Culture Connection: Equity at the Fab Foundation

Interviews with staff by Sherry Lassiter

As a white woman, and as part of the leadership of the Fab Foundation,

I want to support those who have been excluded, as they take control of creating their own technological futures.

Fab Foundation is a global organization that reaches a diverse community of makers and educators.

How can we make digital fabrication and STEM education tools provide true pathways to economic opportunity, community resilience and build wealth in excluded communities?  Can we provide systemic solutions?  Can we break down the barriers to equitable participation in the 21st Century economy? These are all issues that we struggle with, and it is difficult to know where to start and how to be effective.

This exploration begins within our own organization, by listening to members of our staff, hearing about their experiences with equity at the Fab Foundation. There are valuable lessons to be learned here at home. I’m starting with my colleague Aidan Mullaney. Aidan is the Senior Manager of Educational Programs at the Fab Foundation, and has been working for several years in Boston area schools with teachers and students on STEM education– leveraging the tools and processes of digital fabrication.  Here are some of his reflections on equity at the Fab Foundation. 

Aidan Mullaney Interview

One of the things I was immediately introduced to at the Fab Foundation, was how global the Foundation is. Such as our staff, our staff is from all over the world and we work all over the world.  What has been most interesting has been how equity is based in all the work we do. 

An example of this is Jean-Luc Pierite, of the Tunica-Biloxi tribe in Louisiana. He did a presentation for us all about his work in procurement, shipping and logistics, and talked about how  our equipment and materials are being moved all around the world to places where they weren’t made, which was a concern for us all. He was able to share his thoughts about why he is passionate about this work and how he (and all of us) bring equity to this work.  He radiates pride around the importance of the work he is doing. It showed how equity needs to be infused in the Fab Foundation, both in our staff and our cultures and backgrounds as well as in the work.

One personal way that I learned about equity in my education work, was through Nettrice Gaskins.  She was writing a book and creating lessons around culturally relevant educational content.  The lessons she created at the time were inspired by, and based on themes from the movie Black Panther.  I was working with Black and brown students with our mobile fab labs at the time. Her work made me think about how we could make the lessons I teach more equitable, that is, relevant and equitable to the communities we serve.  I was working in front a group of students who didn’t look like me (white),  and I wanted to be sure they knew that they didn’t have to look like me to be a digital fabricator, that they can do this too. 

Black Panther inspired lesson content from Nettrice Gaskins lessons. (Image/excerpt retrieved July 13, 2021 from: https://www.scopesdf.org/2018/07/12/launching-into-the-world-of-wakanda-through-digital-fabrication/)

3D and laser fabrications using Adinkra Symbols (Images: Fab Foundation 2019)

After Nettrice wrote a series of lessons for the Black Panther collection, we were asked to go out and test these lessons. We wanted to see what these lessons looked like in classroom, how the students responded, etc.  I was white, teaching to Black and brown students, and feeling like I wasn’t the best representative for this work. But the experience pushed me to be an advocate for this kind of work, and for getting this kind of lesson into classrooms.  One lesson was about making jewelry, but it was also about West African symbols, and the African artisans who made it.  While I was uncomfortable teaching this lesson at first, it really helped me become an advocate for this work and for the students we were working with.  It is important for enhancing Black culture in America.

This has pushed me to want to make sure that the educational content is relevant culturally and developmentally rather than cookie cutter.  An example of this is a 3D Printing lesson we developed for schools.  Students were to design and make shoe inserts for a sports technology/wearable device lesson.   We taught this in several schools.  But in Lynn Massachusetts we learned to make the lesson more relevant. The Lynn Commons is built in the shape of a shoe. Lynn became shoe capital of the world, due to the fact that the original shoe lasting machine was invented by Jan Matzelinger, who immigrated to America from Suriname. The students of Lynn had a better lesson, not just about shoes and shoe technology of the future, but also about putting a face, a Black innovator’s face, as the person who revolutionized the shoe industry.  So this information connected us so much better to students in Lynn and they were more engaged in the learning.

(1) Student designing a shoe insert (Image: Fab Foundation 2019.) (2) Jan Matzelinger and (3)  his plans for the Shoe Lasting Machine. (Images retrieved July 13, 2021 from: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jan-Ernst-Matzeliger)

Another example of this happened in Lawrence, MA.  The students there visit a bodega every day across the street.  We thought that instead of doing a lesson around making a personalized sticker, we should do a project around making a holiday card that they can sell in the bodega. So they made cards that could be sold in La Marche, the name of the bodega, and the students were engaged beyond doing something personal to doing something for the community.

Equity at Fab Foundation, under its larger umbrella, and specifically the educational work that I do is really important. Learning about equity has been in some ways empowering while also reconciling racism in America and the lack of BIPOC representation in digital fabrication and STEM education.

The push for equity at Fab Foundation is both necessary, and affirms the work we have been doing all along.  It is providing a vocabulary for us, aligning and realigning our pillars in education.  The equity work we are doing is so important due to the students and teachers that we serve.  It is not just important, but imperative that we do this, if we are going to be successful in providing these opportunities to schools and students across the area.

I don’t have a road map or a vision for equity for Fab Foundation, but I would love to test out some of our lessons, or look back at the content that we’ve done in the past and really strengthen and add cultural relevance to it.  Make it more relevant to students who have been pushed out by biases or institutional racism. I would love to go through it all and use resources that we are finding and making to re-evaluate and re-build these lessons to be relevant.  I’d like to add entrepreneurial elements to the learning.  This would allow students to design and fabricate AND create things that they could make money and sustain themselves with – using digital fabrication.  This would allow us to spread opportunity more equitably.