Discussion about Northwest Arkansas Fab Lab (NWA Fab Lab)

We are a free standing Fab Lab in the heart of our downtown area known as the Innovation District in Fayetteville, AR located in the northwest Arkansas region. The Northwest Arkansas region is home to over 500,000 people and home to large companies such as Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt. The idea and dream of the NWA Fab Lab is to give access to tools and resources not currently available to individuals in the area. These individuals will include students of all ages, educators, entrepreneurs, makers, tinkerers, and more. We also will have a huge impact for the local college students since we are located a minute from the University of Arkansas campus.
Our space is approx. 5500 feet. We will offer classes based on the needs and wants of the community. We are in the ends of the planning stages and finishing up the equipment stations.
We currently do offer maker’s club for youth once a week that allows students between 9-17 to come in the lab and learn, explore, and get hands-on experience with the equipment in the lab with guidance from our staff. Our staff just attended the Fab Lab symposium in St. Louis this month.
We have huge positive feedback from the community and the community has expressed a strong desire to see the success of the NWA Fab Lab.
In the planning stages we have contacted several other fab labs and maker spaces to learn from them and gain insight knowledge so we can better prepare our lab and set it up for success. We have taken the approach of building a very strong base then will organically grow based on this communities needs and wants. Our volunteer base is string and consists of numerous community members that reached out to us to get involved. The volunteers range in age from 18-70 and includes several college students, experts in certain fields, and more.
We have a chief maker who is a professional artists and engineer which makes for an amazing combination because his knowledge is across the board and broad.

This is the general thread for discussing the lab; the thread is also visible on its page at https://www.fablabs.io/labs/northwestarkansasfablab