Have your community activities changed during the last several months?

Please summarize your efforts

Activities have completely changed. In order to ensure the focus on activities to support public hospitals and essential service agencies, e-NABLE Brasil completely stopped the device donation activities and requested that all volunteers dedicate their time to printing face shields. In parallel, a map similar to the e-NABLE map was developed by volunteer Mazvydas Sverdiolas, where hospitals could request face shields so that volunteers would know where to deliver the devices. Mazvydas help was key to the success of the initiative. In less than 10 days, there were already more than 10,000 devices and today we have more than 70,000 requests. The strategy was to help volunteers take full autonomy to create their own local groups and structure their workforce, and they had to only respect the security guidelines and the rule that all donated devices on behalf of e-NABLE Brasil were free of charge.

We estimate that using 3D printing we have donated more than 15 thousand devices via volunteers and people who did not need to be a registered volunteer help, they just need to be part of a group, download and donate the devices created by e-NABLE Brasil based.
The devices we shares with the volunteers were based on the original Prusa face shield.

What are the current needs of your community?

What are the current needs for your chapter and activities?

What we really need at this point is to raise awareness not only for our community but also for society in general that we are experiencing a real pandemic and that the numbers of requests only show the seriousness and the situation. Every day Brazil is showing itself as the current epicenter of the pandemic with a high number of deaths per day, and the government's negationist position cannot in any way dictate the behavior of the population that each day loses more and more lives for this virus .

Have you received promotional filament to support your efforts?

How have you used these materials?

We received support from 3D Fila, a national filament manufacturer that started a massive filament donation collection campaign for e-NABLE Brasil and is a recurring partner of the e-NABLE community

Have you partnered with any other chapters, groups, or organizations?

What advice can you offer for others working to contribute to their community needs?

Due to the great demand we understood that only 3D printing would not meet the large device demand in a timely manner, so e-NABLE Brasil formed a partnership with the appliance company Mondial to produce 40 thousand face shields via plastic injection molding process.
The real final was escalated to 80 thousand devices and all of them were donated free of charge.

In June, in partnership with 3M and the Federal Unibversity of Paraíba state, we will transform 1.8 tons of raw material (polypropylene) donated by 3M into face shields (about 50k devices) that will also be distributed free of charge.