Daughter and father Alyssa and Jules have always enjoyed working together tinkering on different projects — even at the age of two, Alyssa enjoyed spending time with her father in the garage as he worked on old cars.

So, it was only natural when Alyssa decided to volunteer as a Clubs That Care (new window) leader, building assistive devices for Canadians with disabilities, that she’d rope in her father. Since then, they’ve built and delivered over 30 devices.

“We value our time together,” Jules says. “This is just another way for us to spend more time [together].”

Alyssa works as a pavement engineer in Ottawa. Jules has been retired for 12 years from his career in the RCMP, he also has extensive experience with electronics from his time in the military working on aircrafts.

After Alyssa became a club leader in January, and they got all their tools and learned how to use them, they began taking on device requests. As beginner makers, they didn’t realize many of the builds they were taking on — including LipSyncs (new window) and Cedar Joysticks (new window) — were some of the more difficult ones. They found themselves up to the challenge.

“Turns out that we were kind of grabbing the harder stuff,” Jules laughs. “The instructions are phenomenal. Honestly, the first LipSync I put together, it blew my mind when it started up and started working and it was as advertised. You read the user guide and exactly what it says it’s going to do is what it does.”

“We geared up pretty fast once we got going,” shares Alyssa. “It ended up being fun because he learned how to do it all, and he knows how to solder and I didn’t know anything. So, there was one night where we sat down, we each had a LipSync and it was just like step by step, grab this, grab that. And I was following along. So that’s how we made at least two of the LipSyncs, which was really cool.”

Answering local requests in Ottawa, many of the devices they’ve made have gone to the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO). Alyssa recalls that the first request they worked on was for a LipSync to help a teenager with a spinal cord injury use their phone, which really brought home the importance of the devices they were making.

“All of a sudden, that just made it so real for us. And then we were kind of in a rush, because we were like this girl needs to use her phone, like, let’s get on it,” Alyssa says. “This is life changing stuff for them.”

They’ve also brought some family and friends into the operation as volunteers, having them help on building some Interact Switches (new window) that were sent out of town to Halifax.

“We kind of had the assembly line going where I would do soldering, pass it on to the next person,” Jules explains. “We’re looking forward to getting other people involved.”

“Especially now that we’re getting a little bit more confidence on the builds. It was kind of scary at first when you’ve not built anything and then you are teaching other people how to do it. But now that we’re getting to the point where we’ve done a lot, we’ve delivered a lot, it’s cool to get other people engaged,” Alyssa says. “[Our volunteers] thought that this was so encouraging and inspiring.”

With over 30 devices and counting under their belts, Alyssa and Jules are looking to continue volunteering, seeing that they have the ability to take on some of the more difficult builds. They are even looking at scaling up their operation, and find partnership opportunities to fund further builds.

“We kind of see that we have a unique subset of skills, in terms of being not every maker that volunteers is going to be: a) interested, or b) have the time to make LipSyncs or Cedars on a regular basis. But since we’ve gone through the learning curve of doing that, now we’re pretty quick at it,” says Alyssa. “[We’re going to] keep doing it as long as we can and build as many devices as we can.”

“The potential is huge and we’re just starting,” says Jules.

This post originally appeared on the Makers Making Change (new window) website.