From: MakeX Palo Alto (MakeX)
To: Council, City
Subject: Request For Comment During 12/2/2024 Cubberley Community Center Meeting Date: Saturday, November 30, 2024 9:51:44 PM
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Hi!
We hope this finds you well. We are MakeX, a teen-run, free access makerspace running from Building V2 of Cubberley Community Center. At the upcoming December 2nd meeting, we'd really appreciate the opportunity to present our space to the community and board officials. We are hoping to express our gratitude to board officials for the space and resources we’ve been given access to for the past ten years. We would also like to share some input for the anticipated Cubberley renovation, if possible. We attached our comment outline below, and we would appreciate it if we could get about three to five minutes to share. However, we understand that meeting time is valuable and we are grateful for any amount of time you can give us. We were also wondering if it is possible to have multiple people speak during the time period?
Thank you so much for your time.
Best regards,
The MakeX Team
Remarks:
What is MakeX?
We are a teen run makerspace here at cubberley. The main barrier to those interested in building and making projects is often the cost of tools and knowledge. Here at MakeX, we break that barrier by being free access, while also exposing people from all backgrounds and ages to the joy of making. We open on Fridays and Saturdays, and we receive about 30 visitors each day, ranging from young kids, to high schoolers, and retired individuals. We also run regular workshops with the Bay Area community, leading various projects and introducing the concept of STEM- based learning to more people. Since October, we’ve run 3 outreach events, even hosting students from South Korea.
We would like to start off by expressing our appreciation for everyone at Cubberley and the City of Palo Alto. We understand how valuable building space is and we are very grateful and feel very fortunate that we have been given access to this space here at Cubberley.
We are approaching our 10 year anniversary in this space, which we feel is a huge milestone. The resources and space that you’ve given us have allowed us to bring the joy of making to more people, and these resources provide an amazing leadership experience for local high schoolers like us.
Like we said earlier, we host about 30 people each day in building V2. Our current building has allowed us to separate our tools into four rooms, giving our visitors a more streamlined making experience. The first is the printer room. Here, people are able to learn about and use our 3D printers, create t-shirts and stickers using the vinyl cutter, print out posters using our large format printer, and use our embroidery machine.
The second is electrical. This is where the brains of many projects come to life, with visitors working on projects such as drones, computers, and control boards. This room features tools such as a soldering station, electronics safety equipment, and many electrical components. Currently this room only is large enough for a single individual at a time.
Next is our main room. This is where visitors utilyze the open space and large workbenches to layout and put together all the pieces of their project. In this room, you can also find art supplies used by individuals to put the final touches on their projects, or simply work on art pieces. We are also excited about a CNC router that is coming soon to this room.
Finally we have our woodshop. Here, visitors come in and use our many machines and tools to woodwork, such as one of our recent visitors making his own chair. This room features safety equipment, a band saw, a drill press, a router, a chop saw, a planer, and many more woodworking tools.
Through the anticipated cubberley renovation plans, we would greatly appreciate access to an expanded space.
There are a few reasons why expanding the space would be beneficial to the broader community.
First, we would be able to utilize more tools with a larger space, and this would allow for more reach in the community, as well as increasing safety for our areas that use large tools and materials. For example, more space in the woodshop would make it safer and increase the amount of people that can work in it at once.
Second, we would be able to have more storage space for people’s projects and for backup supplies. For example, we host Gunn’s rocketry team, and our storage space is increasingly harder to access.
Finally, more space would allow us to increase the number of visitors we can accommodate, bringing the joy of making to more people.
We completely understand that it is a big project, and we are happy and grateful for any update that may occur.
Again, we really appreciate everything we have been given, and we can’t wait to see the updates that will come with this new project. Thank you so much for your time and attention!
If you would like to visit our website for more information, we have linked it here.