Cycles of Craft in American History — And A Place Called HatchSpace, Six Months In

America in the 1820’s captivates me. It is a time when vast forces and untethered passions shaped the landscape that we inhabit today. In my read of our history, it was a time when the first glimpses of our principal economic output became visible in such high contrast that, in a flash, multiple utopian impulses were birthed.

At around this time, Joseph Smith’s family left Vermont, precipitating a set of visions on the young farmer that inspired America’s greatest utopian community, the Mormon Church. Some years later, Thoreau experienced his own individualistic apotheosis at Walden Pond. In between and beyond all of this America raised inspired communities at Nashoba, New Harmony, Brook Farm and many others.

In American cities the expression of a utopian impulse took the forms of political organizing and craft societies. But the message of both was clear: work is moral. And out of these foundling times some of our clearest American voices — Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglas — were raised.

Why does this matter to me? How does it relate to our work together at HatchSpace? I thought to offer this sketch of American history because I believe — and I think my colleagues would agree — that ideas and context matter. Out of this early and active intellectual and physical laboring, the churning and chafing of experiences in search of meaning, the American arts and crafts movement was born. A movement that echoes deep within our labyrinthine times today.

For myself, a retreat to the immediate, the graspable, the shapeable is a natural response to our times. As a visual artist, there is no experience that is more wholly appealing and healing than to be lost in materials and process.

We’re coming out of an extraordinarily difficult time, each in our own way, with our own stories brewed in a common still. We’re recovering from a world-engulfing pandemic at a moment when the nature of work is being transformed and we’re undergoing this transformation at a time when it is known that our economic model is ruinous of our habitat. These are not small or trivial or easily dismissed realities. For myself, a retreat to the immediate, the graspable, the shapeable is a natural response. As a visual artist, there is no experience that is more wholly appealing and healing than to be lost in materials and process. The mind and body and communicative agency of the parts — that pathway of idea to manifestation — work together. All else fades away.

And that is at least, in part, why I am here at HatchSpace. To support the co-founders and board build a platform through which this experience can be shared. I happen to find our historical context interesting (I’m keen on Arthur Schlessinger’s concept of “cycles” of American history). As difficult as our times are, they are generative. And I hold fast to that.

Here, six months into this work — a “journey” I kid myself in some moments — I thought it may be worthwhile to offer our community of builders and makers, turners and joiners a view of the landscape in the way that I experience it.

Last night we held our first of what I hope will be many annual community meetings. Three things really struck me, and they won’t be a surprise to you. The first is the intimacy and personal nature of HatchSpace’s origins; this is a passion project, with all that comes with that. Second is how committed many of you are to your experience at HatchSpace; and the deep roots of desire to see us improve. And third, with those two realities, the nature of my work, which is to daily weave the weft and the warp of big picture thinking (abstraction) and operational detail (concrete representation). Holding together a workshop that is treasured by you while remaining attuned to the vision for growth are twin and tugging forces. Conjur images of that wonderful 70’s toy Stretch Armstrong (all unnecessary “heroic” references aside).

After some reflection informed by the themes and details of our conversation last night, I realize that the day-to-day space I occupy at HatchSpace can be defined in three dimensions. Imagine a cube, three axes in space; these are segments defined by the poles of strategic and operational detail, immediate and long-term action, and resource scarcity and resource availability. I’d like to thank member Tim K. for helping me to “see” and to recognize my world in this way.

As difficult as our times are, they are generative. And I hold fast to that.

Before we dive into the contours of this space, I have a confession to make. And it’s a hard one, but here it is.

As a young person, I had the very great privilege of growing up in Malaysia, Senegal and the Ivory Coast. These were my “salad days,” when I was green in thought to paraphrase Shakespeare. And they powerfully shaped my outlook and my ethos in this world. My young days in Senegal — and later as a scholar, an artist, and current board member at AYWA — have left me with a few unshakable beliefs. First, that “making” can be both a survival requirement and a privilege; where we fall along that spectrum can influence our behavior dramatically. Second, making can occur within contexts of resource scarcity and resource abundance; necessity truly can be the mother of invention. And finally, making generates knowledge; how that knowledge is used can determine the fortune of a community.

About a year ago I tried to summarize what I learned from six weeks spent at Dakar’s municipal dump, a fetid trap where some of the most hard working people I’ve met carve out a living “making” from the refuse of a major urban center. I bring these lessons everywhere I go; they’ve penetrated my being as much as the smoke of burning plastic filled my lungs on those trips.

So here we are. I find myself six months into an effort to build a lasting space for makers who use wood. We’re surrounded by this resource, sometimes as far as the eye can see. Thanks to the hard-won efforts of HatchSpace’s co-founders we have 8,000 square feet of accessible shop space in the heart of Brattleboro, Vermont. We share world class tools, an abundance of raw materials, and enough accumulated knowledge to make a show like Frontier House seem like a cake walk at Carlo’s Bakery.

