LOVELAND: CreatorSpace makes and donates desks for children who need one
As many children do at-home schooling, they’ve had to find new places to work — at the kitchen counter, the family couch or random surfaces around the house. To make this easier, Loveland’s CreatorSpace has begun making and donating desks for home-based schoolchildren.
Christian Becerra, a longtime member of CreatorSpace which serves as a space for the Loveland community to use tools to make things, said the idea for the desks came from research he did and stories he read of people around the country building desks for kids.
While he loved the idea, because he had a personal desk of his own as a child, he said many of the desks he read about were built by woodworkers. So anyone wanting to provide desks to Loveland families would need the know-how and the tools to make them.
Becerra said the idea was to design a desk that could be produced quickly and easily and shipped in bulk. It was also vital, Becerra said, to make the desk so that anyone could assemble it with no tools. “If you don’t know what you are going to eat tomorrow, you (probably) won’t have tools.”
He said that a piece of medium density fiberboard has enough wood for two desks each. The board is placed into a computercontrolled routing table where a digital design is loaded and the machine cuts the wood into the necessary pieces. The five pieces of the desk that are cut can then be lightly sanded and wrapped for shipping.
Becerra said cutting the desks takes about 40 minutes.
When completed, the desk snaps into place and, Becerra said, can be assembled in less than a minute. It can also be taken apart and moved easily.
“If you have a full desk that you cannot take apart, how are you going to move that many desks? You would need a semi,” he said. “Our desks, as soon as it gets manufactured … it doesn’t take any room. If you want to take 30 of them, you can.”
“I think it is brilliant,” said Mary Connole, coordinator with CreatorSpace.
Connole said CreatorSpace began to reach out to Loveland programs to donate the desks to families that could use them.
Greg Muehlberger, a family navigator with the House of Neighborly Service who helps families with any needs they may have beyond case work, said Connole contacted the organization to see if it had a need for the desks. House of Neighborly Service quickly signed on to start distributing them.
Muehlberger said that House of Neighborly Service has six on order, more than
the number created so far, that it wants to distribute to families and organizations. Three are going to grandparents raising their grandchildren.
“What a perfect fit,” Muehlberger said. Becerra said CreatorSpace has enough funding through a $1,000 donation from the Thompson Valley Rotary Club to make 50 to 60 more.
Becerra said he hopes the desks can do for the children of Loveland what his desk did for him as a kid: give them a space they can call their own.
“If they can have even a small space they can claim as theirs, it can bring them a little more stability and comfort,” Becerra said. “It is important to give kids a sense of ownership.”