2024 was such a major year for our fledgling Makerspace that we want to share some highlights from it! We weren’t the best at keeping the website up to date throughout the year, so consider this a catch-up and a promise to do better in 2025.
January saw our debut onto social media with the creation of our Facebook page and Instagram account! We also became the “home” for B-Sides following the dissolution of NokeCodes. Most importantly, we were granted our 501(c)(3) status, officially becoming a non-profit organization!
In February, we started to meet you all! We had our first community meeting, in the South County Library, and over 50 people came out to learn what we aimed to do and to share their opinions in our community survey. We also attended Big Lick Comic Con with a mobile cosplay repair kit, made our very own Reddit account, and opened our Discord to serve as an online community space. On the back-end we got a bank account so we could accept donations via PayPal and Venmo, started our location search, and preliminarily approved the MAKE Roanoke By-laws.
We got our very own Google Workspace in March, which is free for non-profits! This keeps us nice and organized and lets us have our own “@makeroanoke.org” email addresses. We also attended the Lynchburg Maker Faire and this month’s Community Meeting was graciously hosted by the Vinton Public Library.
April was a big month! We had our first Annual Meeting, this time at Virginia Western Community College, which saw the official voting in of the By-Laws by our membership (we have members!) and the election of our very first Board, made up of Georgina Flynn-Smith, Max Bareiss, Chris Santacroce, and Samuel Sullivan. VWCC would turn out to be a huge help, hosting all of our Community Meetings going forward. We marched in the Daisy Art Parade with our Maker Robot and participated in the Salem Red Sox’s Education Day where students and teachers were able to use a metal punch to make necklaces!
We had our very first Virtual Community Meeting in May, in addition to our regular in person Community Meeting. We loved being able to offer the virtual option so that more people could learn about us and join our MAKE Roanoke Community. We also attended the Star City Compost Fest and Clean Valley Council’s Reduce Reuse and Repair Fair!
In June we celebrated Juneteenth at the Juneteenth Family Reunion hosted by the Roanoke Cultural Collective at Eureka Park. People were able to use the engraver to make MAKE Roanoke tags, and use the leather stamping kits to create necklaces and bracelets. We also had our two community meetings!
We were thrilled to start hosting classes in July with our Intro to Electronics Class taught by David Sproles, at the Downtown Roanoke Public Library! Using solderless breadboards, students learned about the fundamentals of electronics, such as what a transistor, LED, and resistor are and how they work. We also attended B-Sides Roanoke at VWCC, and of course had our two community meetings!
We held our Intro to Hand Sewing Class in August at the Williamson Road Library. Taught by Georgina Flynn-Smith, Samantha Sullivan, and Dani Stein, students went from gluing fabric together to hand sewing their own dice bag in just a few hours. We also had our two community meetings and a table at Crash City Con!
September’s class was Intro to Cricut, taught by Jessica Arnold, Michelle Donohoe, Ettelie Lovern, and Samantha Sullivan. Located at the Blue Ridge Indie Market, students learned the basics of the Cricut software and machines and made a card and a heat-transfer design! And of course, we had our two community meetings!
October was a big month. In addition to the Measurements class taught by Chris Santacroce at the Downtown Public Library, and our virtual community meeting, we partied! In lieu of our in-person community meeting, we had a Kickstarter Launch Party at Golden Cactus on October 24. We hit 75% of our fundraising goal at this party, which featured our hand-crafted rewards and crafts and, of course, pizza! The full Kickstarter goal of $5000 was hit within 18 hours of launching, and we ended up raising over $10,000 on Kickstarter total, hitting our Stretch Goal to get a CNC Router (which has been obtained!).
We carried that momentum through into November where the headline was signing a lease! Our location, in the old Press-Press Merch building at 128 Albemarle Ave SE, shares a building with Motel Studios (a pretty rad pottery studio). Our volunteers got straight to work, braving tall ladders to get the dust stalactites down from the rafters and spending seemingly endless hours scraping glued-on lint from the floors. Even spending their Thanksgiving time off to sand and refinish the floors, and now they are beautiful! We also got a huge furniture donation from Lighthouse Church in Vinton, which furnished most of the space, and had our two community meetings (this was the last one hosted at VWCC!). And all that work didn’t stop us from having a very popular class teaching 3D CAD Modeling. Nick Dunne, Ettelie Lovern, Brian Alexander, and Samuel Sullivan taught a class using Fusion 360 and Solidworks at the VWCC computer lab.
December saw our biggest event yet, our Holiday Social! Over 60 people came, enjoyed some hot cocoa and cookies, and handmade an ornament or card. It was our first event in the space and it was so exciting to share that progress with the community. With the floors finished, we were able to move in equipment that we acquired through donations and purchasing, and focus on space planning. We had our virtual community meeting as normal, but this was the first time we hosted a community meeting in the space and we also held our second Board Elections! Samuel Sullivan retired from the Board due to work conflicts, and Nick Dunne and Samantha Sullivan were elected.