And that leaves me thinking, “Where do we start? What is the unmet need here? What has compelled this space into existence and what will sustain it?”

It would be wrong of me to suggest that I have answers to these questions. Instead I think of this process as grounded and emergent. Grounded in the sense that the impulses that led to the founding of HatchSpace are valid; grounded in the sense that what is experienced locally as a public appetite is also being experienced across the country, and around the world. And emergent meaning that the process and conditions of unfolding determine as much of the outcome as the raw material and innate energies of the thing itself.

We share world class tools, an abundance of raw materials, and enough accumulated knowledge to make a show like Frontier House seem like a cake walk at Carlo’s Bakery.

With that, let me share three things that I’ve been working on at HatchSpace — three long-term and emergent indicators that I believe are grounded in the earliest impulses to create HatchSpace. These are inclusion, platform-building, and impact.

The American craft tradition, for a while informed by the European guild system, sprang out of the same entrepreneurial and revolutionary impulses as the Boston Tea Party. Subject to all of the biases, limitations and perversions that plagued most of early American life, craft before the industrial revolution was a very real pathway to economic and social participation in American life. And for all the years since the turn of the 20th century craft in the United States has wavered between an elite preoccupation and the upward leading ladder of the “self-made” American.

So when I speak about inclusion and craft, I’d like you to know what I mean, which is this: it is an active process of learning that necessarily leads to the dismantling of systemic barriers to full participation in the social, cultural, political, institutional and economic life of a community. This work is slow; it must be intentional and it is not always comfortable. And it is one of the responsibilities of anyone in public life today.

I’d like to share a few ways that HatchSpace’s commitment to inclusion are playing out today.

One of the most obvious is that we’ve radically overhauled our membership structure and rates. In our pitch to new members we’re doing what we can to spin off exclusionary language that privileges “expertise,” “fine” or “high” quality, and “mastery”; we’re working to replace this tone with more welcoming language. This includes finding better ways to express creativity, skill, confidence, and joy through woodworking.

We’re also getting rid of hierarchical concepts of membership based on skill-set and income. We’re all here to learn and our membership structure — a flat fee that fell 60 percent, from $125 per month to $49 per month in August — is intended to establish that footing.

A third way that we’re working to expand inclusion is through active outreach and recruitment of instructors who reflect the lived experiences of so many in our diverse community. This outreach effort is inclusive of age, how we identify as Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) or not, and ourselves and neighbors who are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual and Queer (LGBTQ).

And while this work is never finished, we still have a ways to go before I will feel comfortable with our status as a community resource. Our strategy must be to continue to nurture cohorts of new users (we have a wonderful group of young women instructors coming up in the community, for example), forge new partnerships (I am so grateful for the support of The Root Social Justice Center and their Youth 4 Change program), and create affinity spaces and programs that foster safety and joy among their participants (we’ll expand our welcoming of womens’ woodworking spaces to also welcome BIPOC spaces for example).

Let’s talk about being a “platform” organization for a moment. For full disclosure, I first encountered this phrase used by Bill Gates in his book, The Road Ahead. If I recall, Gates was describing companies that served as railroad lines and those that operate as trains. He called the rail line companies “platforms” because they created the conditions for “box car” or train companies to create value. In other words, to run on. Anyway, the concept stuck: I’ve long thought of shared workspaces as “platform” organizations because they foster the conditions within which others can thrive.

Bringing this concept back to HatchSpace, I’ve been working to put some parts and pieces in place that advance our position as a platform organization. This means that we’re building and taking care of the infrastructure that enables individuals and their associations (for example a startup or an organization program) to accomplish their goals. Long-term, HatchSpace will be able to bundle the knowledge and tools we use into a technical assistance program that will support the startup and growth needs of Hatch-like spaces in rural communities across the country.

I’ve focused my energies on building local spaces that serve their communities in meaningful ways. Mine is a parochial occupation with a focus on the needs of creative types — artists, craft persons, fabricators, “makers.”

For now, the most direct expression of the “platform” idea at work is our member portal, which is built on the Nexudus platform. This space accomplishes a few important outcomes.

The first is that we’re able to consolidate and make transparent several complex business processes including member enrollment, class registration, and inventory management. Another outcome is that we provide a way for members to connect and share knowledge with one another; this pushes important “latent” information from a central hub (namely staff) out into our network. Members can and should look to one another for input and advice as they design and build their projects in our shops. And finally, our platform helps to remove some of the friction that inevitably arises within a growing community, achieved through better coordination of decentralized activity. Nexudus allows HatchSpace to push the burden of some essential activities like resource booking (shops and equipment) outward to our users instead of spending valuable staff time on routine coordination.

And this brings us to impact. Squirrelly word, impact. According to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So pretty much doing anything at all has an impact if that’s what we’re going for. How can we be intentional around the impact of HatchSpace — impact in the lives of our members, our community, perhaps the world beyond our community?

