#8 Partnerships: Lessons I’ve Learned Working in Makerspaces on Building Successful, Creative Communities

Connecting you to advisors & investment to strengthen your asset value

Once your makerspace has been running for about a year, some of the outlines that define the form of your creative culture will have become visible. Your community’s interdisciplinary ability and collective super-power is creating new vantage points and finding value in the spaces between disciplines while individual stakeholders assist each other with entrepreneurial ventures.

Parallel to this, you keep one eye focused on your bottom-line, making sure that the magic they’re creating will flow out of your makerspace for years to come. The good news is that these two realities can work in tandem, perpetuating your creative community further, faster.

Begin by working with your internal stakeholders to determine how your creative community could solve external stakeholders' problems. You all know the culture of your makerspace best, so spend time thinking carefully about the value your community creates that is unique from anywhere else. The key is, differentiating how you will partner with external stakeholders to provide a unique value they will find nowhere else. Some examples I’ve piloted:

• Form a “skunkworks” to take on independent design to fabrication projects
• Run sprints and long-term projects that find value for corporate partners
• Develop a platform for STEAM education for local classrooms and libraries

Once you have identified what differentiates your creative space, build the mechanics to partner with external stakeholders. Through the resulting experiential work and exposure to new ideas, these partnerships will inject new energy into your community's creative capacity while growing a revenue stream to keep your makerspace in the black.

Artwork: Charlotte Moth; Kaleidoscopic thinking