A Safe Place to Use Tools

Chad Orcutt created Community Shop Class in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, California. What started out as the ADHD Inventor's Club in his garage grew into a new space, unlike any makerspace you've seen.  He saw it as way to help people, particularly neurodivergent people like himself, learn to use tools safely.  He's built a shop class for people who never had shop class.

Link to companion article on Makezine.com.
Link to video on YouTube.

https://make.co/make-cast/

Transcript

Dale: 0:09

This is MakeCast and I'm Dale Dougherty. Meet Chad Orcut, the proprietor of Community Shop Class in Sacramento, California.

Chad: 0:19

Working at Apple, I was absolutely miserable in the corporate life, and I started building this kind of mini makerspace in my garage I called it the ADHD Inventors Club. I had a 3D printer and a little laser and all my tools and stuff. And then about two and a half years ago, I decided it was time for me to get out of the corporate world and I wanted to build a big version of my garage where I could share tools and teach people how to use them. So I got started in this dilapidated old building on a street filled with a bunch of dilapidated, abandoned buildings in Oak Park. And yeah, I found this building and I saw it for-rent sign and I said I want to do this.

Dale: 0:59

Community Shop Class. It's a one of a kind space, looking as much like a TV set as a workshop, but it is completely genuine. Chad thinks of Community Shop Class as a safe space to learn to use tools safely. Chad is a man with a big heart and a singular mission to serve the community where he lives. Chad has been willing to put in the hard work from teaching classes to cleaning toilets, just to keep this space up and running and serving the community of Oak Park. I had a chance to visit Community Shop Class and meet Chad, along with Josh Manley, who is mentioned in this podcast and was featured in a previous episode of MakeCast on CADclass. We were also joined by Tom Cappelletti, who runs the makerspace at Sac City College. After my visit, I did a zoom call with Chad to fill out the details of his inspiring story.

Chad: 1:55

So I found the building and right when I got into the building, materials prices went through the roof and everything started skyrocketing and lumber was so expensive and hard to get, just as COVID was ending. My thought was that COVID was over and all these people were just gonna jump back out into the world and they're gonna want to do stuff. So I'm like, oh, this will be perfect. Like I said, then I got building and the building was in way worse shape than I thought because I hadn't gone through it thoroughly. So I started working on it and I thought it was going to take about six months to do it and cost about 50 grand. By the time I was done, it was a year and something and was about 150 grand to get the building up and going again. I started this place and we weren't doing anything for that first year because the building wasn't even really habitable. I was working at Ace Hardware in the mornings. I would come here and build all day and then I would paint houses on the side trying to get enough money to keep it alive and pay the rent here. Then it was probably a year and a half ago Josh Manley came into my life and some other people who helped me start putting kind of learning programs together. We started pitching these ideas we had for how we could teach especially neurodivergent people-- autistic, ASD folks and ADHD folks and people with learning differences. So we built these programs to focus on them and give them a place to learn. I designed the space around the ADHD mind. I don't know if I told you this, but the idea was that the place would be like a bento box where everything would be separated, but there was still like tons of stuff to look at and things to keep people engaged. The design part of this was the funnest thing about any of it. But anyway, so it's two years ago AmeriCorps and CCC hired us to do this tool training class and so we put this class together.

Dale: 3:43

And their problem was, what were they trying to solve by having a class?

Chad: 3:47

So there are people who are getting hurt in the field, and the reason that I knew them is because I used to volunteer and I would go out when they were doing garden work in this area, and I would show them how to build garden boxes. So that's how I got involved with them originally, and some of the kids went back and said, Hey, this guy was good with teaching us how to use tools. And they were having so many injuries in the field, they needed, some tool training. And so that's what they hired us to do.

Dale: 4:12

What did that training consist of?

Chad: 4:14

It was basically a tool safety course. It's four hours and we go through circular saw, we go through miter saw, we go through all the basic safety for each tool. We do drills and drivers and some fasteners and talk a little bit about wood and building but basically it's a hands-on project-based safety course. They really were asking us to put probably two days worth of material into this four-hour course. The idea was that we would get them hands on as quick as possible. The shop disarms people anyway, so we usually end up with people in a spot where they're willing to accept information from us and then Josh helped me build this program where we would go from a tool, a short talk and then right into hands on and then we broke the class up with stories and some ways that we could touch people emotionally and draw them into what we were trying to train them on. The AmeriCorps class became the foundation for almost every learning program that we have here. It was a lot because of Josh's help that I figured out how to do that, and together we built a really beautiful class and it started a really beautiful program.

Dale: 5:20

His basic direction was don't spend too much time talking?

Chad: 5:23

Yeah, it's been less time.

