Interview of Rachel Sadd by Dorothy Jones-Davis

Makerspaces are central to the communities within which they reside. Ideally, a makerspace’s membership reflects the community, and its mission is responsive to the needs of its community. But what does it look like to truly commit to your community? Dorothy Jones-Davis interviewed Rachel Sadd, Executive Director of Ace Makerspace in Oakland, CA.

Ace Makerspace has been around for 11 years, and I’ve been a member for 10 years.

What’s really cool right now is coming out of the pandemic, not only myself, but other Ace Makerspace leaders really recommitted to it. We recommitted to the organization, to the community, and also took a really hard look at it and decided to update the mission.

And the mission now kind of has my soul in a way that maybe the previous one had lost a little bit of a grip on my soul. 

Our new mission, it’s got all the foundation of the old one. But really, 

..it’s about bringing people together so they can learn, and create, and solve life’s really big challenges in a space with amazing technology and project-based education, and doing it in a way that it’s inclusive. It’s for everybody, for everybody in Oakland and beyond Oakland. 

And that, to me, grips me amazingly, because, I mean, I believe in community. I really do. 

We are more together than we are apart and that we do have a responsibility to the other people in our community, which is kind of a different approach than the individualism that a lot of America was founded on. And I also believe in the opportunity that makerspaces bring to the world. A truly inclusive makerspace is going to make things available that are previously only available to privileged people, like technology, networks; just space and time to be creative, to be innovative, to have positive experiences where you have agency as an individual. And in the world these days, those are really treasured things.

And the results that come when people, all kinds of different people, come together to do those things are amazing. And they’re not just beneficial for people who are not privileged, they’re beneficial for everybody at the table. And the results that come out of those interactions are more amazing.

Whether it’s just somebody taking a different attitude to the workplace and being inclusive in their workplace or inventing the next thing that helps us, you know, solve or mitigate harm from climate change.. the potential is just huge. And I really think that what happened in the pandemic truly proved that with makerspaces, especially our ability for rapid local response.

Now, when I first got into doing this, this heavy volunteering and being a leader at Ace, I had an idea of that. I was like, I think it’s this, I think this is potential. I think this is where I want to put my energy. And at the time I was leaving tech – I was a front end developer in big finance, specifically for investment products.

You can see how working in a nonprofit and working where I was in tech might not have a lot of parity with those things, because at the end of the day, in my heart of hearts, I’m a socialist, and I was spending all my time working for capitalists, and working for something that I didn’t truly believe in. I did it for all the reasons that people do – to survive and to raise my kids as a single parent, and all of those things. But I was having a very typical tech experience, as a racially ambiguous-appearing woman in a tech group.

I was the only person who was not a man on my team, and I was just having all the typical experiences. I was told to, “wait and give the other guys a chance to talk before you say your ideas”. And when I asked my boss, “what are you talking about? Are my ideas bad?” And he’s said, “no, your ideas are good, but you should really let so-and-so speak”, and I’m thought to myself , it’s not my job to slow down for somebody. You know, [the other guy can] catch up, or prepare, or whatever it is, because the other people that are snappy in meetings, they bring other wonderful things to the table. But don’t ask me to be less.

Or I’d have that typical experience in my job where we go to a meeting, and I’d say the ideas that were my ideas for solving a problem or achieving a goal that we were trying to achieve. And at the beginning (it’d usually be the beginning of the meeting) somebody would say, “oh, that’s interesting.” And then we talk about it more. And then one of my male peers would repeat my idea, and they’d even say my name, “I believe Rachel said we should….You know, Rachel mentioned da da, da, da da. And it’s a really good solution because of da da da da da.”  And still, when the bosses or folks in power would spin back the notes from the meeting, it would be, you know, “that [insert name of guy] has really good ideas. And that’s what we’re going to run with.” And I’d just be like, “what’s the point?” And it was that typical experience with that, and, the pay disparity, the whole deal. Five, six years ago when I was leaving tech, I was feeling super powerless.

I was feeling powerless to affect my own pay disparity and advance in my career. I was totally emotionally disconnected from the work I was doing because I didn’t believe in it. Even though I love being creative every day.

And there was social unrest, not to the scale that we experienced here in the pandemic. But, we were coming off huge protests, especially here in Oakland, just looking at housing disparity. And I was feeling powerless in that way. Even with small contributions. And I just looked around in my neighborhood and I thought “you know what, maybe you can solve this for the world. And those are things that I’m feeling are maybe too big. But maybe you could just make your local space less icky.”

