Our Crowdfunding Groups
Māk (pronounced “make”) is a social enterprise whose mission is to empower urban youth to become 3D designers. Our mission is to provide our youth with the STEM and design skills they need to solve important problems facing their own communities.
We connect high school students to college engineering and architecture students through a 3-month long 3D design training program. These students, who have experience working with renowned professors and industry professionals, will serve as mentors and teach these students professional-level 3D design skills. After the 3-month training program, the students will work on a 3-month design internship with Māk. During this internship, students will work on real-world projects outsourced by design companies and firms.
We are currently partnering with Oakland Technical High School's Fashion, Arts, and Design Academy to bring our 3D design program to all the Advanced Arts students.
Three of us co-founded Māk in 2015: Ankita Joshi (Mechanical Engineering), Michelle Nie (Business), and Aubrey Larson (Public Health). We all met while taking a Social Entrepreneurship class at the Haas School of Business, and we bonded over our shared dream of using STEM education to economically empower youth.
We saw 3D printing as a huge opportunity in the job market, and we realized that no youth training program focused solely on such an important skill. Thus, Māk was born to bring 3D printing training to urban high schools!
In April 2016, we won 1st Place in the 2016 Big Ideas at Berkeley competition in the Financial Inclusion category. After long, coffee-fueled nights of revising our proposal, we finally won the seed money to start our initiative.
We also represented Māk at the Clinton Global Initiative University 2016 conference held at UC Berkeley. We met other students and mentors who were essential to our program's development. And we also got to be in the same room as Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, Salman Khan, Cady Coleman, and John Lewis! Read more in the Berkeley News.
We are raising $5,000 to help build a makerspace inside a public space in Oakland and to help provide scholarships to our students for completing the program.
We aim to build a public makerspace, complete with multiple 3D printers, a laser cutter, raw materials, and safety equipment. Our inspiration was Do Space in Omaha, NE.
The makerspace is essential to the success of our program because our students will be able to test their own creations and see the tangible results of their design work. It will inspire them even more to become engineers and designers in the future. We will also open up the makerspace to other Oakland Unified School District students and community members who fill out an application.
Last but not least, we will provide scholarships to our students at the end of the program to contribute to their higher education and other forms of future learning (we hope they will choose UC Berkeley)!
Video Credit: Cal Delta Kappa Alpha
A facebook status on Mak's page thanking you for your contribution and telling you what the contribution will be used for.
A card thanking you for your contribution and telling you what your contribution was used towards.
A 30 minute Google Hangout Session with the Mak Founders to chat about our progress and future plans.
One of our students will send you a note thanking you for your contribution and updating you on what they are learning in class. The founders will also hangout with you over Google and share more on Mak's progress.
Once our maker space is ready, we will invite you to a tour of the place, demonstrate some ongoing design projects, and give you an update on the progress of Mak.
You will get a gift designed and 3D printed by one our students along with a note thanking you and telling you what they are learning in class.
