Aussie charity Orange Sky Laundry empowers homeless with new partner

Brother International Australia's new partner is Orange Sky Laundry, an Australian charity that brings their mobile laundry services to the homeless.

Starting in Brisbane in 2014, Nicholas Marchesi and Lucas Patchett put two washing machines and two dryers in a van with a vision of empowering the community.

Today, Orange Sky Laundry operates in 96 locations across Australia from 15 mobile laundry vans with the help of over 850 volunteers.

With two 10kg washers and dryers, Orange Sky Laundry can clean 20kg of washing every hour.

Orange Sky Laundry are on a mission: to provide a platform for conversations, volunteering and opportunities for friends, through a free mobile laundry worldwide.

This is what motivated the partnership with Brother. The collaboration aims to provide information to those without internet access so they can locate the charity in the future.

Following a consultation of the charity's needs, Brother trialled a range of printers before determining which are the best fit.

Brother provide three printers to Orange Sky Laundry: HL-S7000DN, the MFC-J5920DW and the MFC-L9550CDW.

Some of the challenges Orange Sky Laundry face regarding printing and communication include:

• The sheer number of individual volunteers, sponsors and supporters who require a constant stream of printed documents in various forms.
• The need to add images and photographs to the documents. The charity relies on the quality of these documents to interact and communicate with the community.

The scanning functionality of the MFC-J5920DW aims to save time when adding images or photographs.

Brother claims that with the low running costs and the 600-sheet paper capacity expandable to up to 2,100 sheets of the HL-S7000DN, the printer can grow as the business does.

"With the reduced administration costs, we can now spend more valuable funds on helping people", comments Nicholas of Orange Sky Laundry.

Brother says the midsize volume colour laser that is used for impact work MFC-L9550CDW suits Orange Sky Laundry's high quality printing needs.

Brother states that for the next three years they will support Orange Sky Laundry by donating all consumables required for the devices.

Luke Howard, commercial market development channel manager at Brother says, that helping small businesses is imperative to Brother.

"We know that a small business can't be experts in every single field so we try and take a small problem away from them so they can focus on the bigger ones".