Dale: 5:25

I figured what his rule was, I heard that last week.

Chad: 5:27

He told me, he said if you lecture people for even longer than about 11 minutes, they're gonna tune out. So you might as well lecture them for 7 minutes, give them exactly what they need to know, and then get them hands on. And then just watch over them, and coach them, and guide them, and then let them learn. practice for a little bit. And that's how we broke that class.

Dale: 5:46

There ought to be the seven-minute rule.

Chad: 5:47

I like Josh's rules. Usually the focus on that class is that we build something that's going somewhere with purpose. We build boxes that are going into community gardens, or we build benches that are for a memorial bench, or something like that. Something that's got some meaning. So the young people feel like they're actually doing something that matters, even in this short four-hour class.

Dale: 6:08

What was the feedback from AmeriCorps getting these people trained versus untrained?

Chad: 6:13

So what ended up happening was that we became the highest rated training AmeriCorps and CCC had ever had and the most responded to questionnaire that they'd ever had. So we've kept doing it every year and AmeriCorps keeps hiring us to do it. The best feedback that we have is that people weren't getting hurt. The whole key is that we were keeping people safe. They were also enjoying our time at Shop Class, so that was cool too. I was ready to give up before AmeriCorps. I had gone way too much money into the project.

Dale: 6:39

This is Community Shop Class, you're talking about?

Chad: 6:41

Yeah. I was probably about ten or twelve thousand dollars behind in rent, and I couldn't afford to fix the building anymore, and I thought it was just a lost cause, and then people started hiring us to do team builders here, and people started signing up for memberships and wanted to be a part of it. Our membership space is 50 bucks a month. We made it super affordable for people in this neighborhood to take part. We also don't have the kind of tools that other makerspaces have. We don't have a$70,000 CNC machine. We've got really basic stuff at a place to practice and do stuff and we've got good coaches around, but we just don't have the same equipment So at 50 bucks a month, people are signing up. And then people started hiring us to do team building events and stuff like that. And before I knew it, we were starting to get a little bit of momentum and people were starting to notice the space. Before any of this started, I wanted to build tiny homes and that was something that I wanted to do as my life is build these tiny homes. We have a horrible problem with housing in Sacramento and I started working on this course building this curriculum for this idea that I had that you could do a month-long course and build a tiny home in the whole process and so I started working on the class a long time ago. Finally I met just the right group of people. I met a manufacturer of tiny homes called Tainer who builds a steel frame tiny home, which I love, just the group that kind of came together around this tiny home project was amazing. So we started offering this tiny home academy and then some of these community organizations started bringing their people here to do this class with us and paying us to do these classes. And so as we were going along, we became probably more of an education space than a makerspace, but we still had lots of people that were joining to become members and wanting to be a part of what we were doing here. And we do a lot of community projects.

Dale: 8:38

Talk about the community that you're in, Oak Park.

Chad: 8:41

Oak Park is I don't know how to describe it as underserved or underrepresented. It's a, probably a higher crime area of Sacramento and we're a food desert without any real access to healthy food. So we got no food. We have no employment opportunities in this area. You have to go out of Oak Park really to find work. There's no educational opportunities right around here and I just thought this is my home. I've been here for 10 years and I love this area and I knew that this was the right place to do something like this at Oak Park. We're in a special area of Oak Park on Stockton Boulevard and this area right here is a tough area. Our street is still filled with vacant buildings and abandoned buildings with Neglectful landlords and it's a tough place. We have a lot of unhoused folks that live in front of the building and we have drug problem out in front. People, when they don't have a place to go to the bathroom, it's the front of the shop or the bus stop in front of our place. So this is a tough spot to make it, but it's also the right spot, to do what we're doing. And I think that by being here in the neighborhood, we've got a way to reach into the neighborhood and find the people that really need our help, or need education, or need a place to build something, or try to start a new business, or whatever it is. We get to reach into the neighborhood and find them. So I wouldn't want to be anywhere else unless we get a chance to do another one in Del Paso Heights, or West Sacramento, or one of the areas, like Oak Park, that needs some help.

Dale: 10:12

So last week, you had your first sort of PR event

Chad: 10:15

It was our first press conference and they're recruiting for this program through California volunteers. They're trying to recruit a thousand people to do AmeriCorps style work where they sign up for these nine-month or ten-month terms. They get paid, but they also get out into the community and they do volunteer type projects or community based projects. And they get to earn a little bit of money. They get to earn some cash for college. They get to take part in these learning opportunities. And they get out and make a difference, either through Climate Corps or California College Corps or one of these different groups within this service organization. So we have this press conference and the mayor is here and Josh Friday from California Volunteers is here through the governor's office and there's a bunch of local politicians here and they got to see the Tiny Home Academy and what we were working on and I thought it was probably one of the best days we had ever had at the shop. And apparently after this I got, the other day I'm sitting in the shop And I started getting text messages from different people that are like, hey, they're talking about you at the city council. Apparently one of the city council reps from one of the other areas was here and was talking at city council about what a great gift Shop Class was to Oak Park. And how she would love to have another one over in her neighborhood, but I'm getting all these messages, they're talking about you at the council because you're actually getting some visibility with the council, which is fantastic because getting any visibility doing something like this is tough, and I'm not really a one-man show, but I do most of the work around here and coach classes and clean toilets and do everything else. And it's hard to get out and focus on the capability part.

