(gentle music) (upbeat theme music) -Bikes, coffee, and a helping hand for youth aging out of foster care.

It's called the nation's first tech library.

Do Space!

Beating poverty by building a community.

"What If..." (upbeat theme music) This 120-year-old warehouse is now centerpiece for a new project called Millwork Commons.

It'll be home to dozens of companies and non-profits... like the tech company Flywheel.

They call this a new hub for art and design - tech and community growth.

Old places becoming something new and exciting.

That's the theme for this episode of "What If..." our series on innovation and creativity in Nebraska.

Our first stop: an old bookstore building.

Now a tech library you won't see anywhere else in the country.

- So you make your model over here.

- Yes.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] I'm making something with a 3D printer.

With a little, well a lot of help.

- Now just pull that.

- [Narrator] Design comes first.

So what should I be doing?

- Alright, so I kind of preset this up so that we could throw it together pretty quickly.

You have to take your familiarity of this in 2D space and now apply that to 3D space.

- [Mike] Okay.

This takes a whole different way of thinking.

- [Instructor] It does.

- We're getting there.

We're learning.

- You are, I mean you got it first, the first time.

- [Mike] 3D printing is one part of this unique place called, Do Space.

- Do Space, fundamentally, is two things.

One is access to technology, whether that's basic all the way up to advanced tools, and then also just the learning piece.

(fast upbeat music) - [Mike] A community tech library, digital workshop, innovation playground.

A nonprofit they call the nation's first technology library.

- Going back six or seven years, several community leaders came together and started talking about access to technology in the community.

Most notably the lack of access to tech.

- [Mike] The idea for Do Space was born.

Stavick's been here from the beginning.

A self-described tech-nerd who grew up making GeoCities websites on a Gateway 2000 computer in rural South Dakota.

Add a library science degree, public library work, interest in the local tech community, and things like access to open data, often called civic hacking, plus a belief that it's good to disrupt the norm and embrace change.

Stavick's a good fit for this outside-the-box venture.

- I feel very lucky to be in Omaha as this project was taking shape.

It's just pure luck, you know, that something like this was coming around when I was, at that moment in my career, when I was looking for a new challenge.

- [Mike] Alright, so what's your favorite thing here?

- You know, my very favorite place within Do Space is our 3D lab.

There are just so many really interesting, creative people in there who are just hacking on all kinds of things, using our laser cutter, 3D printing, all kinds of different objects.

So sometimes I just like to actually go in that room and just hang out and get to know people.

(fast electronic guitar music) - [Instructor] What we created, it's actually two models in here now because we're doing two different colors and what we have to do is assign each model to which extruder, which color it's going to be.

- [Mike] Time to get our design ready for two-color printing.

- [Kristina] One thing that you have to keep in mind, when you're 3D printing, is how the plastic is going to build up.

So, what I'm gonna do, since the bulk of this model is at the top, we're going to turn it over.

- [Mike] Okay.

-[Kristina] That way it doesn't droop because it's quite gloopy when it first comes out of the extruder.

- Gloopy.

Is that a technical term?

- That is the technical term.

- Okay, all right.

A lot happens here.

In the computer lab, people are watching YouTube videos and playing games, but also applying for jobs, working on school projects, making music.

- Okay so how many bedrooms do you want?

- Hmm, probably three.

- [Mike] Designing a dream house, or building a dream business.

Dez Coulibaly came from Ivory Coast to attend UNO.

We found him designing the menu for the restaurant he's opening.

- Lerezo, is gonna include a lot of African culture, you know, some of the traditional dish that we have.

- [Mike] And so you do a lot of work here?

- Yeah, I love the Do Space.

They gave us a platform for us, you know, to be able to use computer and have access to like editing stuff, you know.

I'm using a software called iMenu, which is very expensive but thanks to Do Space, we have access to it with a free membership so.

- Are you excited, about this?

- I'm very excited, and hopefully like, you know, it change, you know, change everything for me.

(electronic music) - [Mike] There's a lot of classes.

We checked out Cyber Seniors and Junior Makers.

Cyber Seniors is a weekly place for folks to get walk-in tech help from savvy senior volunteers.

- Well he's working with a newsletter.

- Looks like you're trying to make a calendar?

- Yes.

- [Voice] Trying to syncronize her phone with her tablet.

- [Mike] Even connecting speakers to a TV and receiver.

- [Student] I've just learned something new.

- Folks come in with relatively basic questions most of the time.

It's connecting people up with the world today.

- Oh my gosh.

This is it.

- [Mike] Junior Makers, offers different maker-based tasks for six to 12 year olds.

Today, build something to transport a Lego person down a zip line.

