[hackerspaces] One Lightsaber Per Child

[William Macfarlane]

Dear friends, comrades, hackers, punks, makers, weirdoes, etc:  please
spread the word as far and wide as you consider reasonable, given the
request/news.

Parts and Crafts Presents: One Lightsaber Per Child

We are excited to finally be offering DIY light[emitting-diode] saber kits
for sale again after a very long hiatus.  At the moment these kits are
primarily available for purchase at Parts and Crafts in Somerville, but a
limited number are available mail-order through our “Give One, Get One”
program.  Every kit purchased through this program goes towards funding a
free lightsaber building workshop with one of our partner Somerville
community organizations.

To purchase a light[emitting-diode]saber kit for pick-up, or through the
“Give One, Get One” program, visit our store -- store.partsandcrafts.org

All of our instructions are open source projects licensed under the CERN
Open Hardware License, version 1.2 which is available here --
http://www.ohwr.org/documents/294

Printed instructions for kit assembly come with the kit, but a digital
version is available here --
https://partsandcrafts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Lightsaber-Instruction-Pamphlet.indd_.pdf

The kit contains a number of pieces that we have manufactured or prepared
in some way, but they are all relatively simple to acquire and make.
Instructions for making all of the kit components yourself (as well as some
design notes) can be found here --
https://partsandcrafts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Howtomakealightsaberkit.pdf

---

Give One, Get One?

Parts and Crafts is running a fundraiser.  We're historically very very bad
at running fundraisers, historically very very bad at accessing money or
resources that aren't obviously self-made.

The truth is that we're bad at asking for things.  Mostly we're bad at
asking for permission, but we're also bad at asking for help (perhaps
largely because the many uses of money blur the line between the two.)

But I'm asking now.  If you buy a lightsaber kit at the give-one-get-one
price, you are not only getting a pretty sweet holiday gift for you and
yours, you're also giving a kid who wouldn't otherwise get the chance to do
so, the experience of building and having something awesome that they've
made for themselves.

---

Why do I care??

Well, I think we're doing something cool.  And I think we're doing
something that many of you agree is cool.  And good-for-the-world.
Something that should exist and that there should be more of.

We run a hackerspace for kids and their friends.  We run an
alternative-to-school for kids who find themselves in persistent
disagreement and conflict with the structures of traditional schooling.  We
run a drop-in, free community open-shop every Saturday for anyone, kid or
grown-up, who wants to come visit and make something and use our tools and
ask for our help.  We host the Somerville Tool Library -- a lending-library
for commonly used hand and power tools.  We run afterschool programs and
school-vacation camps for kids, all on a sliding-scale from free to
slightly-expensive where we offer kids our particular combination of tools,
advice, expertise, and autonomy, and encourage them to be as awesome as
possible.  We act as an event space for grown-ups -- we run periodic bike
repair nights and crypto-parties and random other interesting events.

We do all of these things with little-to-no institutional/grant support --
we fund our programs by asking that people pay for them if they can (and
asking that they come to them for free if they can't afford to pay.)  And
we fund our programs by asking ourselves to work long and hard and be paid
richly in good-feelings and having-access-to-cool-things, and having a
sense of ownership of your job and your purpose in life, but somewhat
poorly in actual-currency (which the landlords around these parts still
demand, unfortunately.)

It's hard to run programs for free when you don't have any money.  And it's
difficult to push really hard on making sure people who don't have any
money know about your programs, and know that they can come to them at
little-to-no-cost when you're looking at the spreadsheet trying to figure
out how the negative numbers and positive numbers can sum to zero.

We run fundraisers to make this part easier for us -- we run fundraisers so
that we can do the outreach to low-income communities we need to do to make
our work optimally meaningful without needing to worry too much about how
much this outreach will affect our fiscal solvency.

So if you can support us, thank you, thank you very much.  Our work isn't
possible without friends and helpers and generosity.  And if you can't,
well, we understand carry on and stay awesome and do your best.

-- 
-Will
www.partsandcrafts.org
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