One participant, Randall Gray, put his woodworking and welding skills to the test when he created a table through many bouts of trial-and-error. “This is a place to fail, which is great,” Hardebeck says. “You become a good welder by doing a lot of bad welds first.”
Finally, Gray landed on an oval shaped table-top with “spider” like legs.
“It looked like an art piece out of a museum,” Hardebeck said. “I would catch him just sitting there looking at it and smiling. It ended up selling for $500.”
The CFUF members completed the program thanks to stipend and scholarship funding from Whiting Turner and Sagamore. There was a graduation ceremony earlier this month, in which all eight participants received multiple job offers and ended up securing jobs in the construction, manufacturing, and HVAC fields.
“What’s really cool is that none of them knew each other before this and now they call themselves the Elite 8,” Hardebeck said. “They’re a team and they have become their own support group.”
He hopes that this program is only just the jumping off point and that a manufacturing bootcamp could eventually happen on a monthly basis. The Foundery is also looking ahead to partner with local universities like MICA, CCBC, and Johns Hopkins, so people can transfer what they have learned into a more formal education.
In the meantime, however, Hardebeck and his team continue to serve the space’s 120 paying members, who are working on passion projects or launching local startups from inside the walls of City Garage.
“Provenance is a big part of it. It’s a matter of pride,” he said. “Spaces like ours aren’t just for the gear-heads and engineer types. We are all about democratizing access.”