Springdale celebrates, plans for permanent makerspace

SPRINGDALE -- The 30-day Innovation Hub NWA pop-up ended Saturday with a block party and a community meeting to help plan for a permanent makerspace in the community.

The creative space was featured in the former Church of Christ building on Holcomb Street and was made possible through the coordination of the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub and an $86,000 grant by the Walton Family Foundation.

The Arkansas Innovation Hub is a Little Rock-based nonprofit group working to inspire innovators and entrepreneurs to expand the range of educational and economic opportunities for communities.

The hub served more than 850 visitors overall, said Shannon Anderson, mobile makerspace director with the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub.

"We have a core group of around 50 folks who have taken multiple offerings here," Anderson said.

The makerspace featured five, four-part classes, 20-25 workshops and more than eight community events, to include Saturday's informal community meeting and block party, she said.

The block party was a celebration of creating, art and the Springdale community that featured live music, make-and-take activities, artist booths and food trucks, Anderson said.

The community meeting was offered to create an advisory council working to establish a permanent makerspace in Springdale, she said.

"We've catalyzed the community around the concept," Anderson said. "We have people who want to be members of this place and volunteer to support it."

The hub helped determine the need for a permanent makerspace to support the underserved in Springdale, to include the community's Native American, Hispanic, Latinx, Marshallese and black populations, she said.

Samuel Rivera Lopez, 22, of Springdale worked as an intern at the pop-up because he saw the potential for the community to learn from the experience.

"There're certain things in life that I look at as pivotal," Rivera Lopez said, explaining the makerspace offered a skill sharing platform through which participants could gain the know-how and resources necessary for financial success.

The pop-up also allowed people to better understand how to create from an entrepreneurial standpoint, he said, as participants learned about the transactional concepts that can become part of creating through the exchange of money, goods and services.

The need for a makerspace in Springdale is evident in the manner in which participants entered into the experience, Anderson said. Many saw the professional development and creation skills they learned at the hub as a means for thriving, rather than simply surviving from day-to-day.

"It's so wanted and needed in a place like this," Anderson said.

The Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub will remain a resource for determining the way forward for the advisory council, she said.

"It's easy to start things. It's hard to maintain them and keep them going," Anderson said. "We can help them in the stumbling places."

There's a lot to overcome to establish a permanent makerspace, she said, to include determining what resources to purchase, creating effective marketing and finding a permanent location.

The Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub staff will put together a report on the experience requested by the Walton Family Foundation, Anderson said. The report is anticipated to be complete in mid-December.

The report will address specific questions the foundation would like answered, as well as what else was learned through the experience, she said.

"We want to look at this and apply it to other areas of Arkansas," Anderson said.

The impacts of the pop-up makerspace have the potential to be long term, said Yee-Lin Lai, Walton Family Foundation program officer.

"Projects like the Innovation Hub's mobile makerspace in Springdale help us explore how these pop-up facilities can enable collaboration, a sense of community and idea discovery," Lai said. "Our hope is that programs like this foster a community that cultivates the innovators and entrepreneurs of tomorrow."

Part of that effort includes providing opportunities for future development of the eight local interns the pop-up employed throughout the experience, Anderson said.

She said she's exploring opportunities to bring the interns to the main hub in Little Rock to provide deeper training on what they're interested in so they can bring those skills back to benefit the Springdale community.

The hub's staff is also translating the curriculum used at the pop-up into Marshallese and Spanish to provide it as a future resource for the advisory council, Anderson said.

"Our goal is to get it back in next week," she said. "We realize this is a huge need."

Anderson recognizes the hub served as a catalyst for establishing a permanent makerspace but the talent and creativity for it to thrive long term was already present in the community.

"We didn't come here and make makers. Makers already existed here." she said. "They just need space to be. They needed space to share their own knowledge."

NW News on 11/24/2019