Followed quickly by the thought, “I have the power to do that?” And so I joined the Board at Ace, and shortly after joining the Board at ACE for the second time, the existing ED was like, hey, I think you’d be really good at this job. And we as the Board would like to ask you to do this job. And I told them, “Hey, I’m a raging feminist, and I mean that in all the ways those words can be interpreted – with passion, with zeal, unapologetically, a feminist, an intersectional feminist. And if you want me to do this job, I’m going to go for big change. And if you’re not down with this, I should not take this job.”

And when I took it, there was a fifty dollar a month stipend. It wasn’t even a jobby job. I was just like, “OK, that’s a first. Like one of many problems we will solve.” And I went for growth.

They said they were down and I was like, all right, here we go, here’s our journey. It was nothing like what they expected. It was nothing like what I expected. You get under the hood of any organization, you find a lot of interesting things. And I found that some of my experiences that I was having in tech, followed me. And figuring out how to manage that and not to let that beat you down, was a real interpersonal journey of like, “oh, no. If you’re trying to move this cruise ship of shitty culture, how are you going to approach this in a way that isn’t about telling people how awful they are, how shameful they are?” And what really kind of struck me, was that it was going to have to be about systematic things, and not quite the traditional focus of interpersonal interactions. And it really was about changing norms. There were many things that happened over time during the adventure of the last five or six years. But I really feel like we did the work. There was a critical mass of willingness to do the work, even within the constituency of privilege (generally speaking, educated, older white men), that really made it possible. But it wasn’t the “isn’t this obvious, here’s the solution, folks”,  and then have them [embrace it] like, “yay, it’s socialized”. No, it was nothing like that. It was such a different slow, more preparative arc. When I think about it like cooking, it was that whole thing where you’ve got to wait for the bread dough to rise. And I’m not a patient person. I was feeling more urgency, “oh, but no, we’ve really got to do this.” We’re really actually just now starting to see very tangible outcomes of that, which is kind of amazing. We did a bunch of things in a very maker way to address it.

I designed what we call “soft skill courses” by working with consultants. We now teach people how to share. And it seems like such a simple thing, like, “oh, now we know how to share.” But I’m like, no, “share things that you find valuable with people not like you.” Now, let’s take that again, and it’s like it turns out to be kind of crazy and kind of awesome. I still to this day am having some of “those” experiences. When we were talking about the fact that one of our committees was imbalanced representationally, and I’m like, “one of you white folks need to step off, because we don’t have the bandwidth to recruit somebody who’s not of that privileged sphere. So to balance it percentage-wise, one of you need to not be here”, and they were taken aback and began to rationalize why they were the exception, et cetera, et cetera.

And another board member in the conversation actually said, “you know, I thought that you considered yourself a person of privilege”. And I’m like, all right. So we’re going to have this conversation again about how, you know, privilege is dimensional. And I had to explain to them in really simple terms.

And it landed, which I’m stoked about. My response was — “Yes, I’m privileged. I’m doing a job that I’m passionate about. I’m able to afford to live in the neighborhood where I can do that job. I have access to technology, and networks, and people via makerspaces. I get to realize all the benefits personally for the other part of my career as an artist for that. And in order for me to keep it and have it, I have to work harder. For me to have even got here, to have the privilege I have today, was not the journey you went on to get there.” It’s still an interesting conversation in that regard. 

I’ve also learned to be extremely cautious about who I put in positions of power. And I daily, I’d say daily, fight my biases, when it comes to men of privilege behaving badly, and also have to trust myself. If my Spidey sense is going off, I got to just roll with it, you know, and go, no, maybe don’t give them a title, and let’s see how they treat people first and then give them a title, that kind of thing.

So, that’s how I got to my career spot that I’m in at the moment. Not how, I got to the beginning of that story, but that’s how I ended up here right now, recommitting after a crap year and change, year and a half of pandemic stuff and losing half our income stream and me wondering if I’m going to have a job that can afford to insure me – any of these things. And looking at the future and going, yeah, that’s a lot of work for us to recover. And it’s amazing work and it’s still worth it.  It’s still what I’m going to do today, and being able to bring all the benefits of a makerspace to, you know, the town that I love, Oakland, and just even putting it out there in the world in general, still captures me when I get up every day, and doing it in a way that, is a little defiant. I’m now taking this thing that used to be for privileged people and saying, fuck that – it’s for everybody. And both people of privilege and those who are marginalized will benefit from it, if it truly is for everybody. And so I still get up to do that every day.