Not-for-profit Initiative
In March 2020 when the COVID pandemic lockdowns were enforced, two Delhi-based architects Aranya Khurana and Ishita Maheshwari foresaw the need for personal protective equipment (PPE) on a large scale for frontline workers such as doctors, nurses, police officers and NGO workers. Face Shield Delhi was set up to cater to this need in whatever capacity possible.
How might we provide reusable, low-cost face shields to COVID-19 frontline workers in total lockdown?
Raised ₹1,89,000+ (CAD $3,000+) and donated 6000+ face shields to frontline workers such as healthcare professionals, police and security personnel, NGO volunteers and food & relief workers.
The goal of this stage was to take existing designs, improve on them and test their use in the real world.
This phase dealt with the manufacturing of the face shields, making them as cost efficient as possible and procuring the funds to produce them.
In this stage, the aim was to get the shields to those that needed them.
In this phase, we wanted to record and publicly declare donations in order to maintain transparency and trust for all our contributors.
Open-source designs available on a Github resource created by Mumbai-based initiative Maker's Asylum used as a starting point to tweak and develop prototypes.
Laser cutting workshops and material vendors were contacted who were cooperative enough to offer their services during a very strict lockdown with the threat of police shutting down operations.
Funding was generated through multiple fundraisers and broadcast through a newly setup Instagram account as well as reaching out on other social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook. These received generous contributions from friends, family and other not-for-profit organisations and foundations.
We also devised a model where we sold shields at nominal rates to those who could afford them. After taking care of production costs, all profits were funnelled back into shields for donation.
Throughout the entire process, the designs were improved iteratively to ensure an optimum balance between comfort, cost-effectiveness, durability and material efficiency and availability. For this, we would settle on a design, ship it and take in feedback from users. Based on this feedback as well as our own observations, we would make adjustments to the same core design at any point in the design or production process that we could.
Face Shield Delhi officially became part of Maker’s Asylum’s M-19 Collective in April 2020 in order to pool together knowledge and resources and combined initiatives from more than 49 cities across the country. The M-19 Collective was part of a case study on the Maker's Movement in India by OSMS and has received recognition from UNESCO. It was also featured in a University of Cambridge case study on digital fabrication and distributed manufacturing (Corsini et al., 2020).
Once COVID-19 was declared airborne and masks were found to protect better against newer variants, Face Shield Delhi scaled down and eventually shut operations.
As of October 2020, FSD supplied more than 6000 shields on the ground including to St. Stephen's Hospital, GB Pant Hospital, Goonj (NGO), Little India Foundation and Delhi Traffic Police among others. A publicly available compilation of donation details can be found at: linktr.ee/faceshielddelhi
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