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MAKING HISTORY AGAIN
AWAREPRENEURS
Highlights from Sherry Lassiter’s Recent Podcast Appearance
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Paul Zelizer is a business coach focused on the needs of social entrepreneurs who work to increase positive impact and improve quality of life for the world’s citizens. He maintains a busy practice, consulting with impact-focused founders, leaders, and companies. He’s also the host of Awarepreneurs, a prominent social entrepreneur podcast and podcast accelerator, which just published its 332nd episode! Covering essential topics that range from the support of Black business to toxic positivity in social impact work to innovative climate action, Awarepreneurs is a platform for voices that the world most urgently needs to hear today.
We were fortunate to meet Paul last summer, when he invited one of our key partners for FAB23 Bhutan—Ujjwal Deep Dahal, CEO of Druk Holding & Investments—to join him on the podcast for a discussion about Leapfrogging to a Thriving Sustainable Economy in Bhutan. Recently, our President and CEO, Sherry Lassiter, sat down with Paul to share her perspective on A Global, Distributed Network of Social Impact Leaders with the Awarepreneurs audience. We’d like to highlight some of our favorite segments of that conversation here.
In the Beginning
The Labs were really the brainchild of a large National Science Foundation grant that we got at MIT to do research at the boundary of bits and atoms—what happens when the digital bits of the world merge with the physical atoms. We pulled together a small and more affordable subset of our digital fabrication facility at MIT, and we said, “What if we put these into communities around the world? What would they do with this?” If they had the ability to make almost anything that they could imagine, would this stimulate new business, new entrepreneurship? Would it stimulate education? So, we put the first proto-Lab in rural India and the next one in rural Norway and the next one in rural Africa. And it took off. Everywhere we put a Fab Lab, like three other Fab Labs sprouted. What we learned is that people really wanted to measure and modify the world around them in their own context. The network built itself, really. Every Lab that was established, there was so much interest in the community that the network would kind of naturally grow. And what we found after about 10 years is that some of these organizations were turning into anchor organizations in their communities. Instead of just being a shop or a makerspace or whatever, they were becoming community centers in a way. We realized that we needed to provide some networking glue, and that’s really where education came in. We started to provide educational resources because people wanted to go much further and much deeper with the technology. So, we engaged in global and distributed education programs, which really ended up being a big part of the glue that connected and bound this community together. And it has continued to cultivate a really strong community of practice. They share knowledge, but they also share ideas. They collaborate. They innovate. And they emulate one another. And it’s truly extraordinary. The education started around online courses—they’re really hybrid courses. We would offer a technology survey online that would allow people to explore all of these new technologies and capabilities. One course, which we called Fab Academy, spawned a whole portfolio of courses that are similarly posed. Each course is kind of a survey that exposes the student to the new technologies in this particular field. It worked so well that there’s now a growing community around it. Of course, once you do that with adults, there’s a lot of interest in getting young people involved. So, we started K-12 programs, giving educators the resources and the tools that they need to teach it in their own Fab Labs or in their own classrooms—providing content for free, online, such that this can develop its own community of practice.
On the Impact of the Fab Lab Network
There are many things that you can do with technology that will help you along your path to success. The community gathers around itself, and projects come to the surface. At the Fab Foundation, we try to help those projects find their potential. We might matchmake them with funders or support particular parts of the projects we feel are scalable and useful.
Examples of Regional and Global Impact:
Fab Lab Puebla — They set up a Fab Lab, and they started with their students at the university, their engineering and technical students. But they realized that there were many other ways that they could reach into their community and bring really good economic impact. So, they built a Super Fab Lab. They put together a two-year project, whereby they targeted the most demographically challenged parts of their community—these are usually small enterprises or family, local micro-enterprises—they brought them into their Fab Lab, and they taught them very basic digital fabrication skills. And one family, who had been barely able to support itself, within seven months was able to support eight people in their business! This particular project incubated almost 300 family micro-enterprises over two years by just teaching those basic skills. Of course, they also did some support in terms of teaching them how to market and helping them find the sort of legal or other resources that they needed to get started. It was a tremendously successful program. That’s the kind of impact that we like to see and that we see more and more around the world.
Pandemic Response — During COVID, makerspaces and Fab Labs around the world really proved their worth to communities. Many of these Labs stepped up to the plate, and they were making PPE, whether shields or masks or things to open doors or more sophisticated things like ventilators and respirators. And I think, in the first year, the statistics from Open Source Medical Supplies was that Fab Labs and makerspaces had produced more than 40,000,000 PPE articles for their communities. And most of that was done just as a donation. That’s tremendous! It shows that decentralized manufacturing is possible. It also shows what these kinds of interventions can bring to a community, in terms of education and resilience. It was really quite extraordinary.
The Fab Future
We’re trying to democratize access to these tools and to the knowledge for technical innovation. Right now, a Fab Lab costs about $100,000. We’re working on versions that cost $5,000 or $10,000—Fab-in-a-Box. Letting people have access to this technology and learn the skills that you’ll need to be a part of the 21st century for $5,000, that’s great, right? We want everybody to have access both to the tools and the knowledge. Another thing we’re thinking about is how we can support distributed manufacturing. It’s been everybody’s dream for a long time, but now it’s becoming possible and a reality. The network is getting big enough, and the support system is getting big enough and critically professional enough that distributed manufacturing could become very important in the future. During COVID, we all saw the supply chains completely fall apart. Can we now rebuild a world in which all of this happens locally, and it’s much better for our planet, in addition? We’re also looking to support building libraries of sustainable materials that are made and sourced locally for manufacturing. That’s a huge project that many people are working on. And we’re investing, both intellectually and financially, to make machines to manufacture new things in new ways. It’s just the whole idea of sustainability. We want to really make this world sustainable, and we want to distribute the economic opportunity that comes with creating technology. So, figuring out how to do that is on our agenda.
Lass’ Lessons Learned
- Push v. Pull: You have to open your ears and listen and not assume that what you have in mind is what the community has in mind. You have to listen to the pull. We had leaders from communities come to us and say, “We need this.” So, we followed the leaders. They didn’t follow us; we followed them. What we provided, of course, was the technical know-how and the technology itself, but you don’t do this in a vacuum. You don’t just drop technology somewhere and then say, “Good luck!” You have to work with a local champion that really understands what this is and what it brings to their community and that can help to sustain it over the long term.
- Network Effect: Distributed and decentralized is the way we’ve approached it. The network is really a democracy. They make the decision as to where to go and where to invest, and we kind of follow them. The glue that binds us is the technical community. It’s the technology, but it really is creating the space for the social part of that community. It’s not just the machines; it’s the people. And so it’s really about how you support that social interaction and that social network. It’s so important: the social part, the network effect.
- Leadership: Strong guidance and leadership is critical to invest in. There’s a tension between vision and democratization. While you want to be as democratic as possible, leadership and vision is absolutely critical. So, you need to keep infecting the network with new vision, with leadership, with new ideas.
- Funding: Social impact is hard to fund. Corporations want to fund a certain kind of impact that reflects on them. Government has very specific and narrow interests. Philanthropy is not doing as well right now as it used to be. Figuring out funding is really, really important. How do you fund yourself in ways that really allow you to grow? It’s something that I would recommend that you think about earlier rather than later.
Note that the preceding text from Sherry’s interview was edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full conversation here or on your preferred podcast platform:
We’re very grateful to Paul Zelizer and Awarepreneurs for sharing the Fab Foundation’s work with the wider world!