Blog

In the collaboration room at Vector Space I was lucky to have an audience with entrepreneur and creator Clover Charles. With makers clicking, clacking, and creating in rooms all around. Clover- an entrepreneur, licensed cosmetologist, certified hair loss specialist and fellow at Vector Space - took time to weave me into her thoughts on working with Vector Space, running a business in Lynchburg, and co-creating with her daughter.

Clover runs two businesses rich in the art of caring for others. Oasis Caribbean takeout restaurant, taking care of people’s hungry tummies, and The Beauty in Serenity salon, a medical and cosmetic wig business taking care of people’s dignity. After five years of working through accreditation Clover is proud to now be offering insurance covered services for clients who have experienced medical trauma. Clover’s caring nature doesn't end with her, she has passed that loveable trait to her daughter, Cadejha Samuel. Sharing the responsibilities of the business, Clover takes care of clients and her daughter quite literally ties up loose ends, sewing incredibly intricate wigs to suit their clients needs. One of Clover’s greatest joys in serving clients is knowing that “when you look well, you feel well, and you are able to heal”.

All of her passion helps but doesn't fully account for the difficulties you undertake when you open a business. Like many business owners Clover has felt discouraged, unprepared at times in her entrepreneurial journey, and suffered from “that woe is me mindset,” she says. Quickly though, she discovered a community in Vector Space that helped fortify her own inner strength. Clover told me of how “coming here (VS) and seeing people and hearing people is the difference between me being down here and me leveling up”. She went on to explain that without having come to Vector Space and participating in CO.STARTERS, a ten-week entrepreneur training program, she wouldn’t have been able to hear about other artist and business owners’ hiccups, hardships, and red tape problems. Knowing that she wasn’t alone in trying and struggling to seamlessly step into business ownership gave her new strength to face entrepreneurial challenges. She describes how she couldn't do what she is doing now without having come to the makerspace and joined with people making things, talking, and solving problems.

Now, with four months under her belt as a Maker Fellow at Vector Space, Clover is nearly ready to unveil the newest stitch in her portfolio. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peak into an invention of her very own! Unwrapping the details of her creation to me, Clover talked about how she’s identified a need in her line of work to prevent and mitigate carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis. I can't say much more here as this is a provisional patent at the moment but what I can say is that Clover intends to part the rows and move forward when she sees any tangle keeping her from getting her invention off the ground.

In our time together Clover spoke a lot about how coming to the makerspace changed her by empowering her professionally and therefore emotionally. It “opened my eyes to a whole new world, after you see something you can’t go back to being a regular person anymore.”  

Clover says empowerment happens in ways big and small, “like when me and my daughter wanted to come here to make bags for our business. It’s just that easy to move forward, all the tools are here.” I think it’s safe to say that Clover Charles is as special to Vector Space as Vector Space is to Clover Charles.

Learn more about Clover’s one of a kind services on her website https://mynubiantresses.com/ or at Oasis Caribbean, 450c Oakley Ave (now serving seamoss infused drinks!)

This week a new group of students from Lynchburg City Schools Empowerment Academy begins their semester at Vector Space. As they embark on a new community project, we wanted to share the work of last semester's students.

Vector Space has partnered with Empowerment for several years, but that partnership, like so many other things, was interrupted during the pandemic. Each semester five students who are staying on top of their grades and have a good attendance record are selected to spend each Wednesday afternoon at the makerspace. Fall 2022 was our first semester back, and we chose Blutooth Speakers as the project. Each week we spent time getting to know students, training them on the woodshop and electronics tools, and giving them tools to express their creativity, like laser engraving and spray painting. By the end of the semester we had a collection of fully-functional, highly personalized speakers that each student took home.

Throughout the semester we learned of students' interests, goals, and previous hands-on experience. This group was particularly adept at handling power tools and being able to visualize a 3D object from a set of 2D plans. Many of them had shop class at Dunbar Middle previously, and they were gratified by the hands-on work of cutting, routing, sanding, and assembling their wooden speakers. Electronics was a new frontier for most of the students, with the exception of an attempted lamp repair by one ambitious teen, but they showed persistance and an admirable amount of competitive spirit in building the best looking and sounding speaker. As always we began with a plan that included room for following the students' lead. Their interests lead to the unplanned lessons of laser cut stencils, leather handles, programmable LED lights, a space-themed spray paint effect, 3D printed speaker accessories, and advanced wood joining techniques.

We celebrated their successful speaker build with a field trip to Blackwater Branding + Add Logo, where local recording artist Phinees motivated the students with his own story of following his passion to success. A stop into Mrs. Joy's for a cookie along with an entrepreneurial boost from another Lynchburg role model rounded out our field trip. With the semester wrapped, we are now working to connect these promising students with our local employer partners at EDM, Southern Air, and Foster Fuels for internships and post-graduation employment.

On a welcome sunny day after Virginia’s recent cold snap I had the pleasure of hearing the heart warming story of downtown Lynchburg’s Vector Space member Stability X. With sunshine streaming in the window of her bus, soon to be home, she told the story of how she came to use Vector Space as a way out… Stability joined Vector Space in Sept 2021 after moving here from Georgia, where she became familiar with shared workspaces. As a mother and a disabled veteran, Stability found herself bumping into housing barriers. Trying to use her disabled veteran’s allowance to rent an apartment was not working. Like a sack of bricks landing in her lap she realized that with the modest allowance and rising cost of housing she would not be able to afford a large enough space to house both her and her first child. Now four weeks away from another bundle of joy in her life, Stability tells me about how she sees the bus as her way out. For Stability, access to a place with tools and a supportive community like Vector Space is an opportunity to create her own housing, a way to “do it however I want to do it”. 

When Stability moved to Lynchburg she had her mind open and found Vector Space by a stroke of curiosity. Stopping to snap a picture after driving by one day she navigated her way to the website, pointed her compass towards membership and hasn't stopped rolling over there in her bus since. 

When I decided to study engineering, I knew that I liked science and I liked to build things, and that engineering probably included these things. I wasn't completely wrong, but certainly misguided, and it's an experience I've heard from many of my fellow engineers. If there isn't an engineer in your life, you likely have little understanding of what engineers do in general, and even less about specific subdomains. Part of the solution to this problem must surely be for engineers to engage with the public and serve as the source of this knowledge. This is the purpose of BWXT's Engineering Mentoring program, to engage working engineers with high school students in a hands-on way, through the completion of a small engineering project.

Vector Space partnered with BWXT for the second time this fall, with the goal of bringing fresh and exciting educational experiences to this year's cohort. For this semester's project, we chose to build modular performance stages. The Academy Center of the Arts served as our mock customer, providing students with a rider typical to a performance they would host, with design specifications clearly laid out for our budding engineers. These included a budget, striction dimensional accuracy, and a minimum load requirement of 150 lb/sqft. Students worked in teams of four, each guided by an engineering mentor to first design a stage on paper that met these requirements, then build a small scale prototype from basswood, followed by the full scale build from construction lumber, and finally inspection and load testing.

Though I was looking forward to destroying all of the student built stages with a mechanical press, they all withstood the maximum 2,500 pounds of force over a 2 foot square, far exceeding the load requirements. Next time I won't underestimate their engineering abilities.

This project was made possible by the Future Focus Foundation, BWXT, and Framatome.