This month the Colorado Maker Hub has been focused on communicating the Making in Colorado. We have been posting a topic each week sharing the awesomeness in the Colorado maker community. This week I will emphasize the abundance of resources available to you in the Colorado maker community. Reach out to grow and keep Making In Colorado!

We are blessed here in Colorado! We have a very supportive infrastructure with our state, counties and cities through various government supported programs such as Colorado Creative Districts and the Colorado Innovation Network.  Since the Colorado Maker Hub formed a little over eight months ago as its own 501(c)(3) nonprofit earlier this year, we are now starting to be able to measure the abundance of Making In Colorado and the resources available for each of us to grow our making. At the closure of this year’s eight months of pulling together the community, we have been able to identify the following:

• Over 1300 Organizations & Businesses that are a part of the Colorado maker community and growing…
• There are over 90 DIY Spaces across Colorado with various capabilities that can support you with mentoring, equipment, networking and space for making.
• We have listed almost over 100 events on our Event Calendar that inspire others to make or help makers grow.
• We have over 70 event organizers in our directory ready to spread the word through their events of the wonderful Making In Colorado.
• Over 130 academia and non-academia educators with ‘Making’ programs. I foresee that this is only a small percentage of the maker education happening across Colorado and look forward to connecting educators even more in the coming year.
• Over 600 maker businesses that provide custom projects to end products that are made in Colorado.  With over 1.7 million businesses registered in Colorado we suspect that at least 1% of these registered businesses are maker businesses.  We look forward to finding them next year as we look at ways to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in the Google Cloud.
• Over 200 community organizers that welcome makers into their community and supporting their interest in a type of making.

As we leave our month of Making In Colorado and thus reduce the number of emails in your inbox ;^), we want to emphasize the wealth of resources for each of us to grow our making or start Making In Colorado!  Make sure to reach out in the Colorado maker community to collaborate and strengthen in our numbers.  We are all better together as we share and grow.

Even though our newsletter frequency will reduce, we will continue to post opportunities on our site forums as we receive them and look forward to others helping share information online.  We know your time is limited so we want each of you to focus on what you do…do what you need to do to communicate what your make, teach, organize and support in the maker community…focus on communicating this through your website.   We will be looking at ways using technology to pull information into the Hub to help each other connect, make opportunities more accessible, grow awareness AND demand less time from community members.

We can’t wait to compare the growth in a year.  We are excited about the possibilities for each of us to reach out to grow and keep Making In Colorado!