Long time no see - and a few big announcements

Hi everyone! It’s been ages since we posted, but before we get into everything we have to talk about, we have to cover a few huge announcements!

We’re simplifying our brand.

To make it a bit easier to say and write our name, we’re simplifying to “Encouraging Engineering” in most of our branding! The hope is to create a more approachable organization.

You may have noticed a few changes around here.

As an organization, we’re pivoting our presence online. This is for a few important reasons.

Previously, our organization was in a way fighting itself. While we worked to create the best group workshop content we could, we also invested time into our online content - meant to be studied independently. It forced us to pick our priority - but we still had to split our time. That meant that our workshops weren’t as scalable as we wanted them to be, and our online curriculum wasn’t 100% of the way there. For a while, we just ran with it, but we’re now making a change - we’re honing in on scalable workshops beyond our local community. (But don’t worry - our organization-run workshops will only continue to grow as the testing ground for our content) Why, you ask?

A pretty huge announcement

This September, Encouraging Engineering will be giving a talk in front of the UN general assembly during the seminar “Sustainable models for accessible STEM education and opportunities with a focus on marginalized student groups". There, I’ll talk about how low-cost, sustainable, and social workshops are the best way to ensure that the next generation can think like engineers. That means our organization will get a publicity boost - to say the least.

UN General Assembly hall - courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

So, we’re hoping to be ready in September for a huge influx of people ready to use our content to deploy workshops around the world. It’s a huge task, but an exciting one! In the coming months expect to see more and more documentation for our social workshops published on the site.

Workshops at Hope Solutions

We’ve been running workshops at Hope since the last post, and they’ve been great. We’re currently on pause for the summer, but as soon as the fall comes around we’ll begin again. Organizations like Hope Solutions will now be a vital testing ground for our workshop content - and we look forward to working with similar partners in the future.

In summary

Overall, we’re making a few changes to ensure that we can continue to grow our impact on the world - but we’re still the same organization at heart. As we publish more content focused on group workshops, and promote our organization in new ways, we hope that our impact will go beyond anything we could do in our local community, state, or country - we hope our content will be in the hands of anyone who could use it.

All we need to do is document, organize, and publish.

See you all soon!

-Vaughn