Our Early Days

May 2018 - UpSkill Introductory Workshop

Shedding started off with a tiny verandah, a bunch of benches and a grant from Byron Shire Council with which we kicked off our 3 hour UpSkill workshop, offering students an introduction to the fundamentals of carpentry and building. But more than that, it is an introduction to a hands-on attitude towards learning and self-discovery”.

September 2018 - Build Pallet Furniture

Not long after UpSkill kicked off we were approached by Byron Community College and launched our 8-week Build Pallet Furniture Course, which is part-funded by the NSW Government. This course offers students to learn a new power-tool each week to design and construct their own furniture piece by the end of the course.

December 2018 - Our First Shedding Open Day

We invited a host of local organisations to come together and share skills and knowledge with our community at our bustling​ Open Day. Locals got a little taste of what it is to become a ‘Shedder’, amidst the scents of Indian curry and mango ice cream wafting upon the melodies of local live music.

February 2019 - DIY Tricks of the Trade

Our DIY Tricks of the Trade workshop offers a smorgasbord of skills in all those nifty home reno jobs that never seem to get done! We explore a variety of genres including plasterboard, glass, concrete, brick, metal and sealants. It’s fun and fast-paced and loaded with take-home tips and tricks.

August 2019 - Tools & Tinker

Our weekly advanced​ Tools & Tinker workshop offers a casual space for Shedders to collectively tinker on their own projects.. It is a place for networking and connection, often resulting in new friendships and offers of exchange outside of the workshop. It runs every Friday and has received funding support through Southern Cross Credit Union. 

October 2019 - Rainbow Shedders

We hosted this one-day event to come together as a community and learn tools as we constructed a colourful rainbow, from recycled and reclaimed materials. Supported by funding from WayAhead Mental Health Association NSW as part of Mental Health Month, this event was about raising awareness and celebrating our diversity in identity, gender and sexuality.

November 2019 - Shelter Building Course

Our Shelter Building Course is a step up from carpentry into the world of building – similar principles but with a delightful necessity for teamwork. Students come together to build a small-scale relocatable hardwood shelter – discovering the complexities of construction codes and building standards. This course has been funded by Byron Shire Council.

February 2020 - Another Open Day!

We had another delightfully successful ​Open Day in 2020 with over 200 guests and bustling activity, including hands-on Shedding mini-workshops, sustainable building demonstrations and displays from a host of local organisations and food, drink and music for all. Our Open Day received the support of over 60 volunteers and funding from Byron Shire Council.

March 2020 - Cob Building Workshop

We teamed up with a couple of inspiring earth builders – Lucy and Campbell – to host our Cob Building workshop, sharing the theory and practise of using this natural material. With mud between our toes we tested and mixed cob to build a rocket stove and a bottle brick wall together.

April 2020 - A Dream for the Future

After 6 months of anticipation the Development Application for our new off-grid shed was approved. Until then, the home of Shedding had been a little verandah overlooking the back field and an old basketball court emanating our vision for the future. Our new shed would allow us to run even more workshops for even more people with more tools than ever.

July 2020 - Construct Workshop

We announced our latest workshop series with much excitement. The Construct workshop allows us to jump into the details and complexities of construction. It offers a comprehensive training in all our power tools ready to launch you into all your creative carpentry desires, with the added knowledge of design and planning – sometimes the most important bit!

August 2020 - Toolbelt Making Workshop

We collaborated with Rachel at Bangalow Shoemaking who hosts our students to custom-make their own tool belt specific to their own needs.

August 2020 - Our Off-Grid Shed plans

After months of planning and preparation we stepped into Stage 2 – hosting a fundraiser to continue our adventure.

November 2020 - The Repair Cafe

We excitedly joined forces with REPAIR CAFE and welcomed them into our space in a joyful collaboration of generous and clever humans.

July 2021 - Co-Create Workshop

This space is for advanced Shedders to work on self-directed projects in a shared workshop environment, utilising the tools and skills that they learnt in UPSKILL and CONSTRUCT. 

July 2021 - Shedding On-Site

Created for our crew who wanted to put their skills to use, we welcomed our Shedders to jump onto a real building site and construct for members of our community. Through this initiative, we built a range of structures, decks, outdoor showers, and sculptures for individuals and organisations, as well as becoming the set up and pack down crew for local events.