Dale: 11:57

How do they see you? You just described how you see your space. How do they see it? Do they see the potential that you see in it?

Chad: 12:04

Now it was hard, and it's funny when I started this I couldn't describe it. I couldn't tell people what it was really that I was trying to do here, it was hard to define what this Community Shop Class idea was. Once it started developing and people started seeing it, now they see us as a resource. I think that early on they saw it as like a clubhouse kind of an idea. And now they see this as a valuable community resource because we're training young people to use tools and we're training them how to build tiny homes and we're getting people into jobs. Now we're giving people opportunities. We've probably had six people or couples start small businesses here, building little bar carts and a collapsible coffee cart or just starting their own thing. Last month, we found out that the city had hired us to do youth programs for the summertime. It was a pretty good contract that we got to do those programs. Once the mayor saw us, once these people saw what we were doing now, they see us the way that I see us.

Dale: 13:03

You created a beautiful space and usually compelling. You have some talents for putting all this stuff together. And it's good to see the reception you're getting from folks and, education orientation. This big thing about DIY or people learning to do things for themselves is such an important aspect and I think it's hard sometimes to pick that up in formal education.

Chad: 13:29

We know that so many schools took out shop class, and it's a critical way for people to learn these things, self sufficiency or skills to do things themselves.

Dale: 13:38

And I wanted to ask you, you said for ADHD and neurodivergent kids. So is it just that it's hands on that you're doing? What is it that they need in your space that they don't get elsewhere? What do they find in your space that clicks for them?

Chad: 13:55

The space itself plays a huge part. If people walk into a community center or they walk into a sterile classroom, if you take people with ASD or ADHD and you put them in that environment, it is mind numbing. Lot of the times those folks will close down in that kind of environment. We bring them here. They know they're safe here. They know because we talk a lot about neurodivergence, they know that we are open and a supportive place for them. But they also come in here and they're interested in what's going on. So they come in and I feel like we can disarm them here. We don't put them into a situation where their guard's up, so they come in and they feel open and they see the creativity that goes on here and we're not a perfect place and we talk a lot about making mistakes and what a great place it is to make mistakes. And so it's basically a combination of the space, the look, the feel the emotional part of it but we focus a lot on that emotional component of learning. The way people feel is what they take away and I think that when we touch them, either through the space or stories or just the way that we cheer for people and clap for them and support them, we focus on how they feel probably more than what they hear. That creates a space where maybe non traditional learners feel a little bit better about learning. We want people to be who they are here, and our place is a super diverse place because we're in a super diverse neighborhood. And we encourage folks to get their hands on tools. Not the kind of place where it's dominated by like a masculine version of tool use. We're not that kind of shop where it's a locker room talk or any of those things. Those just don't happen here. We have a different environment. But I think it gives people that maybe wouldn't feel safe walking into a normal spot, a safe place to use tools and learn how to use tools.

Dale: 15:50

A safe place to use tools, in every sense of the word safe there, right?

Chad: 15:54

Yeah and we do that. We provide safety, physical safety. We provide emotional safety and we feed people here. We make sure that they've got food and drink. It's a big part I think of the learning process. That we can't have people hungry and trying to be safe and learn always keep food on hand and and give people free drinks and things like that. It's just part of what I've done since the beginning. But yeah, the neurodivergent people, I think the space is a big part of it. I think the emotional part is huge and I think my ability to connect in those communities, it helps. I'm unembarrassed about my learning differences, and when I share that with people, I think they enjoy coming in here and seeing. This place was created by someone with ADHD who doesn't read. I've never read a book, this place was built by this group of people who don't learn like other people do and we've still been able to create this neat space and this great program. I think that is very encouraging when people see it and especially young people. Or suffering through this, I don't fit in and I can't read or I can't sit still in class But you can still do big stuff.

Dale: 16:58

It's been a pleasure talking to you. I want to stay in touch with you because I have immense respect for what you're doing and I want to support it.

Chad: 17:07

So nice to meet you and connect. I'm glad to be an acquaintance now and hopefully a friend in the future.