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Reaching Outside the Walls of your School
Reaching beyond your immediate network of colleagues and peers can often lend itself to identifying potential partners in your local community. It is helpful to have thinking partners and collaborators to help support making in your space. Below are some questions to consider to help target potential partners and collaborators:
- What kinds of relationships are currently fostered in your space? How can you facilitate expanding these relationships with the community around you?
- Who, in your immediate and extended community, supports your space? What roles do they play?
- Who could, but doesn’t, support your space or program?
- What kinds of activities, events, and/or structures could be put in place so these people or groups would be more likely to lend their support to your program or space?
- Who isn’t at the table but should be? Think about a diversity of experience, different kinds of educational settings and roles, pay attention to race, ethnicity, gender, and age, and ways to reach educators in need.
Don’t limit yourself, use the resources and networks available to you. Partnerships can be found in a variety of places: makerspaces, community workshops, museums, libraries, a county office of education, or companies that make or design. Think broadly! This could include a job-site, a kitchen, or a even a local cafe.
After you have brainstormed your responses to the questions above, set a coffee or lunch date to meet with a potential local community or organizational partner.
Resources:
- Check out Maker Ed’s Purpose, People, and Parts planning tool which includes guiding questions and themes to help you design and plan makerspaces and spaces for making