Rachel Sadd on Community Creativity: ACE Makerspace
Blue Heart’s Lindley Mease had the honor of speaking with Rachel Sadd, Executive Director of Oakland’s ACE Makerspace. ACE provides inclusive and accessible space, tools, technology, and project-based education for traditional makers and craftspeople as well as digital and material hackers. ACE’s offerings are centered around the values of community, inquiry, growth, and action.
Interview edited for clarity.
Lindley: How did you come into this work, and what’s important to know about you?
Rachel: I’m the Executive Director at ACE Makerspace. I’ve been doing this work for seven years, but I have been a member at ACE for 11 years and change. It just turned 12 in May, so I joined after it was founded but, like, a minute later. At that time my kids were still with me and I was a single parent, and like many single parents in the Bay Area, I had a side hustle. My side hustle was creating bespoke fashion, mostly for Burners, which involves a lot of corsetry. Anybody who’s ever drafted something like that knows it’s cutting out the same piece over and over and over again, and stitching them together in a little feat of engineering that does things to the human body. I loved the drafting, and I loved the sewing, and I loved the designing, but I hated the cutting. And a friend said, “Hey, do you know about laser cutters? You’ve gotta come check out this laser cutter at ACE.” Basically it was a robot that did my cutting for me, and I was sold. I lost my mind. It made me more efficiently and more joyfully able to do my side hustle, it supported my family, and I was just in.
At the time I was working in tech, doing front-end development for big finance to support my children. It wasn’t what I believed in. I’m not a capitalist. But it had great health insurance, so I stuck with it until my kids were adults and could find their own thing and then I went into private consultancy while volunteering heavily at ACE. There was a lot of social unrest then, riots and protests happening in Oakland. I also left tech for the reasons that women leave tech. You know, the 17% pay gap, the constant microaggressions, all of those things. And I was feeling powerless. Then [ACE] said, “Hey, do you want to run this thing?” And I said, well, I am a joyful passionate raging feminist, and if you want me to run this, I’m going to go for growth, I want this place to look like Oakland, I want to make sure everybody can access this place, and if you guys aren’t into that, then we shouldn’t do this.
I’m passionate about it because I absolutely believe that when people can be supported and have access to resources, and different kinds of people come together, the solutions that come out of that community are exponentially better. It isn’t about charity. Homies Empowerment has this awesome phrase: “Solidarity, not charity.” It’s not about, oh, let’s include these people that were previously excluded. No. It’s about making the table better and bigger for everyone. It changed my relationship with the world and my ability to navigate these very interesting and challenging times. That’s why seven years later, even if my day is filled with kerfuffle and dumpster fires, I still want to show up and I’m still excited every day about this opportunity to create opportunity.
Lindley: Who is the ACE community?
Rachel: We are this Venn diagram between Oakland and tech. The East Bay is incredibly diverse in every way you can think about diversity, with exceptions perhaps for the weather. [Laughs.] It’s got a deep history of social change. If I want to understand and educate myself about the Black power movement, I can go do that with the actual people who were part of that 30 years ago, 60 years ago. That’s what Oakland is, and it’s got all the tensions associated with all that variety of humanness.
ACE is still an organization that came up as most maker spaces in the United States came up, as a social gathering place adjacent to startup culture and what’s called hacker culture. Both of those cultures, and maker spaces and hacker spaces in the United States have predominantly been by and for white men, AKA the people of privilege. When you think about who you’re going to see [at ACE], it’s still going to be a lot of guys, but we’ve moved that needle dramatically, and we’ve changed the culture from some of the things that could be toxic about monolithic cultures.
We also just kept our service offering broad. You can be the person who bought a fixer-upper and just need to fix a thing. You can be the person that just needs some hobby space. You might be a small businessperson and you can’t afford the tooling and space to do your thing. You could be a group of plucky friends who are starting up a product. You could also just be like, hey, I want to do something cool today, so let’s go play with lasers. We serve that spectrum with the idea that all those folks need good community, they need things to be accessible, they need awesome resources that are cost-prohibitive usually and space-prohibitive in our neck of the woods. And also strong community so they can access education, especially in non-traditional formats: peer learning experience, parallel play experience. So that’s the spread of it — we are the 65 year old quilting lady, we’re the tech person who needs to make something with their hands, we’re the small business owner who makes amazing home goods, we are the person who wants to teach their kid how to make a little robot. We’re all of those things, and we’re part of the greater community.
Lindley: Can you give a taste of what it’s like — what’s a day in the life at ACE Makerspace?
