Support Hacker Dojo Capacity Campaign

Our Objective: It is hard to build one's skill set in technology without financial means. It is even more difficult to collaborate with experts and peers directly. We are here to lower and remove those obstacles. The staff and members of the Hacker Dojo organize and host events, workshops, and activities; free to anyone in the community.

Our Specialty: We are a hackerspace for learning and development. Our workshops range from programming languages to technical interview prep classes to Hackathons to robotics classes. Whether it is for a developer role or a technical role related to software development we are there to support the technical growth of our community. We provide access to electronics and laser cutting labs for prototyping. We also have socials to get people talking to one another in an informal setting.

Our Funding: We fund our efforts through three avenues.

1. Membership programs, where a bulk of our funding comes from..
   1. Standard: At $150 per month, a standard member has 24/7 access to the Hacker Dojo site to work, book event rooms and meeting rooms free of charge.
   2. Student: College students are offered the same membership perks as the Standard at a 50% discount.
   3. Hive: For $325 dollars per month we allot a designated desk in a secure room with less than 10 other Hive members.
2. Non-members booking the Hacker Dojo space for events.
3. Donations and merchandise sales.

Our Dilemma: Like many organizations worldwide we had to close our doors during the pandemic. We were fortunate to have a healthy bank account and a few grants to keep us active online. Unfortunately, we lost about half of our members in the Bay Area. The most common reason individuals canceled their membership was that they moved away. We are seeing steady membership growth but are in need of an additional $100K in funding to give us the time and bandwidth to attract more members at the current growth rate.

Our Results: Since the beginning of the year we have more than tripled our membership base; from 32 to 101 student, standard, and hive members. Our target is 180 for sustainability at the Mountain View location, 220+ to enable us to begin expansion to a second site in another part of the bay. Events and workshops have also tripled to six per week.