Determination: Makers in Ukraine

Maker News

DALE DOUGHERTY is the leading advocate of the Maker Movement. He founded Make: Magazine 2005, which first used the term “makers” to describe people who enjoyed “hands-on” work and play. He started Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and this event has spread to nearly 200 locations in 40 countries, with over 1.5M attendees annually. He is President of Make:Community, which produces Make: and Maker Faire.

In 2011 Dougherty was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business. He believes that the Maker Movement has the potential to transform the educational experience of students and introduce them to the practice of innovation through play and tinkering.

Dougherty is the author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane Conrad. He is co-author of "Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities" with Peter Hirshberg and Marcia Kadanoff.

View more articles by Dale Dougherty

@dalepd

March 25th, 2022March 25th, 2022

Determination seems like the best word to describe the collective response of Ukrainians as they fight for their country, for their home and their freedom. One month ago, I spoke with Yuri Vlasyuk and Svitlana Bovkun who live in Kyiv. That was the day Russia invaded Ukraine. I knew them because they were producers of Maker Faire in Ukraine. I wanted to find out how they are doing and what the maker community was doing during the war. A month later, one month into the war, we talked again to find how determined they are to do anything they can to help others and resist the invasion.

If you’d like to help out makers in Ukraine with a donation, go to makerhub.org/support. Yuri tells me that they can’t work with PayPal, Stripe or other payment processors. So you have to wire money to the bank and the instructions are on the page. And I can confirm that the instructions work.

Ukraine Workshop photos by Dmytro Kovalenko.