- It just allows people to kind of maybe experience things that they're not experiencing at school or at home.

Three, two, one, go.

- [Rebecca] It's called Do Space.

So, taking action, making sure that a lot of our programs are hands-on and project-based rather than just like a straight lecture.

And just kind of promoting that culture of, you know, if you wanna to learn something, here are the resources, jump on it.

You're responsible for your own learning.

-[Kristina] Literally all you're gonna do is push a button.

- [Mike] Okay.

And how long is this going to take roughly?

- So the software is showing us an estimate of a little bit over two hours.

- [Mike] This thing has 152 layers.

Meaning 152 passes for the jets.

Let's watch them all.

(machine buzzing) (music abruptly stops) Yeah, maybe not.

So you'd describe this as what?

A hot glue gun on rails?

- A hot glue gun on rails, yeah.

That's how I like to explain it cause yeah, you can see we've got the rolls of plastic filament here so it's basically the same set up as a hot glue gun.

It's a metal tube that gets hot, melts the plastic and then these gears just feed it through.

- Why is 3D printing a good thing to have here?

- So 3D printing is really great because it allows for rapid prototyping in a way that isn't, hasn't been easily accessible to people before.

- [Mike] Do Space lives in a former bookstore at 72nd and Dodge.

Kinda the crossroads of Omaha.

Easy mass transit access.

Important because closing the technology gap between those who have, often to the west, and those who have less, often to the east, is a big reason this was created.

- There are still tens of thousands of households in Omaha that do not have access to the internet or a computer at home.

So the original focus was really just providing access, but as that started to develop as an idea we realized obviously education has to be a strong piece of this project.

You can't just throw tech out there and say, okay, good luck.

(fast upbeat music) - [Mike] Now there's this.

All free to users, impacting a lot of people since it opened in 2015.

What excites you about all this?

- I love being in this room with so many different people.

This is a really inclusive, welcoming space.

We have a very diverse membership and just being able to be in this community here where people are helping each other.

(machine whirring) - Alright.

- [Mike] Voila!

- [Kristina] There we go.

Since this obviously wouldn't stand up on its own, I made you guys a little stand to go with it and you've got your little ellipses on there.

We've printed the What If logo with a little stand and that's what 3D printing is all about.

- [Mike] There's a quirky former bank building not far from here.

Now it's home to a business that's changing the lives of young adults.

(lively music) - [Mike] Stuff goes in circles here.

Drinks, wheels, life, for the guy who created this and the young people working here.

(lively music) The name, Bike Union and Coffee, says pretty much everything about the business side of things.

Fixing and selling bikes, making and selling drinks.

- Do you have chai tea?

- Yes, we do.

- Okay, I wanna get a chai tea.

- You want that iced or hot?

- Uh, iced please.

(ice filling cup) (liquid pours) - Here's your chai tea latte.

- Oh, thank you.

- [Mike] MaKayla and coworkers are what's different.

- I was a foster kid from 15 through 19, when I aged out, yeah, so.

- I was put into foster care at two.

- [Mike] What was your foster care experience like?

- It was just a lot of moving different, moving to different homes, eight or nine in four years.

- Wow, and then all of a sudden you hit 19 and, - Yeah.

- [Mike] Hitting 19 means aging out of foster care for more than 300 Nebraskans a year.

- If you look at that demographic, there's a whole host of negative outcomes that are associated with it, but I think the thing that really stood out the most is there's a 50% unemployment rate in that demographic.

And so we started this bike shop, coffee shop as a means to provide workforce development for young adults who've been impacted by the foster care system.

- [MaKayla] 20 ounce Turtle.

- [Mike] 20 hour a week jobs, for a full year, for five young adults aging out of foster care, but more than a job.

- [Student] There's only two blues so six minus two, I mean eight minus two is six, six over eight simplified is three-fourths.

- Perfect.

- [Mike] GED tutoring and academic mentoring are part of the program and, things like financial literacy and cooking classes, life skills programs, a book club (metal dings) and mindfulness meditation.

Learning how to regulate emotions.

- This is where you come back to over and over, whenever the mind wanders off.

- [Miah] This has gotta be out of left field to them but of all the programs that we do I feel like it's the one that comes up at the daily talk with them the most.

(metal dings) Our bottom line is not profits, our bottom line is the programming.

(machine whirring) - [Mike] Something has to keep the lights on.

That's mostly grants for this nonprofit, but the coffee and bike side is about 30% of their income and growing.

- [Mike] A lot of stuff down here.

- There is a lot of stuff down here, yes, yeah.

(lively music) These are used, donated wheels.

Handle bars and stems and seat posts and forks and seats and reflectors and fenders, inner tubes, tires, basically everything you need to build a bike of things that have been donated to us.

