lucas Patchett, Orange Sky is based around a concept — driving around local parks and outside areas in Volkswagen Transporter and Mercedes Sprinter vans fitted with washers, dryers, shower units, water tanks, generators, and pumps, and offering cleaning services for free.
Funded through public donations, anyone living on the street or experiencing displacement can use the washing machines and access a warm shower in the company's vans. “People thought we were crazy,” says Marchesi on fitting their first vehicles with washing machines and parking around Brisbane’s public areas and parks, “but we felt like this was something with the potential to really help people.”
Eight years on from those first vans, Orange Sky has grown from that first van to a fleet of over 400 volunteers across Australia and New Zealand, washing over 1.9 million kilograms of free laundry and providing 20,000 free showers. What the charity’s two founders did not foresee however, is that offering these basic cleaning services to people would facilitate a much bigger, equally important, service — providing a space for conversation. As the machines washed clothes, local people sat down on the orange chairs outside of the vans and have had over 35,000 hours of open and non-judgemental chat with volunteers and each other, creating connections and making a space for conversation for people living on the street that did not exist before.
We felt like this was something with the potential to really help people.
“When we started back in 2014, the idea was to help people out there in our own backyard and simply to improve their hygiene standards,” co-founder Marchesi says. “What we quickly realised though, is that Orange Sky only had a little bit to do with washing and drying clothes and sort of had everything to do with sitting down and having a chat.”
The conversations that occur every day outside the Orange Sky vans can be aimed at helping someone in a tough situation, but they’re often just a nice conversation with a new friend. “The conversations aren't meant to preach anything, or teach anything, or fix anything, they're there just to genuinely connect,” says Marchesi. “Conversations might be about the weather or about sport, or about what you did on the weekend. I think that's sort of the beauty — they're not clinical or they're not that orchestrated, they’re just about making new connections.”
Nic Marchesi and Lucas Patchett, founders of Orange Sky
© Orange Sky
The charity is now looking forward to how it can use innovation to make their service even an even more positive force in the world. “At the moment Orange Sky has a lot of positive impact on the world, but we also have some negative impacts,” says Marchesi. “Drying clothes uses a significant amount of literal power, and the power we have in offering a reliable service is incredibly profound. For people who've been let down in their lives, if we show up and we're not able to help, that can have a massively negative impact.”
To solve these issues, the company is creating more reliable and eco-friendly machines. “We want to offer a dryer, created by Orange Sky, that has less impact on the environment and also more reliability,” says Marchesi. “We also have other crazy and exciting ideas. What does the future of laundry look like? It used to be something that was done in streams that brought people together in communities, but now it's something that is done in private apartments and in the dark of night. Orange Sky has brought back a little bit of people coming together and washing. We want to continue to create ways that we can bring it back to a place of community.”