Rachel: Oh my gosh, everyone asks me that and I wish there was an average day. Last week there were three people co-working on textiles, one person working on designs for their leather bag line, a person learning to sew, a retired lady making her second-ever quilt, and some folks in the lounge on their computers, just chilling. And that’s just what was happening in one room, of six. I know in the wood shop, there was a fairly new person who was making their first bench, and later that evening there was an electronics get-together. We culled our stash of goods so we could give components to a local robotics team because we felt we were hoarding, so let’s put these back in the wild and re-home them with this robotics program at one of the local tech highs. That’s just an “average” day. There’s so many things that go on. We recently pulled our numbers just to figure out what the traffic is like. We’re experiencing 520 discrete visits per month. That’s not [the number of] people, because folks bring their partners, their guests, their children, their friends to work on things.
Lindley: Do you think of your work as political power building? How do you see yourselves as part of a broader movement toward social change?
Rachel: We are absolutely overt and upfront about the fact that we are in the business of disrupting systems of privilege. The tools we have, the education we have, the networks that are inherently there because of those things have previously only been available to people of privilege. It’s a systematic problem. We are in the business, in everything that we do, to disrupt those systems and ensure that everybody gets access, not just people of privilege. So that’s our first relationship with social change. Everybody gets the goodies, and really being very broad in what that means, and embedding that in our everyday moves. It could be something so simple as how we’re labeling things, what languages we use. How we design our spaces, whether it’s for beginners or experts. There’s a bunch of nuances systematically that we address and we’re always improving and learning.
On the flip side, we have looked at how we engage and what kind of community participants we are. If we are this amazing resource with this really nimble and robust ability to respond locally to situations that need help, then we have an obligation to do so because we can.
It’s also part of our effort to change that arc of culture from where we came from, to be of and by the people we want to serve. It could be anything from doing a site cleanup with folks who are living unhoused or it could be showing up and supporting an activity by some great organizations like Homies Empowerment or the East Oakland Collective. And it’s also things like our 500 Filters initiative. We can efficiently design and produce DIY filter kits that act as air scrubbers so people can make clean air shelters in their homes. We gathered the information for them to seal their home cheaply, and also translated it. We were in two languages last year, and we’re probably going to be in three this year. Our goal is to distribute 500 filters in Richmond and East Oakland this year. We’re working with Homies Empowerment as our distribution partner because we don’t need to rebuild the distribution wheel.
Lindley: I’d love to hear more about the ethic of mutual aid and how that’s operationalized.
Rachel: Mutual aid for us is multifold. At the end of the day, I have a roof and I have plenty of food and I have access to health care. If the people in my neighborhood don’t, it doesn’t work. Mutual aid is as much about the quality of my life as it is helping the person next to me or supporting them. And it’s not charity. Mutual aid is a vehicle through which we have a beautiful prosperous world. We want to aim for that, and it’s taking direct action locally to make that happen. It’s about doing something and learning from it and improving and doing it again. Which, if you’ve ever done it, is very much the process of making anything. So we’re applying that on a grander social scale. When you think about it, the maker space came up so that everybody could share resources. So why not share everything?
Lindley: What is your vision? How is the world different in five to ten years because of ACE?
Rachel: Locally, our vision is to be able to expand so we’re the appropriate scale for the size of the community we are serving, but also growing in a way that is driven by this community. We have a youth consultancy initiative coming up in the fall, and we’re hoping to do four of these workshops in the communities we want to serve. We love being independent. We are not beholden to a particular grant, so we get to go where we really want, and that’s really awesome. We don’t want to lose that quality of independence, but it’s going to be a creative adventure to fund.
And for the global perspective, we have a pretty innovative model, if one takes a deep dive into maker spaces on how to change cultures that are trapped in white supremacist systems, and also a pretty innovative operational model. We’re looking at making sure that model is accessible and repeatable in other spaces, and adjustable so it fits their context. That’s work that we’ve already begun to do. It’s pretty common to have somebody knock on our door from some other part of the country or other part of the world, at least a couple times a month, to go, “How do you do that?” Our lessons learned aren’t for us, they’re for everybody. The things we’re able to pull off, we want to amplify that.
Imagine: the world is what it is, and we’re having our suboptimal experiences at work or out in the world, but you get to have this one experience in a maker space where accountability isn’t punitive, and you have healthy reparations when bad stuff goes down, and you actually practice the art of sharing with other adults, and many of those skills are transferable out there in the world. How good is that?
Lindley: Beautifully said. I’m curious to hear anything you want to say about the power of space in organizing.
Rachel: If you think about the systems of oppression, one of the most tangible and profound things about oppression is erasing people. It’s erasing their experience, it’s erasing their personhood, it’s erasing the space they occupy, both physically and in society. If you create an opportunity for people to have space — people build it, people contribute to it, people make it what it is — that’s the first thing that we provide. That’s the bare bones. If all of our tools were erased tomorrow, we’re still solid. Even if we lost our lease tomorrow, we’re still solid because we’d still find a place to get together. But the creation of space is the opposite of oppression. Our location as we exist here today in Oakland, it’s awesome, it’s going to continue to be awesome, I’m going to roll in there tonight, it’s going to be beautiful, but at the end of the day it’s also just a laboratory to figure out how to make this goodness happen again, and then again, and then again.
