Aussie Bread Tags for Wheelchairs

Junaid, who is a student at Alta du Toit School in Kuils River in South Africa has just received his wheelchair. Meanwhile students at Beenleigh Special School in Brisbane are collecting tags to help us buy more chairs. That will put a smile on some more kids’ faces!

The smile on John’s face says it all! It’s great to be able to provide him with wheels. John is from Calvinia in the Northern Cape province in South Africa, and suffered from polio as a baby.

We’d like to introduce Maureen, our ‘post lady’. Maureen collects the post from our PO Box twice a week, empties out the tags, cuts off stamps to donate to other charities and ensures all the packaging is appropriately recycled. She also colour sorts all the tags that come by post. She’s a gem!Did you know that everything at Aussie Bread Tags for Wheelchairs is done by volunteers : leadership, collecting, hosting collection points, colour sorting and transport. Thanks to all who contribute.

We have just supplied our 20th wheelchair in South Africa. Yolanda lives in Somerset West and has no knee cap, so needed a special leg extension. Her carers say she always has a smile and a word of encouragement for others – what an inspiration.

We have received photos of the latest two wheelchairs our Aussie bread tag recycling has funded. We were able to help Mr Annandale at Lake Farm home for intellectually disabled adults in Port Elizabeth and also provide a wheelchair to a funeral home in Vredendal to enable the frail to attend funerals.

On 12 March we got the chance to say thank you to our amazing team of colour sorters in Adelaide who between them sorted more than 1 tonne of bread tags in 2020 – what an effort!

Jenny Cooper, who leads our Aussie Bread Tags team, was honoured to be awarded Citizen of the Year by her local council, Burnside, during the 2021 Australia Day event.

Did you see us on the 7.30 Report on 4 Jan 2021? Click below to view the segment (it was filmed in 2019, so we have grown significantly since then, but the story is the same).

Graeme (on the left) was so excited to receive his wheelchair, he wouldn’t get out of it all day! Graeme lives in Jansenville, inland in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa, at Whitlock’s Care Centre.

Roana is the recipient of the 10th wheelchair provided using funds from recycling Aussie Bread Tags. This is the first wheelchair provided via our new partnership with Rotary Algoa Bay in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. We are excited to be working with Rotary in this area as they have established contacts in disability and aged care services and are very enthusiastic about our program. We are hoping this is the first of many wheelchairs we can fund in this region.