A year of e-Nable Italy

It was just over a year ago when I started working on the first device for my daughter Greta, it was also the first step of this fantastic initiative that would soon become e-Nable Italia and that I am honored to coordinate. In the Energy Family Project association we had an idea: that of being able to donate devices to children in Italy, made by us, by parents and friends who wanted to help us, the idea of being able to give a little joy, a dream to our children ...

For once, try to overturn the perspective and try to transform something that is seen and experienced by many as a "defect" to be hidden into something special to be proud of.

This is the basic idea, but also the one that prostheses (real ones, we make devices, toys, which replicate a part of their functionality but which are not prostheses) can help children and adults in everyday life. who live the experience of an agenesis or a traumatic amputation and that we, in our own small way, with our "toy devices" can perhaps help to bring children closer to this world and make them more pleasant and interesting a device that otherwise would tend to suffer only because they are far from their world of play and fantasy.

Here, it all started from here, we met several people in this short journey that lasted just over a year, some with a decidedly orthogonal approach to ours and from which we kept well away, immediately ready to discuss armchairs or how to find and manage funds, others much more in tune with our approach which has always been to work from the bottom with humility, day after day, learning and trying to do better every time, ask for help too, but for what is strictly necessary and work, work hard…

I found fantastic new friends and trusted travel companions who have joined Massimo, Riccardo and Samuela, travel companions of all time, I quote here Alessandro, Michele and Piera, because they in particular have contributed, each in their own way, to create and place a really important piece of this small community that I write about today and that I represent, but the list is long and growing from month to month, our community is growing and I am sure together we can do great things.

The community of those who believe in us and support us is also growing, first of all the families and their friends, they really surprised us, supporting us and helping us to acquire resources and tools that not even remotely we would have imagined we could have only six months ago, this is a great satisfaction, I believe and I hope it means that we are doing well, but it is also a great responsibility, we must always do better and live up to the expectations of families, of all the friends who support us but above all of the children who expect us to we give him a dream.

In 2020 our friends supported us by donating € 1,520 to our micro campaigns in support of e-Nable Italia and to help us create the devices for our children, these funds allowed us to:

• purchase 17 spools of filament for printing devices
• purchase a Palette Pro 2S device for printing multi-color devices
• purchase all the consumables necessary for the construction of the devices

To date we have given away 5 devices, we are working on five more, we are carrying out experimentation activities to extend the use of existing devices to children who cannot use them at the moment and we still have other fantastic ideas that we are working on and that we will soon be happy to share.

On behalf of the Energy Family Project and e-Nable Italia today I feel obliged to thank you all for the trust and support you show us and to renew our commitment to do better and better, we are only volunteers, for none of us this is a job and none of the volunteers are paid for what we do, but our commitment is firm and, I think I can say it on behalf of everyone, the joy of the children when they open the package and find the device repays all the efforts and the nights made to make them happen.

Heartfelt thanks from e-Nable Italia.

Alberto Navatta
Chapter Lead - e-Nable Italy
Vice President of Energy Family Project