Orange Sky, a charity that provides free laundry services to alleviate homelessness and hardship, opened its first location south of Ōtautahi this year — right here, in Ōtepoti. We at Critic Te Ārohi were tumbling over ourselves to see how it's been getting along since it opened in April, and how they’re helping our community.
Orange Sky was born just over the ditch in Brisbane, back in 2018. Offering the world’s first free mobile laundry service, their kaupapa quickly expanded across Australia, and then eventually New Zealand. From there, additional locations have been popping up across the motu, with South Island services beginning in Ōtautahi in 2022. For Ōtepoti, the service expanded here earlier this year. Now there’s over one thousand volunteers across the country lending a helping hand.
To chat about their expansion to Dunedin, we caught up with Caeley, a student at the University of Otago, and a volunteer team leader. She tells us that Orange Sky operates out of the car park of the central city Salvation Army, who are "very, very generous in lending us their power [and] water." The volunteer team currently runs 2.5-hour shifts on Thursdays and Saturdays. “Anyone can just bring their laundry, and we'll do a wash and a dry for them." They can't take everyone, in theory. But they can do "6, maybe 7" big loads of washing in a shift.
A key thing about Orange Sky is that people don't just come for a good wash. It doubles as a space for kōrero and connection while the washing cycle runs. Caeley remarked that repeat visitors would get comfortable enough that they’d eventually come to "just sit down and have a chat, and talk to us about their story." The charity and Caeley call these people friends, explaining that "they're not clients [...] It's not something that they're paying to come and use in that sense. So yeah, it's a word that we can use to show that actually it's just a space where they come as equals, and we just connect with them, really." Since its April launch, Orange Sky Dunedin has completed 140 washes and engaged in more than 230 hours of “genuine and non-judgmental conversation."
Orange Sky Ōtepoti has been equally popular with volunteer applications. So much so, they have a waitlist. "There's not any vacancies," Caeley tells Critic, who joined Orange Sky through Student Job Search (SJS), "but you can go onto the waitlist." And because many of their volunteers are students, who often get busy with things like their degrees, names get pulled off the waitlist quite frequently. The operation is currently small, with volunteers working out of a pod rather than Orange Sky's iconic orange vans.
Even in the brief period Caeley has been living and studying in Dunedin since 2024, she's noticed a marked increase in rough sleeping around Central Dunedin. "And it's freezing down here, right?" she exclaimed, noting the snowfall during our interview. From conversations with friends, she knows that "things are just getting hard, and it can be from something as simple as just rents going up”.
Those experiencing rough sleeping don't have access to basic hygiene. Caeley saw that, saw the SJS advert, "and was like, what a great opportunity to be able to help people feel just that much fresher and cleaner, and appreciated, y’know?"
Volunteering for charities is a helpful way for tauira to gain meaningful volunteering experience, be out in the community and learn new skills. Caeley has gotten more from this work than just that. "It's quite hopeful to see the change that we make. People, they're so grateful.” People leave Orange Sky Ōtepoti with smiles on their faces and clean, dry clothes.
“It’s a really awesome and rewarding thing to be able to do that,” Caeley explains.
To her fellow students, Caeley has a final message: "Homelessness can actually impact anyone." You never know if it will happen to you, or someone you know, because it's getting “more and more expensive to just live”. So keep that compassion, she says. Look for those opportunities to help people – it's rough out there.
You can get involved, or donate, on orangesky.org.nz. You can also chuck their Instagram a follow @orangeskynz to keep up to date with the organisation.
