When Surrey resident Dylan Belvedere came up empty trying to land a number of grants for his business idea, he decided to go public – but not in the usual business sense.
Belvedere had been trying without luck to raise capital for his proposed “maker space” business, called Maker Cube, when he resolved to incubate his idea in available civic space.
“I decided to just start doing meet-ups at the local library,” said Belvedere. “And luckily the library was very supportive of that and they did a lot of advertising for us. So we started doing weekly maker meet-ups out of the Surrey City Centre Library.”
Maker spaces are similar to co-working spaces but are gauged for the making of things rather than just offering a collective office space. This means a person could be working on a robotic hand and sharing a multimeter with someone building computer hardware, while across the table another person is putting the finishing touches on a customized video recording device. Belvedere said after running Maker Cube for three months out of the library, he had attracted enough interest and membership (which starts at $25 a month) to start his own shop. Now, with a space in Surrey on King George Boulevard, Belvedere and his partner, Karen Cancino, have decided to also continue with the meet-ups at the library.
“We’re hosting workshops on a number of things, so anybody from the community can come in and have a look,” Cancino said. “Our goal is to eventually become a large enough group where we could engage with the community on a daily basis and even have something like a community science world that would be run by the Maker Cube committee.”
The emphasis, Cancino said, is on so-called STEAM disciplines, a broadly used term that stands for science, technology, engineering, art and math.
“It’s basically any type of making,” added Belvedere. “Whether it’s electronics, robotics, hardware, arts and crafts, sewing. Our meet-ups at the library are very much the entry point to starting to make things. So our workshops will range from programming to circuits to knitting. Basically something from all the fields of making.”
Belvedere said none of this would have been possible without the support of the library system.
City of Surrey deputy chief librarian Surinder Bhogal said staff have embraced this expansion of the library’s role.
“This could mean anything from business planning workshops and databases to information exchanges,” Bhogal said. “We also have English classes and computer skill classes for small startup businesses.”
When the $36 million Surrey City Centre Library opened in 2011, Bhogal said the idea was to rethink the role of the library within the community. With its central location and 77,000 square feet of space, the facility offered the opportunity to create an education and networking destination alongside basics services like lending books and magazines, Bhogal said.