February 2022 - Flood Recovery Repair Project

After the floods we worked with REPAIR CAFE in hosting a HUGE Flood Recovery Program to save items from landfill, and support all who were impacted. The floods washed away much of our stability and motivation and left us all burnt out and needing a rest.

April 2022 - The Big Move

By some miracle, we were offered to relocate to the Railway Shed (at 18 Prince Street) and moved our entire shed across town with the generous help of our Shedders. We have loved transforming this incredibly large space to give it our personal touch of intimacy and vibrancy. Plans for our off-grid shed are still on the back-burner and this long-term dream is still alive.

November 2022 - SpaceMakers Workshop

We created this workshop to invite students to collaboratively design and build our community space. We work together learning about design, context, installation, renovation and retro-fitting space.

April 2023 - The Empower Program

Sharing our skills in teaching and leading to empower others across the region with hands-on skills in carpentry and building for wellbeing and community connection.

Our Story Continue

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2022 | New Beginnings

Like a phoenix Shedding rose from the ashes … or in our case, the mud … after our Big Move to Mullumbimby’s Big Railway Shed in April, following the 2022 Northern Rivers flood disaster.

 

Workshops were resurrected whilst we transformed our ‘new’ Big Shed.  We introduced a new workshop – SpaceMakers – to invite students to collaboratively design and build this community space. We worked together learning about design, context, installation, renovation and retro-fitting space, to turn our Big Shed into an intimate and vibrant workshop.  

 

For our ‘Post-Flood Initiative’ we were recognised as a Finalist in Resilience NSW’s ‘Get Ready Community Award’ 2022.

 

We celebrated our incredible community with our End of Year Gathering at our new space – a day of music, food, wellbeing and special moments.  We reflected on the past twelve months and what a ride it had been!  Amongst many trials and challenges we had discovered the tremendous amount of love, care and support that we share amongst our incredible community.

2023 | Year In Focus

Early in the year, in addition to our regular workshops, we introduced our Empower program, with funding from the Northern Rivers Community Foundation: sharing our skills in teaching and leading to empower others across the region with hands-on skills in carpentry and building for wellbeing and community connection.  More can be discovered about our workshops on Shedding’s ‘Our Workshops’ webpage.

We expanded our on-line presence – Shedding can now be found on our YouTube Channel and Spotify.  

You can watch videos from our Empower program on YouTube that will help you discover more about how we support community wellbeing whilst teaching and learning.  The uncut full-length recordings of the conversations are in Season 1 of our podcasts on Spotify.

We began the process to get ‘Shedding On The Road’ by purchasing our good friend Ken’s truck to create a mobile workshop.  Find out more about this by listening to our first podcast episode of Season 2: ‘A chat with Ken from the Mullumbimby Men’s Shed’.

We were recognised locally, regionally, state- and nation-wide for our efforts:

  • Resilient Australia National Mental Health and Wellbeing Award 2023, for our Post-Flood and Recovery Initiative (access the YouTube video via Shedding’s ‘Media’ webpage)
  • Resilient Australia Mental Health and Wellbeing Award 2023 NSW
  • Community Initiative of the Byron Shire 2023

We wrapped up the year with our now annual ‘Shedfest’, coming together to celebrate each other amidst food, music, fun, community, and hands-on activities!

2024 | A Busy Year! ...

… in which Shedding received a “Community Recognition Statement” from the Parliament of NSW Legislative Assembly acknowledging Shedding’s work since it was established as a NFP organisation in 2018: “Shedding Community Workshop Inc is a true testament to how a grassroots idea can evolve into such a vital component of our community.”

As a Not For Profit organisation Shedding gratefully accepts funding which fuels our capacity to support the wellbeing of our communities in need. It supports us to keep our services free and accessible to all participants.

Funding we received from the InGrained Foundation (last year) helped us buy our ‘new’ truck and launch our Shedding on the Road project this year.  And Solo Resource Recovery donated Shedding a trailer to (literally) join our new truck.

Newcastle Permanent Charitable Foundation (NPCF) funded a grant to support the work we do at Shedding, including the backstage management of our entire organisation. 

We also received funding from QBE Foundation for our 6-month Salvage Crew project. Our aim was to discover, experiment with, and establish efficient, practical, accessible, and replicable systems and structures for recycling ‘waste’ building materials.  This project allowed us to support many other organisations through collaboration, including Byron Community College and Mullum Clayworkers.

