Grants

The Fab Foundation was formed February 6, 2009 to facilitate and support the growth of the international fab lab network. The Fab Foundation is a US non-profit 501(c) 3 organization emerging from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Bits & Atoms’ (CBA) international Fab Lab outreach program. Our mission is to provide access to the tools, the knowledge and the financial means to educate, innovate and invent using technology and digital fabrication to allow anyone to make (almost) anything, and thereby creating opportunities to improve lives and livelihoods around the world. Community organizations, educational institutions and non-profit concerns are our primary beneficiaries.

The Foundation has three programmatic foci: education (.edu), organizational capacity building and services (.org), and business opportunity (.com).

Foundation educational programs and services (.edu) include bringing digital fabrication tools and processes to people of all ages, teaching the skills and knowledge of digital fabrication, developing curriculum for formal and informal educational settings, as well as designing and offering professional development training programs for teachers, fab lab managers and other professionals. We offer advanced technical education through the Fab Academy which provides instruction and supervises investigation of mechanisms, applications, and implications of digital fabrication. The Fab Academy is a worldwide, distributed campus utilizing fab labs as classrooms and libraries for a new kind of technical literacy.

As part of our academic work, the Foundation facilitates partnership and collaboration in distributed research and science. Fab labs worldwide differ widely in their settings and foci, but share common capabilities so that people and projects can be shared across them. Applications range from custom furniture and housing, to community computing and communications infrastructure, to renewable energy conversion devices, to analytical instrumentation for healthcare, agriculture, and the environment, to using rapid-prototyping machines to make the rapid-prototyping machines themselves. To augment and support research conducted in this network of community-based research laboratories, we facilitate the dissemination of knowledge resulting from innovative research, and broaden the type and nature of research projects that can be undertaken by labs worldwide.

Foundation organizational services (.org) include the promotion of digital fabrication, facilitating the development of community-based and educational fab labs, the dissemination of best practices in digital fabrication throughout the fab lab network, facilitation and dissemination of research and community-beneficial projects, the funding and facilitation of fab lab and digital fabrication projects that benefit people and communities in exemplary ways, such as mobile fab labs for emergency aid, or fab labs for developing world contexts. These services include deploying, installing, training, and consulting for new fab labs as well as programmatic support of established fab labs. The Foundation works to gather and provide critical evaluation data as well as provide tools for tracking the impact of fab labs in educational, business and social contexts. As part of our services we provide a network function for the fab lab community, bringing together fab labs around the world either physically (for annual meetings and workshops) or virtually through online tools and resources.

The Foundation’s business program services (.com) are evolving to enable new forms of economic exchange and opportunities created by this globally distributed network, facilitating an ecosystem of fab lab generated businesses and products with access to global markets. From time to time, as financial resources permit, the Foundation will connect exemplary business concepts and products emerging from the fab lab community to venture and micro-finance funding, making capital available in the right form, at the right time, and with the right terms, to help them along the trajectory of long-term sustainability.

In general, Fab Foundation provides and manages programs that benefit fab labs and their host communities, whether research, educational, or entrepreneurial, across the network of fab labs.

The School of Education is internationally renowned for its research excellence and teaching quality. In REF 2014 The School of Education was ranked 1st in Education in the UK for research impact. We are ranked 4th overall in Education in the UK, with world leading and internationally excellent research. Our staff are engaged in high-quality international research focusing on diverse educational issues and methodological approaches, all underpinned by a commitment to social justice, equity and inclusion. We are
a collegial leadership team, providing mentoring support for colleagues at all career stages.

We have a wide range of full-time, part-time, distance and online programmes, some of them taught in international locations, making this a vibrant and stimulating environment for research-informed teaching. Our student body is growing in diversity, with full and part-time students, coming from a range of previous study experiences, from different contexts of educational practice and from different parts of the world. The School enjoys strong demand for its postgraduate and undergraduate programmes, including our innovative International Postgraduate Certificate in Education (iPGCE) – providing teachers with a deeper understanding of planning, teaching and assessment strategies.

We are based within the Faculty of Social Sciences is a large and diverse grouping of twelve departments that offer professional education alongside more traditional social science disciplines. This rich and exciting disciplinary mix encompasses both world-leading academic research and education and a strong practitioner focus in particular areas. It uniquely positions the Faculty among Sheffield’s peer institutions. The Faculty values the School for its high-impact research, strong city/region partnerships with local schools and communities, and its contribution to teaching excellence.

Human Restoration Project (HRP) is a US non-profit 501(c)3 which aims to provide resources that illuminate and foster progressive educational practices. We incorporate progressive education as actions toward systemic change. Rather than tweaking around the edges, we must transform schools toward human-centered policies that promote well-being and learning. HRP wants to bring to light what we’ve all seemed to forget: our students, our educators – they are human beings.

HRP centers its work around four values statements:

• Learning is rooted in purpose-finding and community relevance.
• Social justice is the cornerstone of educational success.
• Dehumanizing practices do not belong in schools.
• Learners are respectful toward each other’s innate human worth.

HRP focuses its attention on systems-based change through grassroots, teacher organized change. Despite decades of US school reform (Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, A Nation at Risk), only 40% of students are engaged in high school and less than half of students feel their learning is relevant. And, despite our focus on improving math and reading scores – stressing about test results – the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists state we’re “100 seconds from doomsday.” Our priorities in education have moved away from the obvious answer: we’re all human beings, we need to treat each other accordingly.