2. Co-Designing with the Community
Top takeaways
Engage with the residents to build awareness and trust.
Work with resident services and staff.
Reach out to local communities, including neighbors, potential partners, and industry.
Engage with the residents to build awareness and trust.
One of your first priorities should be engaging with the resident community. The maker movement that has swept across the country is a long way from representing the values, interests, and needs of diverse communities. Each affordable housing community is unique, so you are more likely to meet with success by developing a program that “fits.” It is also a new concept for many, so begin by connecting with what’s familiar, such as crafts, gardening, household repairs, even cooking. Everyone is a maker, after all.
Hold small gatherings and larger events. Try a dinner chat and chew paired with visual interest boards and topical questions, and larger seasonal events and annual traditions paired with activity tables, such as an annual fall festival paired with a light-up mask making activity table, or host a button-making activity (wildly popular!) at the summer resident appreciation BBQ. The concept of a makerspace in their community will start to become familiar, and supportive activity planning by the staff involved will begin to build trust. Consider putting out surveys (in the languages of your community), either under doors or passed out at events. This will give you more data to work with.
There are other means for building awareness and sharing information to consider, as well. You can create a website and use bulletin boards to serve as information hubs, and get the word out via existing forms of communication such as a texting system and flyers distributed under doors.
The Bayview Makes program: How we engaged with residents
We connected with the resident community first to learn if they were interested in a makerspace and if so, what kinds of activities, projects, and tools they’d like to see in the makerspace. Before we pursued funding, a team from CAST and Operation Pathways, the resident services provider, hosted a pizza dinner to discuss the makerspace concept with residents. We brought in large visual display boards with different modes of making and had participants register their interest with dots. This served as a great conversation piece (Why all the dots here, what about it do you like?), and gave us important data. Residents were clearly positive about the concept, so we moved forward and pursued funding from the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Informal Science Learning program.
Work with resident services and staff.
Work with your community’s resident services coordinator to get in sync with existing programs and goals and align your activities and programming accordingly. Better together.
Getting staff buy-in also has advantages. The facilities staff are key to helping with events (moving tables, providing extension cords, etc.), and office staff can be helpful with logistics such as key locations for flyers, welcoming and directing outside visitors, etc.
Meet Tsani, RSC
Tsani Rhodes is the Resident Services Coordinator (RSC) at Bayview Towers. She works with Operation Pathways to provide programs and services through four different pathways: Academic Achievement, Financial Stability, Healthier Living, and Aging in Place. She provides a voice for the community, input on the shaping of the activities and events, and critical support for the ongoing running of the Bayview makerspace program.
How this worked with the Bayview Makes program
Resident services at Bayview Towers are provided by Operation Pathways (OP). They use a coach-based model to work within the pathways. Makerspace facilitation at its best is also coach-based, and our activities and programming keyed into three of OP’s four pathways: Academic achievement, financial stability, and aging in place. This mutually strengthened and broadened the avenues towards the goals of OP’s pathways and the makerspace program.
Our makerspace internship program also benefited greatly, as youth would hear about the makerspace while doing a summer OP internship. They could “dip a toe in” to the goings on in the makerspace by helping with makerspace events, and would apply to be makerspace interns the following summer. This is critical for building leadership from within. For more on this, head over to the Sustainability chapter.
Reach out to local communities, including neighbors, potential partners, and industry.
Neighbor communities, libraries, other makerspaces, schools, community colleges and universities, potential partners, and local industry are all rich with potential. Get them involved! Invite them to maker showcases or to have a booth at events, and bring in experts to share about their work or teach a workshop. (More on this in the sustainability chapter.)