The Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund awards Dr Osei Vandermeer and Dr Mirela Hanke a grant to formalise the handover of a neighbourhood tool library's paper loan ledger between volunteer coordinators.
A new grant funds a witnessed sign-off between a neighbourhood tool library's volunteer coordinators, so a loan's condition notes survive the handover intact
A neighbourhood tool library keeps track of every borrowed drill, saw, and ladder in one place: a single paper ledger, filled in by whichever volunteer happens to be on the desk that afternoon. For years, the ledger’s only record of a tool’s condition — the chip in a blade, the frayed cord — has depended on an outgoing volunteer remembering to mention it to whoever takes the desk next. The School of Continuous Improvement has been awarded an Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund grant to stop relying on that memory.
The funded protocol pairs a photographed condition record for every tool currently on loan with a witnessed sign-off between the outgoing and incoming coordinator at each handover, and a standing rule that no ledger entry closes until both signatures are on the page.
A ledger that changes hands without a witness isn’t a record any more. It’s just whoever’s turn it is to guess.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory, School of Continuous Improvement
Co-grantee Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow, said the ledger had quietly become exactly the kind of proxy her own research keeps finding: a blank space next to a tool’s name gets read as “fine” by whoever’s next on the desk, whether or not anyone actually checked.
The grant carries $71,238 and, the School hopes, an end to the ledger’s habit of inheriting a coordinator’s confidence along with their handwriting.
Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund: Formalising the Handover of a Neighbourhood Tool Library's Loan Ledger · $71,238 · awarded to Osei Vandermeer, Mirela Hanke