With ongoing government “policies” attempting to dismantle creativity and equity, it became necessary for the TCSP newsletter to focus on how Creative/Maker Spaces (CMS) can address the often-overlooked mental and emotional well-being of every person, ensuring that healing and joy through creativity are accessible to all.

So this quarter, I’m providing guidance to help your CMS foster truly inclusive, transdisciplinary environments where everyone is valued and empowered to collaborate by integrating:

Emotional, Physical, Intellectual, + Cognitive (EPIC) safety

Every Creative/Maker Space I’ve worked with has aimed to foster an innovative environment where interdisciplinary community members collaborate to invent new solutions. Regardless of their origins, each CMS has evolved from traditional workshops, where physical safety protocols have long been essential to protecting individuals from bodily harm.

Yet while physical safety is prioritized, mental and emotional harm—far less visible but often more pervasive—frequently goes unaddressed. Unlike physical injury, which tends to impact individuals sporadically, mental and emotional harm can occur daily, leaving behind long-term, community-wide damage. When ignored, this harm reinforces inequities rooted in misogyny, othering, systemic bias, and more. Such inequities cultivate exclusionary cultures that privilege a few while marginalizing the many, perpetuating barriers to interest, access, and participation.

Establishing an EPIC CMS Safety

Why embed EPIC safety in your CMS? Because, unlike the ignorance and prejudice coming out of Washington, you want a world where creativity flourishes, and the value of that creativity drives innovation, benefiting each person, your institution, and yourself.

Such a space must therefore have EPIC safety to prioritize Diverse Representation, ensuring that historically excluded communities have an authentic voice and a visible, active presence in your CMS. From there, this Community of Belonging establishes the infrastructure and initiatives that foster mutual respect, shared purpose, and genuine inclusion. Like a dinner party with close friends, this safe environment supports Unrestricted Ideas Culture, encouraging community members to discuss ideas freely and collectively embrace creative thinking. This enables Collaborative Conceptual Thinking, driving the co-creation of transformative, transdisciplinary solutions that explore complex questions through nascent concept development and hands-on prototype design. Finally, your empowered community will support authentic Intellectual Exploration, discovering applications for these new insights that drive innovation and solve valuable transdisciplinary challenges.

Ensuring the holistic well-being of every community member establishes an environment where everyone is safe from judgment or fear, to explore ideas from broad perspectives, and take creative risks in partnership with one another.

Getting Started:

OK. I admit a lot follows - don’t stress out. I’d advise you to read through it, knowing you are looking at months, if not years, of work. Chunk it up and think about how your community and culture would best engage with each stage of these guidelines authentically and symbiotically.

To establish EPIC culture, I use these six sequential stages of engagement and empowerment. The following process provides a framework for incorporating your community's specific characteristics.

1. Build a Diverse and Informed Team  

To begin this process, you and your CMS leaders must first develop an internal pedagogical framework to teach and confront their own inequitable beliefs. This process establishes a baseline of EPIC awareness that transfers to the creative spaces you direct, reducing harm and exclusion within your CMS community. 

The crucial next step is to assemble a diverse advisory team of CMS staff and stakeholders that reflects the full spectrum of the community your CMS seeks to welcome. For example, to foster a collaborative culture across Babson, Olin, and Wellesley Colleges, I established the “Scouts” student ambassador program. The program’s hiring practices incorporated several intentional policies to ensure equal representation across the three schools and the diversity of the student body. To do so, the program consistently maintained a team of 30 “Scouts”—10 from each college—and recruitment began with outreach to diversity-focused student groups and peer recommendations from within each campus.

However you get there, the goal for your advisory team should be to possess strong sociocultural literacy and a deep understanding of equity principles. This foundation enables them to pre-emptively identify and dismantle the biases and power dynamics that contribute to mental and emotional harm within your space. As a guiding force, your advisory team plays a key role in establishing EPIC safety as the cornerstone for creating policies, practices, and initiatives that prioritize equity and inclusivity, while also transferring this knowledge and experience to new members of the CMS community.

2. Honest Discovery:

With leadership self-discovery underway and your advisory team in place, you are well-positioned to begin understanding the specific challenges and needs related to the community’s EPIC safety. Because your advisory team reflects the community it serves, who better to provide authentic feedback on the policies and infrastructure you are working to establish? Empower your advisory team to serve as your “litmus testers” for everything you do.

Foster a symbiotic relationship that consistently orients them toward your “North Star,” while remaining flexible and responsive to their guidance, whether positive or critical.

In addition, your advisory team is uniquely equipped to collect both qualitative and quantitative data through grassroots methods such as “fly on the wall” observation, casual conversations, and peer-to-peer surveys with current and prospective CMS community members. This data can help assess the extent of inequalities in areas related to mental and emotional safety. It should be designed to highlight gaps in safety around equipment access, emotional well-being, and cultural inclusivity. By analyzing this data, your CMS community can begin to define a dual-focused assessment of needs that addresses both tangible and intangible safety concerns, creating a supportive and inclusive EPIC environment where your community members are valued and protected.

3. (Professionally) Identify Mental and Emotional Risks

Addressing mental and emotional harm is challenging. Such harm can manifest in subtle and subjective ways, ranging from unintentional microaggressions to overt discriminatory behavior, thus requiring a nuanced and proactive approach.

While your community and advisory team will play a key role in identifying solutions to risks, the subtle nuances of preventing mental and emotional harm often require a more comprehensive approach. This process ideally involves conducting a thorough external audit of community interactions, operating procedures, initiative designs, and the equipment and infrastructure that shape your CMS environment. In collaboration with your CMS advisory team, consider engaging two external auditors: one focused on mental and emotional strategies, and the other on the physical environment. 

Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Justice (EDIJ) specialists have expertise in applying a lens to your CMS that brings historically excluded groups into focus. They facilitate retreats, lead in-depth conversations, and conduct forensic culture audits. Their insights help identify systemic issues and empower your CMS community to develop effective mental and emotional safety protocols. These may include bias awareness training, equitable equipment training, and equipment procurement practices, among others. This ensures that the infrastructure is welcoming and designed to meet the needs and backgrounds of all users. 

A Certified Industrial Hygienist (CIH) brings specialized knowledge in environmental health and safety (EH&S) matters. They identify physical safety risks that may contribute to mental and emotional harm, working alongside your CMS community to develop tailored solutions. These unbiased teams will help determine the full scope of needs and offer valuable perspectives and pedagogical approaches to teach the CMS community how to ensure EPIC safety best practices. By addressing these risks holistically, your CMS community can learn how to design the systems and protocols needed to mitigate harm, creating a safer and more equitable environment.

4. Guides and Frameworks

After this challenging and (trust me) fantastic process of institutional self-discovery, your CMS advisory team can now build on its learning to design cultural frameworks, such as a racial and social equity roadmap, hiring polocies and an honor code, to guide your CMS community development and decision-making processes for both new CMS policies, initiatives, and infrastructure and the revitalization of established ones. 

By having community-developed frameworks directly contribute to every aspect of your CMS redesign, your advisory team furthers its authentic connection to the CMS, enabling them to see themselves reflected in its social and functional fabric—a powerful acknowledgment of belonging. Importantly, these guidelines are living documents that must remain open to refinements as your community grows and refines its culture in the coming years.

5. Identity and “Patina”

To begin designing critical physical EPIC safety infrastructure, collaborate with your advisory team to assess how its guides and frameworks, alongside the ways your community interacts with the space, will shape the design of your internal and external identity. This should be done in tandem with your EPIC safety measures and responses, always through an inclusive lens. Use these insights to develop pedagogy and processes that thoughtfully incorporate diverse community perspectives. Empower both the advisory team and the broader community to co-create tangible artifacts—such as labels, signage, and interactive learning tools—that educate and warn about potential physical or mental harm.

These artifacts form a collaborative physical “patina” that reflects your CMS’s unique voice, style, and culture. Because your advisory team represents the full spectrum of the CMS community, every graphic and physical design decision is grounded in a deep understanding of the CMS’s core EPIC safety values. By encouraging ongoing contributions and iterations to the patina, you enable community members to connect personally with the design process, fostering a lasting and authentic relationship with your CMS.

Over the years, the rich color of your patina deepens, voicelessly communicating the importance of mental and emotional safety measures established by those who have previously worked with the space. Just as the human history of a well-used handrail can be sensed in its shape and color, so too will the richness of your diverse community be evident through its patina, transforming the environment into a vibrant, living, personalized symbiotic ecosystem for all who use your space.

6. Response Design

Either after the processes for developing patina have been established or in conjunction, your CMS is ready to develop responses to emotional or mental harm. In this case, you will need to bring in other members of your community who may specialize in responding to harm. Avoid including staff with dual roles, who are often too overburdened to provide immediate assistance. Instead, folks like mental and emotional harm mediation professionals, bias coordinators, diversity officers, mental health professionals, and public safety personnel are fantastic resources to have as the core of your response team. 

These professionals collaborate with your advisory team and community to co-design tailored responses that align with the unique context and dynamics of a harmful event. This approach ensures that harm is promptly identified, the underlying causes are assessed, and a resolution strategy is thoughtfully customized to the specific needs of those involved, fostering healing and long-term restoration. In addition, a zero-tolerance policy is important because, although your CMS is designed to support everyone, individuals who intentionally cause harm are never welcome.

In my work, I have frequently developed a response protocol to mental and emotional harm that requires a three-tiered severity scale that the CMS community can use as a reference to identify emotional and mental harm. These protocols focus on the most common types of mental and emotional harm CMS communities may encounter and provide structure for addressing it:

1. Unintentional Harm: Behaviors that may unintentionally offend or exclude, such as biased comments or inappropriate jokes.

1. Cultural Harm: Actions that violate established policies, such as community members allowing untrained individuals access to equipment.

1. Egregious Harm: Intentional actions that cause mental and emotional harm, including discriminatory language or refusal to respect individuals' identities.

To whatever types of harm you identify, design scenarios to immediately activate a carefully structured sequence of healing, counseling, and communication protocols co-designed with mental and emotional harm pre-identified mediation professionals, when the mental or emotional harm has been identified. Direct the people harmed to designated individuals or groups equipped with specialized training and the authority to effectively address and alleviate the harm through a range of communication techniques, including active listening, empathy, and validation. This fosters trust and empowers individuals on their healing journey. Once the harmed person or group has been treated, work with the individual who caused the harm using similar techniques to determine if they can remain part of your community.

Good luck and have fun!

I hope this newsletter supports your CMS community in cultivating a unique and adaptable culture, infrastructure, and tools to respond swiftly and effectively to emotional and mental harm. Despite best efforts, every CMS community remains vulnerable to both physical and emotional harm. That’s why EPIC safety must be continuously nurtured, ensuring it is deeply embedded in the culture of your creative and maker space.

In these troubling times of increasing prejudice, CMS spaces have a unique opportunity to rise above systemic inequities. They can become creative culture generators—empowering communities to explore, with strength and joy, the necessary solutions to stop and reverse the attacks on freedom and humanity, and to build what is urgently needed: an equitable creative world.

Janos Stone