Some years ago I intentionally left the ranks of the “change the world” thinkers. Inspired by the writing of David Bornstein, around 2004 a movement of “world changers” and their “world changing” ideas became prominent in American life. Two years later the first TED talk was posted online and it seemed that everywhere you turned, someone had this big idea to fix things. Admittedly, it was exciting to read and hear the inspired stories of individual initiative, collective action and broad social impact. I had nonetheless become less convinced that there was a “better world” to be had at the end of all of this “scaling” activity. And I wasn’t willing to spend time on planes to realize my voice and agency. Was vast, uncoordinated, jet-setting do-gooderism going to manifest itself in a utopian global community, a manifestly “better world?” Despite the vivid boosterism of the Skoll Foundation, Omidyar Network, Ashoka Fellowship, and a constellation of other players, my nature couldn’t square all those angles of incidence and reflection into something I recognized as positive systemic global change.

Individual impact is meaningful. At the most basic level, a place like HatchSpace must nurture the conditions in which creative confidence can grow and thrive.

I redirected my energies into building local spaces that serve their communities in what I can only hope are meaningful ways. Mine is a parochial occupation with a focus on the needs of creative types — artists, craft persons, fabricators, “makers.” My principal framework has been to lower the barriers to access for creativity, to foster conditions for collaboration, and to reduce the startup risks for entrepreneurs. Along the way, if I happen to support “world changers” and their big ideas, well that’s a bonus and just fine with me.

Here at HatchSpace there are two kinds of impact that I believe we can make. These operate at the individual and the group level.

Individual impact is meaningful. At the most basic level, a place like HatchSpace must nurture the conditions in which creative confidence can grow and thrive. We are doing our job — and doing it well — when we help someone go “from zero to one” as Peter Thiel put it in his 2012 book. While Thiel was discussing startups, I think the idea that our greatest step-order of personal growth occurs when we move from zero to one, “from nothing to something.” At HatchSpace, when we can support someone who has no experience or confidence with woodworking to become able and willing to work independently on machines, to build the things they love, we have had our greatest possible impact.

Of course, there are numerous other ways to measure impact among individual users at HatchSpace, and each of them resonates in its own way. We want to see our members move from a place of learning to a place where they share that knowledge. We’d like see members who have a particular gift with wood use our tools to earn supplemental income if that is a goal of theirs. And we’d absolutely want to help members who struggle with isolation, depression, and addiction to overcome those challenges by discovering the therapeutic and rehabilitative qualities of woodworking.

Group level impact can be measured over time among a large population. To get there HatchSpace must cultivate meaningful community partnerships that combine the expertise and program needs of local service organizations with the capacity and strengths of our organization. Some of the ways we’re thinking about this include positive youth outcomes (self-image and agency for example), workforce development (including skills-based training for under- and unemployed individuals), and rehabilitative and developmental outcomes (overcoming addiction, finding positive social feedback and positive behavioral reinforcement).

As we approach the close of the first quarter of the twenty first century I find it reassuring that our struggles, unique to us, are not new. I’m thankful that we have history as a resource, if not to light the path perhaps to reassure us that it is there.

I’m personally excited to be watching, listening to, and learning from a growing number of organizations across the country who are doing this work really well. From Providence, Rhode Island to Los Angeles, California, some of my heroes in this space include Edge and End (supporting with non-traditional workers) and Would Works (creating opportunity for homeless).

Ada Lovelace once said that the “best and wisest refuge” from all troubles is your science. Spoken as the gifted mathematician and scientist that she was, perhaps the same could be said for our craft, in whatever form that it expresses itself.

The same year Ada Lovelace met Charles Babbage, Andrew Jackson took office as the seventh U.S. president. The year was 1833 and a deep populist discourse was influencing public action across the United States. A ten year-old Frederick Douglas was sent out to work plantation fields the year America’s Anti-Slavery Society was founded. Twin economic disruptions lingered on our horizon, just beyond the curve — the necessary downfall of slavery and (perceptible through the glow of industrialization) the rise of computation and automation threatened an economic status quo propped up by a corrupt political spoils system. A new “moral” movement would be born, one that prized the fruits of collective activity and “skilled making at a human scale.” As a new cycle of American history began to coil, the strands of our next — the Gilded Age — were be born. As Americans of the time wrestled with the challenges of urban growth, economic transformation, and social integration at a time of vast inequality many turned to craft and collective enterprise for succor.

As we approach the close of the first quarter of the twenty first century I find it reassuring that our struggles, unique to us, are not new. I’m thankful that we have history as a resource, if not to light the path perhaps to reassure us that it is there. Through an emergent process of repeated self-discovery, America reinvents itself. And we all have a part to play. Thank you for being a part of that journey at HatchSpace.