Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the leading social entrepreneur. Our goal is to help you increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a rating and review on your favorite podcast app, It helps more people learn how to have positive impact through values based business. Thank you so much for considering it. And today I am thrilled to introduce you to Sherry Lassiter.

And our topic is a global distributed network of social impact leaders. Sherry is the president and CEO of the FAB Foundation, a network of over 2,000 digital fabrication facilities in over a 100 countries. The goal of a fab lab is to provide access to the tools, the knowledge, and the financial means to allow anyone to build almost anything, thereby creating opportunities to improve lives and livelihoods around the world. Sherry, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Paul. It's a honor and a pleasure to be here today.

You're doing some cool stuff at scale that I can't wait to help our listeners learn from before we do that, Sherry. If somebody didn't know who you were and just needed a little bit of sense of your backstory, what would they need to know to understand where you're coming from and what you bring to this work that you do now?

Oh, how interesting. Well, I started out in television in documentary science television, oddly enough. And I got I worked for public television. I did all sorts of PBS type documentaries and worked for NHK and, you know, some of those are BBC around the world. And I got to the point that it was right around the time that we were all converting to cable television that I realized that all all people were really interested in was faster, better, cheaper, more eye candy, and I decided I wanted to become a part of the story rather than telling the story of science and technology. And so that's when I joined MIT and started this help started to help build this global network of 27 100 labs in about a 100 and 50 countries. So we've grown from a tiny little proto lab in rural India in 2002 to now this global network, which has been quite an honor and a pleasure to be a part of, I have to say.

That's amazing. So 2002, you start building this network and, and give us a sense, like what was the original concept behind the labs and what were gonna happen in the labs?

So the labs were really the brainchild of a large National Science Foundation grant that we got at MIT to do research at the boundary of bits and atoms. So what happens when the digital bits of the world merge with the physical atoms? So you build a smart environment or you are building. And at we were doing this research at MIT at the Center For Bits and Adams and we decided that we wanted to do outreach, right, to the community. What we did is we pulled together a kind of a small and affordable or more affordable subset of what of our big facility, our digital fabrication facility at MIT, and we said what if we put these into communities around the world? What would they do with this? You know, what would, if they had the ability to make almost anything that they could imagine, you know, would this stimulate new business, new entrepreneurship? Would it stimulate education? Would it Didn't know what would happen. And so the National Science Foundation, to their credit, was very willing to let us experiment. And so we we put, you know, the first proto proto lab in rural India and the next one in rural Norway and the next one in rural Africa, and it took off. Everywhere we put a fab lab, like 3 other fab labs sprouted. Right? And so it really was to ask the question, if you could, if you had the technical capability of making almost anything, what would you do with that? And this this global network, which has grown since that time, is continuing to answer that question.

And in my opinion, it's around the dotedu, the.org, and the.com. So, it's education, you know, bringing economic opportunity through innovation and entrepreneurship and also social impact. How do we produce and consume in a in a sustainable world? And so that's that's really kind of the origin.