From being on the front lines of the incredible citizens-brigade effort to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and provide personal protection equipment to our medical providers and those most at risk such as seniors and the immunocompromised, I have the following observations and opinions:
• From my very rough count of various efforts, it looks like the maker community (encompassing thousands of makerspaces and tens or hundreds of thousands of self-proclaimed makers and crafters) has generated over 2 million pieces of PPE over the last couple of weeks. They are probably into a cool million or so dollars in donated materials and efforts nationwide. This is downright incredible! We need, collectively, a lot more mainstream media coverage on this. Check out www.getusPPE.org for a glimpse at this effort!
• Politics aside, our national pandemic response is in tatters, and without this collective effort of ours, more people would be at higher risk or dying. Medical responders would be devastated without the equipment we’ve been able to improvise and provide. We have proven, without a doubt, the value of the maker community and the makerspace as a disaster response center and invaluable community resource.
We have proven, without a doubt, the value of the maker community.
• Where is the money? A comparative I am going to use is celebrating the kid who works a bunch of odd jobs to pay off the school-lunch debt of his peers so that classmates can eat a lunch. Why are we raising this up and not demanding better funding? It is humanity’s beauty at its finest with that awesome kid, but fairly obvious that the powers-that-be are, in fact, counting on our generosity and can-do attitude to make up for civic shortfalls. At this point, every maker and space is out there pumping out PPE, but also clearing out every scrap of 3D-printer material and fabric, creating prodigious wear and tear on expensive laser cutters and computer numerical control machines. And at the end of this panic mode, we are going to be stripped of our spare change, machines heavily worn and spare stocks of everything gone. Who is going to pay for this? How will we recoup any of this?
• While I am not saying we should be sending out bills to hospitals and doctors and nursing homes, this massive volunteer effort has a cost. And this will affect operations and viability of many makerspaces and community-arts organizations, not to mention the effect of the social distancing and business operations restrictions have had on already tight bottom lines. We likely need a collective and loud effort to seek some support from the federal government to help the spaces and organizations that have given so deeply and without concern and regret. Billions of dollars have been set aside for major corporations and no-bid contracts and we-just-need-it-done efforts at the national level. This is not a bad thing mind you – we are in a crisis – but a few million to be spread around nationally to makerspaces would help ever so much.
• Hopefully we don’t lose all the amazing innovation knowledge and experience we’ve gained here in this crisis. We need a clearinghouse or coordination system setup for future disasters. We also need to see how we can get included more in the economic recovery and response process – that would include emergency and priority funding mechanisms to help pay for materials and labor. If the government has a hard time organizing a response to whatever given disaster, we’ve collectively shown that we at least can do a damned impressive job of it.
• The makers and places are an amazing collective resource. We have value, our skills, tools and spaces. I have seen incredible open-source creations, spaces diving in collectively to innovate on unbelievably rapid time frames. This is awesome. I have also seen a soda bottling plant spin up face mask fabrication in two days. Many of us have been working with local manufacturers and partners to take ad-hoc innovation and start making commercially made product in very short order. We need more of this. We can be one of the most important parts of economic disaster recovery, starting or working with small businesses, entrepreneurs introducing novel products, looking at how existing companies can have preestablished pivots to be helpful and economically viable in times of need. We need, however, to be included in the financial planning for future disasters. Current funding is important to beef up our diminished resources and enable us collectively to be the thing our nation needs for economic and community resiliency.
Todd Thomas is co-founder and president of Tinker Bristol, a nonprofit manufacturing incubator and makerspace.
