GOAT Notes #6
Welcome to the newsletter for Grassroots Open Assistive Tech!
Please DONATE TO GOAT today!
News
We’ve had an active year so far at GOAT!
In the summer, we made great progress on preservation work. Our archive team has catalogued nearly 150 interesting, useful, and rare items from the Enders Archive. We have scanned 56 items which are now uploaded to the Internet Archive with the physical materials hosted at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, where you can browse them in person!
We are looking for more donations to support a paid intern to start on high-speed book scanning. We have a generous donor willing to match up to $20,000! Please donate today to help us reach this goal!
At our workshops so far in 2025, we distributed 45 “Fix it Kits” in a pilot program. These bags, about the size of a large pencil pouch for a binder, are packed full of useful wheelchair tools and repair materials. They also include a zine on wheelchair, walker, and rollator maintenance.
Future kits and version 2 of the zine workbook are now under construction. We are making two different kits: one, the Workshop Kit, which is more complete and with more tools. It is meant for our events, with one-on-one work with GOAT volunteers and attendees, to walk attendees through inspecting their devices to gather information and adapt the tools to their needs. The second style, our Street Kit, contains minimal tools, but more “fasteners” like cable ties, velcro straps, and gaffer tape. It is designed to pass out more casually on the street or at more fast paced events that don’t allow focused one-on-one work. There is also a broader range of tools and supplies in our Grab Bag so that we can customize the Workshop and Street kits individually, to fit someone’s particular dexterity and their mobility gear.
Your donations to GOAT can help us buy the materials and tools for these free repair kits! And if you would like to buy supplies directly, we have a wishlist.
Collaborations
GOAT is working with other community partners in many ways this year.
We are marshalling volunteers for weekly visits to the CIL’s Wheelhouse, where we are helping to organize and store their inventory of donated assistive tech. It’s like a warehouse and workshop, or a huge wheelchair pick & pull. Some of what we are doing is breaking down unrepairable powerchairs for parts, but I think there is a meta level of developing a larger crew of people who understand the AT resources of the Bay Area and are able to tell people about them. And these folks may also be the pool of future mobility gear repair and refurbishment techs that our “ecosystem” desperately needs!
We are working with University of Washington’s a11yhood project team and CREATE as a community partner, to make DIY assistive tech more widely and freely available, findable, and curatable!
We stocked the SF Disability Cultural Center with a Fix-It workbook and a full toolkit for minor wheelchair repair and maintenance.
And with other local projects like C.R.I.P.S.R.I.S.E. to spread knowledge of how to use 3D scanning and printing for assistive tech in the community.
Recent blog posts
For more details on GOAT’s activities in the last few months, have a look at our blog posts:
Community DIFxTech talk on software design for assistive tech (coming up on Oct. 28th!)
Open Source Accessibility Summit in October! (coming up Oct. 11!)
What we do
Grassroots Open Assistive Tech’s purpose is to document, curate, preserve, make accessible, and freely share assistive technology designs and information under open licenses, as well as providing coordination and education to affiliated communities.
We support disabled people in making their designs and builds available for public good, and in having free to use designs available to them for their own use.
Please donate!
GOAT is a 501(c)(3) organization and your donations are tax deductible. EIN: 93-3313503.
We are also registered with Benevity for employer-matched donations!
You can donate via PayPal or via check.
PayPal donation email: liz@openassistivetech.org.
To avoid our paying transaction fees, you can send a physical check made out to Grassroots Open Assistive Tech, to GOAT, PO Box 720011, San Francisco, CA 94172.
Subscribe to GOAT Notes
Subscription is free, but optionally, you can pay to subscribe via Buttondown, as a way to support our organization and its activities! https://buttondown.com/GoatNotes#subscribe-form