LD partners with Betty Brinn Children’s Museum.
In other metro areas around the country, non-profit organizations have formed to address this challenge. They solicit donations of excess materials from area firms and make them available to educators at low cost. Better known among these are RAFT, with locations in California and Colorado, and the Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse.
Teachers attending our monthly Collab Labs expressed concerns about the cost of materials. That got us wondering what options we have in Milwaukee for an organization doing something similar. We brought the idea for a corporate challenge to The Commons (who provides space for our Collab Labs in Ward 4 and helps facilitate our break out groups). They agreed that this would make an interesting challenge for students. So earlier this month we got the green light to pursue that with a team in this semester’s cohort.
We partnered with Betty Brinn Children’s Museum to formulate this challenge over the past weeks. We are challenging a team to create a pitch for a sustainable startup to provide surplus materials to the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum’s Maker Initiative as well as area school’s maker programs. We spent Sunday afternoon at Ward 4 with Carrie Wettstein and Mike Cook from Betty Brinn to introduce our challenge and meet prospective team members.
The project will kick off on the 21st when team rosters are announced. Our team will work with Mike Cook and the makers at Betty Brinn to understand their needs. Joost and I will serve as the team’s coaches through the process. We’ll help connect them with area schools creating or running makerspaces/FabLabs so they can understand the K12 perspective as well.
We are thrilled to have the opportunity (Thanks, Joe!) and look forward to the work. We’ll keep you posted on the team’s progress and opportunities to see what they come up with.
