For Makers Making Change Project Manager Zee Kesler, making and empowerment just naturally go together.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Zee’s work with the maker community includes spearheading Vancouver’s Maker Education Initiative.  She is also the co-founder of “Curiosity in the Classroom”, a maker club for sixth-graders.  And she’s been the lead on numerous mobile maker workshop projects–including the 2012 “Maker Mobile Workshops on Wheels”.

And now, she’d like to empower you–to get involved in making a difference.

Makers Making Change, an initiative of nonprofit Neil Squire Society, recruits maker volunteers.  The goal: to create low-cost assistive technology for people with disabilities.

in the Makers Making Change archive are more than fifty open-source projects. These include a wheelchair-mounted dog treat dispenser; a Braille keyboard overlay; and an adaptive bottle opener, for people with arthritis.

There’s also the LipSync, Makers Making Change’s flagship creation, which is a mouth-controlled device to operate a touchscreen!

So, what do they need?  As far as maker volunteers go, they welcome anyone who has the time to help.  Projects can be as simple as 3D printing out a device–or as involved as building a LipSync.

And they invite anyone with a disability to reach out and request a maker’s help, to create an assistive device.

Makers Making Change has done a number of events in Canada and the U.S.   They’ll host a “buildathon” in San Francisco this Sunday, March 31, according to their website.  And they’re headed to Toronto, for the Abilities Expo, happening April 5-7!

On this edition of Over Coffee®, you will hear:

• How the maker community first captured Zee’s imagination;

• How she first became involved with the Neil Squire Society;

• A description of Makers Making Change (in case you missed our 2017 interview with Neil Squire Society Director of Development Chad Leaman:

• What are some of the top devices people request to have created by makers;

• Several ways anyone interested can get involved and help;

• A number of upcoming events;

• How to get a presentation in your community!

• Methods of “hacking” toys, to adapt them for children with disabilities;

• A suggestion for makers who are into creating with textiles;

• An exciting upcoming maker-education project on which Makers Making Change is working!

• What Makers Making Change will need, in the area of help on theirnew project;

• What Zee learned about the maker community, during her work with Makers Making Change.