Homeless and Makerspaces

[Bob Waldron]

Here's a pretty cool story about one way that a makerspace is helping the community where it's located:

Homeless to hacker: How the Maker Movement changed one man’s life  http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/16/homeless-to-hacker-how-the-maker-movement-changed-one-mans-life/  “…Scott Glover and Marc Roth are feeling quite comfortable at this branch of Peet’s Coffee. Roth tells me that the homeless spend hours on end in coffee shops, which offer optimal shelter on chilly days like this one. Glover is in town for a three-day gig providing protection detail at the annual Veteran’s Day Parade. His current employers don’t know he’s homeless. Roth is no longer living in shelters, but he can relate to his new acquaintance’s transience. Until last year, he was living in his car, in hostels, the BART…and in shelters around San Francisco…His ideas…include a food delivery service, a laser company, and a hardware accelerator program…Whatever he does next, Roth intends to hire from within the homeless community, which he views as a hotbed of untapped talent. One wintery morning in 2011, Roth awoke after a rough night in a homeless shelter in San Francisco…When he spotted a business card for TechShop in the shelter’s garbage bin, it seemed like a sign. Intrigued…he spent his remaining dollars on a membership and a few introductory courses…His first core discipline was 3D printing, the process of making a solid object from a digital model, as members don’t need to pay for the materials. “I was studying 10 or 12 hours a day, seven days a week,”…it didn’t take long before TechShop’s most dedicated member began to receive requests for help. A number of other makers desperately needed an extra pair of hands…Many of them were freshly-minted after successfully raising funds for their projects on sites like Kickstarter. A dab hand with a laser cutter, Roth could charge upwards of $20 an hour. Within a few months, Roth was able to move into a house for startup founders…Similarly to Roth, Lang’s living situation was unstable. For the past year or so, he had resided on a sailboat…After discovering TechShop, he saw an opportunity to reinvent himself as a maker. Lang learned how to build robots and work with machines in less than six months. His first project, a mini submarine for amateur ocean exploration called OpenROV, raised $111,000 on Kickstarter. Lang would later hire Roth on a contractual basis…Roth is now an entrepreneur with a funded laser company. He threw himself into design with such gusto that he’s an Autodesk instructor, consults for LeapMotion, and teaches seven classes at TechShop…His dream is to build his own version of TechShop called “the Learning Shelter” that specifically caters to the homeless…”