Decatur Makers Named Regional Hub in National Making Spaces Program
It’s very exciting for us to share that Decatur Makers was accepted into Cohort 4 2020 of the national “Making Spaces” program led by Maker Ed! Woot Woot!
The Making Spaces Program, supported by Cognizant and Google, is a Research Practice Partnership led by MakerEd and Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh (CMP) with educational institutions across the nation, and has an ambitious goal to sustainably incorporate making into learning environments across the country. Over this 30-month program, Decatur Makers will become a regional hub supporting maker-led education with 5 sites (schools, non-profits, libraries, museums, etc) that we choose, particularly looking to support underserved communities and Title 1 schools as part of our site selection.
This opportunity is right in line with our mission and vision as well as our strategic goal to be a national leader in maker education. We already provide Outreach programs for all things related to maker education supporting youth hands-on experiences, building out makerspaces, and teacher professional development. The Making Spaces program will help us provide better programming to a larger audience, extend our impact to incorporate Social Emotional Learning, expand our teacher professional development, assist with evaluation and assessment, support capacity building and help with sustainability, and give us a national platform to share our successes.
Long term, we hope to support schools and organizations to sustainably incorporate maker-led education into their STEAM programming across Georgia with the added bonus of creating a community where these education-based groups can support and continue to develop their programs together.
Stay tuned for more updates as we choose our sites for the first cohort, and kickoff the programs within these sites during the Spring 2021 school semester.
Interested in supporting this initiative for a school serving a low-income community? Your funds would go towards additional costs such as materials and equipment, artist and maker in residence participation, administration, and teacher stipends for their time. Please click here to make a donation (no amount too small!) and let us know in the Notes that you’re supporting Making Spaces. Thank you!