davis_square | petri dish open house, sunday 09/20, 6-10PM

Hi! My name's Alec Resinck, and a few weeks ago, some friends of mine and I started to renovate 339R Summer St., just past Rosebud's. A few of us are working on an educational startup called sprout (our site is mostly a placeholder page for now, and will be growing significantly in the next few weeks) and we're sharing the space with some other friends of ours who are starting up their own organization called DINO. We're new to Davis, and pretty excited to be here.

As part of our respective endeavors, we're working to set up an open community workshop and labspace. While that's still ongoing, we decided to have an open house tomorrow from 6-10PM. Our space is normally open to the public (even if that hasn't been well-advertised, yet), but from 6-10PM on Sunday the 20th, we'll be _extra_ open (which mostly means we'll have some food and light refreshments around). So, if you want to swing by, say hey, and see what we're up to, we'd love to chat! We're in the carriage house set back from the road--if you have any trouble finding us, feel free to give me a call/text at 617.229.5036 or send me an email at alec@thesprouts.org

If you'd like to take a look at the flier, you can find it here NOTE: the date is a week off (instead of 09.13.09, it should read 09.20.09)

Please feel free to pass this along to whomever you think might be interested--thanks a bunch!

Gratefully,
a.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Is: what general age group are you aiming at? I know, you'll probably say that everybody is welcome etc etc. In practice, however, if you all are in your mid 20s, that is the crowd that you will attract, because of general compatibility issues.

I can only really speak for sprout; although, I suspect that the people from DINO would say something similar.

With that caveat, I think the way a community's demographics work out is in part about who starts the community, but I'm confident that with some effort, we can make sure to seed our community with enough diversity so that it doesn't narrow to just one group. So far, we've been pretty successful--I'd guess that the median age at our last event was around 35 or 40, even though we are in our early 20's.

Our first project as sprout is working with an organization called Green City Growers, and they install raised bed gardens in people's backyards (and optionally maintain them) so that people can grow their own produce. In that context, we'll be working with people across all ages--that's one of the most exciting aspects of the project. Beyond that, we've all had experience running afterschool programs and camps for people aged 5-18, and are excited to bring more people in that age range into our space. So far, we've got a puzzle-focused math class running here for that age range, and it's been going pretty swimmingly.

To put it shortly, we're not focusing on a general age group: we want to be working with people up for deep investigation of the world around us.

Hopefully, being aware of the potential for 20-somethings to only attract more 20-somethings, we can mitigate that. I would be excited to hear any suggestions or examples of organizations that do that successfully.

This sounds very interesting. I think I'll wait a bit and see how it develops, though (mostly, I'm a bit too busy right now). Those gardens sounds cool. Are you guys looking at roof gardens too (or perhaps just on roofs above porches)?...

I was at an event there last week and I would guess the median age was @ 33. I am older than that and wondered if I would feel welcome but it was all good.

Thanks. That's good to know...

I'm in my 50s and felt quite comfortable visiting tonight.

petri dish open house, sunday 09/20, 6-10PM

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