Community liaison officer for the Red Cross Liz Parr was impressed when she first came across the Orange Sky Laundry's distinctive orange Dasher van and the mobile laundry service it was offering to the city's homeless.
But as the Safe Shelter in Braddon shut down for the summer, she realised there was going to be a gap in that service, and started thinking of how it could be extended. Orange Sky Laundry's service manager Noreen Vu wanted to move its main operation into the Canberra Civic, where most of the ACT's support services for the homeless are located.
"Every time the van is parked in the depot, it is time wasted from washing clothes for our homeless friends," Ms Vu said.
The van, equipped with a top-of-the-range washer and dryer, has already provided more than 450 free washes for the homeless since Orange Sky Laundry launched its operations within Canberra in April this year.
With more than 40 permanent volunteers, Ms Vu is confident that Orange Sky Canberra will eventually be able to offer more services than when it started, with the hope it will be able to operate the Griffin Centre service daily and also expand into the Queanbeyan area.
In addition to the new weekly services at the Griffin Centre, Ms Vu said the Dasher van will begin a weekend service, starting this Sunday. "We have a pool of interested volunteers that can't do it during the day; people are still living on the streets on the weekend, so it's important that we expand our services."
While another van to complement the Dasher service is not on the cards at the moment, the organisation is looking to find more more volunteers so it can run more services across the week.
"We generally wouldn't have competing timeslots of where the van would go to, so we have staggered it out to do a few shifts during the day and that sort of thing instead."
The new service comes as Orange Sky celebrated its second year of operation on Monday, having started in Brisbane by the 2016 Young Australians of the Year, Nic Marchesi and Lucas Patchett. There are now services in Brisbane, Gold Coast, Melbourne, Sydney, the Sunshine Coast, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Hobart in addition to Canberra. Collectively the services process about 6.9 tonnes of laundry every week.