After training over 200 participants, our initial Empower program wrapped up at the beginning of the year with our Integration Event.  We welcomed over 40 ’empowered mentors’ to join a brainstorming session to help us plan the future of Shedding, to share our model for resilience with others.  We realised that Empower was the beginning of something much bigger!

Since creating Empower, we have received calls from across the country from people wanting to establish their own inclusive workshops for building, salvage and repair.  Byron and Ballina Council, Resilient Lismore, and The Paddock, brought their staff, volunteers, clients and residents to discover our non-hierarchical wellbeing values in teaching and leading.

Through the month of June, we filmed our Salvage Crew for ‘Our Salvage Project: A Shedding Documentary’ (accessed via our ‘Media’ webpage) – a beautifully filmed authentic representation of our values and salvage practices.  The documentary was released at the end of the year after we screened the premiere at our Shedfest.

In the lead up to taking ‘Shedding on the Road’ we built saw horses and benchtops at SpaceMakers – our collaborative design and build workshop – and began to collate the necessary tools and equipment.  

From April to September Shedding on the Road visited one community each month to offer a weekend of workshops and events to inspire a network of inclusive sheds across the region.  We visited flood-affected communities including Wardell, South Golden Beach, Uki, Kyogle, and Lismore, for a fun and educational weekend, where we aimed to empower communities with practical carpentry and building skills, with our Empower and Tools & Tinker Workshops.  

Shedding continues to run a number of other regular Workshops throughout the year which are outlined on ‘Our Workshops’ webpage.

And … we love to share food at Shedding!  Once a month we invite all Shedders to our Potluck Dinners.  To round up the year, we celebrate our annual Shedfest, where there’s not just food, but drink, music and fun hands-on activities for all!

2025 | A Year Of Consolidation and Exploration

Shedding kept up the pace of the previous year, and more!

During the year we welcomed generous donations from our community, including:

  • Weekly deliveries of curry and cake and seasonal fruit 
  • Donations of milk and coffee from Mullumbimby IGA and Byron Bay Coffee Company  
  • Techies fixing our website
  • Collecting salvaged building materials
  • Donations of tools
  • Repairs to our tools and equipment
  • Offering a listening ear, and contributing to our collective vision to support each other.

Whilst we continued to explore grants for funding opportunities, we launched our Community Funding Initiative.  Over the years we have been grateful to receive funding support from council, government and businesses through grants – particularly since the 2022 floods. Prior to this, a majority of our workshops were fully funded by our participants and students.

We decided to trial a community funded model to enable us to continue to host our existing inclusive services in salvage and repair, tool training, wellbeing support, food and drink, and behind the scenes coordination.  Additionally we would like to provide: youth workshops, disability workshops, visa support, employment pathways, co working spaces, sharing more skills, DIY trade tips, sharpening services, construction practices, and more community support.

As part of our Community Funding Initiative we launched our occasional Pop Up Workshops, which kicked off in May with Patt Gregory, who facilitated a chiselling workshop.  These workshops are an opportunity for fundraising to support the existence of Shedding – Patt donated her expertise and time, with all proceeds supporting what we do here at the shed.

After a three year hiatus (due to big floods, lease endings, our big move, and a big set up), we offered our first ever Construct workshop in our beautiful big Shed.  Construct is a 4-day comprehensive tool training workshop, in which (having completed our Upskill workshop), participants learn how to design and build a project from start to finish.  We share our sustainable practices in identifying and salvaging safe ‘waste materials’.

 

In October we were involved in the Byron Bay Film Festival where Shedding’s Sophie Wilksch was interviewed about ‘Our Salvage Project: A Shedding Documentary’, which was screened at Brunswick Picture House as part of the BBFF’s “Through the Local Lens”.

 

For National Recycling Week in November, Shedding collaborated with Stone and Wood as they turned their brewery into a hub of ideas diving into the circular economy through film, music and upcycling workshops.  The brewery hosted a bottle cutting workshop run by Shedding, where participants learnt to upcycle and transform waste bottles into beautiful glassware, and Sophie was invited to join a discussion panel on waste.

Once again the year wrapped up with Shedding’s most special of events – our annual Shedfest end of year celebration.  We love to end our year with a celebration of our community – with guided and casual workshops, food, drink, ice cream, music, and a raffle – none of which would happen without our wonderful Shedding volunteers!