Black Makers and Designers Residency

Makerversity is launching the Black Designers and Makers Residency. A programme designed to offer long term support, space and resources to Black designers, makers, creatives and innovators.

• Full time 24/7 Hot-Desking membership for 12 months.
• A Grant of £100 per month for 12 months. This can be used to support any project, creative endeavour or go towards your personal living costs. It will be paid directly to you at the beginning of each month.

In return, we ask that you use Makerversity as your main workspace for at least 4 days per month. This helps ensure the opportunity is being actively used. If you're unable to meet this minimum, please update us, the grant will end the following month as we’ll reallocate the membership to another individual.

• 1 hour at the end of the programme.
• 30 minutes every three months.

This is simply to help us understand whether it's useful to you. Checking in every 3 months to make sure we're offering the right support and that you’re continuing to use the membership. Then at the end of the 12 months for an evaluation for any feedback.

Our goal is to make this free membership a permanent part of Makerversity’s offer and to open it up to applications and referrals going forward.

We are based in London and in our neighbouring local boroughs Black people make up 7-30% of the population. Yet as a membership organisation we have few Black members. We feel that our membership community should strive to reflect the demographics of our City, so we feel we can do better than we do now.

Therefore, we have looked at the barriers to entry that exist for Black members to join and we have identified two areas we can work on.

• Racial inequalities in employment and wealth persist in the UK. Between 2014 and 2022, people aged 25–29 from Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic backgrounds were twice as likely to be unemployed compared to their White British peers, regardless of economic status ().
• The Runnymede Trust’s Colour of Money report (2020) highlighted the scale of racialised wealth disparities. Drawing on the Wealth and Assets Survey, the report revealed that for every £1 of wealth held by White British households, Black African households owned just 10p.
• In 2023, only 8% of the UK’s STEM workforce came from Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic backgrounds, with unemployment rates for graduates (BA and MA) in these communities twice as high. Representation in tech is even lower: only 4% of the UK’s tech workforce identifies as Black, and Black women make up just 0.7% of the IT workforce. You can find out more here.

These figures underscore the urgent need to address barriers and create opportunities for underrepresented communities in STEM and tech.