Shedding Community Workshop Inc. was established as a not-for-profit organisation in May 2018, bringing together love for sustainability, carpentry and building through passion for people and wellbeing.
The below section covers some of Shedding’s significant recent chapters and events.
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.
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:
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!
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!
During the year we welcomed generous donations from our community, including:
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!