What started as a family initiative for Jaimini making visors at home, ably supported by Suhani and Surya also in Year 7, has turned into an incredible journey and community effort to mass produce and distribute over 18,000 visors to different establishments during lockdown.

Hospitals including Northwick Park, Hillingdon, St Mary’s, St Helier, Norwich, Watford, Luton, Mount Vernon, Cromwell, Homerton, Oxford oncology, Hammersmith and many more have benefited, and donations have also been delivered to care homes, GP practices and pharmacies. This is a truly staggering achievement as a community has come together to contribute to making a difference.

Jaimini’s mother, Mrs Popat, explains how this all came about:

It all started from making 20 visors at home. We ordered all the materials from Amazon and started to make them. The whole family got involved. We had so much fun and we had a little production factory going. One would cut the acetate, the other cutting the foam, someone sticking the foam to the acetate and stapling the elastic. Once we made the first batch, it went out to the hospital very quickly, the demand grew so we ordered again and made more and more.  By this time a few of us who were making the visors for the hospitals decided to set up a group as it was easier to collaborate between each other to determine the number of visors needed for each hospital and other information for ordering materials etc.

The group grew and everyone helped, all their children got involved too. There were many contacts that were made directly to hospitals from our group and it became very apparent that hospitals needed a lot of visors. To keep the cost down as we had a lot of generous people who were funding this, we sourced materials through our family friend and other wholesalers and we were sending out packs for others to make. These packs contained, ready cut visors, self adhesive cut to size and medically approved foam and elastic. It was much quicker to make these and as we had so much demand from various hospitals we could produce the visors on a mass scale. We have made and sent approximately 18,000 visors to different establishments in the last 5 weeks.

It was so nice to see strangers getting together and committing their time to help front line staff. Without the help of families this couldn’t have been done on such a large scale. We decided to name our group “Team Visors”.