On Friday, September 13th Vicki and I visited the Brisbane South Toy Library at Richlands, Queensland. What an amazing group of volunteers! It is a community-based service offering a wide range of toys, games, and educational resources for families with young children. This non-profit organisation operates like a lending library, allowing families to borrow high-quality toys and equipment for a set period. The toy library promotes learning through play, supporting the development of children’s cognitive, physical, and social skills, as well as supporting sustainability by reducing toy waste by encouraging reusability.
The library caters to children of various ages, offering toys that enhance creativity, problem-solving, and motor skills. It plays a vital role in fostering sustainable practices within the community and providing affordable access to resources for families. Volunteering opportunities are also available, allowing community members to contribute to the smooth running of the library.
The library is open to the community twice a week. Families can come and borrow toys (and test them out first). There is an online system to allow for click and collect letting children continue to sleep in the car while families pick up and drop off toys. The volunteers collect toys from a local charity shop that no longer accepts toys and sort them (for use in the library, as spare parts, to give to BIG W toy recycling program or as donations for other toy libraries. We had a wonderful time learning about their library and choosing toys to take to Papua New Guinea.
We collected over 50 toys (or toy collections like play food or dinosaurs) that were very generously donated to OMEP Australia to kickstart our Toy Library initiatives. We are so grateful to Adelle and Robyn for their support and look forward to partnering with Toy Libraries Australia. It was a fantastic start to our toy libraries project.
