“Sometimes the simplest ideas can have the biggest impact,” Nic Marchesi tells BuzzFeed News.



It’s good advice – and Marchesi knows it. After all, it doesn’t get much simpler, or more impactful, than Orange Sky, the mobile laundry he founded with friend Lucas Patchett in 2014. The two men, now 21, came up with the easy way to wash and dry the clothes of homeless Australians while thinking of ways to get their schoolmates interested in volunteering after graduating.

Marchesi already had a van, and the pair successfully pitched their idea to a laundromat supplier. "They had a few questions and qualms, but eventually said 'OK, let’s go downstairs and pick out the machines you want'," says Patchett. "It blew us away." Three weekends, twenty trips to Bunnings, and a lot of experimentation later, they had the world’s first mobile laundry.

Two days after the charity launched, it blew up online. “I remember waking up and we had over a thousand emails in our crappy little Gmail account because we had trended overnight on Reddit,” says Patchett. The media attention led to donations from people around the world, and within a couple months, a second van hit the streets. Now, there are five vans across Australia and almost 300 Orange Sky volunteers wash thousands of kilograms of laundry a week.

But just as important as the practicalities of clothes-washing are the conversations volunteers have with Orange Sky clients, says Marchesi.

“You spend a few minutes driving to a location, press a few buttons and the machines are running – and then it’s time to have a chat. The great thing about those conversations is that they’re making a massive impact."

Patchett recalls one conversation that really opened his eyes. Jordan, who was getting his clothes washed by Orange Sky, had gone to school just down the street, and studied the same degree at university.

“This guy has had the exact same past trajectory as me, but a few wrong turns, maybe a few poor decisions and he’s found himself living on the streets,” says Patchett. “That’s something I think about a lot – one or two or three tiny things can go wrong and you can find yourself in the really unfortunate situation.”

As for the next generation of social entrepreneurs, Patchett's advice is simple: give it a crack. “Everyone has ideas, everyone can drink beers and sit around a table and talk crap. But it’s the next day, taking it from that ideas stage into doing something.”

“What we’ve come up with is not the next cure for cancer, it’s not a multi-million dollar machine that saves lives,” adds Marchesi. "It’s a simple thing with a massive impact."