Collective effort

While stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic, a Jay County native now living on the East Coast wanted to find a way to help.

She and her husband decided to put their 3D printers to work, and found a community in the process.

Amy (Young) Filko, who graduated from Jay County High School in 1985, and her husband Jeremy have started a nonprofit organization to create shields for healthcare workers’ protective masks.

The couple, who with their two teenage children live in Vienna, Virginia, heard from a friend in the medical field how the protective mask shortage was affecting healthcare workers.

“We have a couple friends who work in the healthcare industry, and I was talking to one of them and she was talking about how worried she was, and how they just didn’t have enough N95 masks,” Amy said. “By that point, reports were coming in about people wearing them for a week or only having one or stuff like that.”

Jeremy, a data scientist, has been interested in 3D printing technology for several years, and already owned two printers. He enjoys tinkering with the machines, Amy said, and printing useful items — such as a bug spray holder that hangs by their front door.

First, he looked into 3D printing the masks themselves. However, those would take too long to print and there were concerns that they wouldn’t work.

“So, he came up with this design to make this really thin plastic shield that would go over the N95 and protect it,” Amy said.

From then on, Jeremy has printed the shields practically non-stop, reworking the design as needed after receiving feedback. The two-layered shields are intended to be placed over the N95 masks worn by healthcare workers. Amy makes sure to point out to recipients that the shields haven’t been tested or approved by the government, but are available to those who think they could be useful.

“It’s just a part of, again, this unprecedented time where this was something we saw that we could do and we could give them to people, and if they think that it will help them they should use it,” Amy said. “They are homemade and not tested and not sterile, and just our best effort for helping extend the life of an N95 mask.”

The shields are free to those in the healthcare field, who can request them at collectiveshield.org. To help pay for shipping and administrative costs, the Filkos set up a GoFundMe page, and have raised more than $20,000.

Since mid-March, the Filkos have been printing as many masks as possible, purchasing two more printers to add to their equipment line. Amy and Jeremy even alternated working with the printers overnight on a weekend with a lot of orders.

“They have to be swapped out every hour, so we just took shifts, like when you have a baby, right?” Amy said. “I took midnight to 4, he took 4 to 8.”

The Filkos made the design available to anyone who wanted to try printing the masks. They quickly found a community of individuals willing to lend a hand.

“It was crazy and also really wonderful ... not only did we have a lot of people request them, but we had a lot of people say, ‘We want to make these, how do I help?’” Amy said.

Requests of both kinds grew after the couple’s work was profiled in local media. That’s when Amy realized that the Facebook page she had set up wouldn’t be enough. She and a team of volunteers created their website, and she formed a nonprofit organization called “Collective Shield.”

The name describes the purpose of the group — creating the shields for protective masks. But it also embodies how even during a pandemic, people came together to help out others.

“I think this could turn into something else, I think it maybe already even is something else,” Amy said. “It’s about bringing these people together.”

The design has been shared nationwide, and some large corporations including General Electric have even been inspired to print shields as well.

The makers who have connected with the Filkos communicate via a Slack channel, sharing any tweaks they’ve made to the design and requesting shipping labels to mail out the shields.

Amy anticipates the community living on in some way, even after the pandemic is over. While those plans are more abstract — their main focus right now is printing the shields — 3D printing will likely always be a part of it.

“But to me it’s not that specific,” Amy said. “If the infrastructure grows I think even, you know, in the not too distant future we could offer other things, connections between other people.”

The work has made for some long days and nights for the Filkos, especially with Amy still working from home as an internal communications lead for a cybersecurity team. But finding a way to help out felt like a natural response.

“It’s just such a scary time and I feel so much respect for the people who have to go out into the world and fight this,” Amy said. “So it kind of feels like, you know, if we can do something, we should be doing this.”