Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals, businesses, and governments have stepped up to contribute to community response and recovery needs. One type of organization brings all those players together while supporting their communities: Makerspaces. 

Many of these entities are steeped in community, providing classes, workspace, equipment, and other services to businesses, large and small, and to individual community members. As COVID-19 brought a renewed need for manufacturing capabilities, these spaces stepped into new roles; some becoming contract manufacturers or workforce aggregators, often providing needed income streams to neighborhood residents. We have highlighted four makerspaces and their efforts in a short piece, Makerspaces In Action: A Community-Based Response to the Pandemic. From Protohaven in Pittsburgh and Clubhou.se in Augusta, GA, to Open Works in Baltimore and The Foundry in Buffalo, we know we only scratched the surface with how makerspaces are contributing to response and recovery.

These makerspaces have been particularly impactful during this time because each had taken an intentional approach to connecting with their community well before the virus hit. As we wrote in InBIA’s Launching Your Neighborhood Place-Based Entrepreneurship Center Playbook, “makerspaces that are intentional about community partnerships can attract a greater diversity of participants.” This is critical for many reasons, top of which is that makerspaces can serve as launching off points for people to start and run their own business, supporting their ability to create wealth for themselves and their family.