- We generate kind of the lifeblood of the organization by refurbishing bikes and that kind of thing.

It certainly helps provide a funding stream for us.

- So many bikes, yeah so, just like let's get a group of people to band together, give my bosses an intervention to move some of these bikes out.

(giggles) - Vallory may be Bike Union's poster adult.

Taken away from her mom and put into foster care as a toddler, two decades of living with her grandmother, her mother, foster parents, an agency for at-risk youth, even homeless.

A young lady with no high school degree and no direction when she connected with the Bike Union.

(metals clanking and whirring ) (somber music) - [Vallory] I felt like I couldn't do anything, I just felt really alone.

- You know, she was in temporary housing, she'd stay in there all day, 15 hours a day playing video games, and the world was just kind of like going away.

- I just did not talk to anybody, I was super scared.

I would just cry like during my shift, I don't know why.

- She was just really sad, really depressed.

She actually wouldn't talk to me at first when I met her.

- So I got in here and like immediately, they're like, "Okay, you said you wanted to get back in school, "let's do that."

- [Miah] She started achieving her personal goals.

She lost a hundred pounds, she started commuting to work, she started going to the gym, she graduated from high school, she got her own apartment.

- And to see her just like come out of her shell socially, like, has been huge.

She has goals now, she sees hope for her life.

She is a different person, completely.

- [Vallory] I really look at this place as like my family.

- [Miah] I really think Vallory's is one of my favorites.

- Changed my life completely, completely.

This is probably my favorite thing to make, because it's just, we're just chilling here, watching the beans, you know, nice.

- [Mike] When Vallory graduated from the Bike Union program, Sommer knew he had to keep her around because of how she influences others.

- Is it expanding?

Yep, you've blossomed them perfectly then.

- [Mike] He hired her as shift supervisor and Vallory is also going to school with an eye on being a social worker, pulling from her life story to help others, something a guy from South Omaha understands.

- So this is the old neighborhood?

- Yeah, this is the old stomping grounds.

It's always really cool to be back here I think.

- [Mike] Wasn't easy growing up here, was it?

And it had really nothing to do with the neighborhood?

- [Miah] You know, yeah, I'm not gonna lie, the childhood was rough and there was some instability.

My dad brought a lot of stability into the situation, and when, when he went away it kind of left me in a pretty unstable situation.

- In what way?

- Well, you know, as far as like monetarily, you know, we were on state assistance and I was kinda left with an unstable single parent so, that led to a whole host of other issues that I had to face, you know, which led to trouble in school and which eventually led to me dropping out of school and not getting back to college till I was 27.

But it kind of all happened around this area, so it's bittersweet being back a bit.

(soothing music) I'm not doing this because I think I'm better than them and there's something I need to teach them, I think I'm doing this because I, I am them, I see myself in them.

- [Mike] It was a way for Sommer to take a leap from a comfortable job and combine lots of experience in the bike world, his life experience, and an entrepreneurial spirit into a unique social enterprise business.

There are plenty of highs and lows.

Sommer says he knows what they're doing is working.

And isn't worried about the sort of measurables that look good on an annual report.

The same sort of maverick attitude, his term not mine, that drives Sommer to keep this small, impacting a handful of Vallorys, MaKaylas and Terrances at a time.

- We know that young adults age out of foster care system and we know the negative outcomes that they face but it's something that continues to happen.

The only conclusion to draw is that we view them as a disposable demographic and I think that's something that, it really makes me angry and, you know, it's something that I wanna make sure that we fix.

- Here Miah, here, here.

(laughs) (whirring sound) That music you hear in our stories?

Well we think a show about creativity should celebrate original music and composers.

And that's exactly what we're doing.

We put the call out, and Nebraska composers submitted more than 150 pieces for possible use in our "What If."

stories.

And we've used a lot of it!

♪ - [Mike] Just north of here is our last example of something new from something old.

A development trying to break the cycle of poverty in North Omaha.

(somber music) - [Mike] Do you remember Pleasantview growing up?

- [Voice] I did, actually my aunt Rose lived in Pleasantview.

It wasn't the safest most you know, pleasant, it wasn't a pleasant view in a sense for anyone.

- [Interviewee] When you concentrate poverty what happens is there's lots of negativity that produces, you know, children and adults don't have the resources that they need.

(somber music) - [Mike] The land was abandoned, unwanted for a few years.

Then this happened.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (bell ringing) - All right, here's our tour of Highlander.

Housing, the event center, greenhouse, playground and swimming pool.

Oh, ouch.

Connect, which is community classrooms and tech lab, coffee shop, Accelerator building which has three restaurants and also classroom space for Creighton and Metro Community College.

(car honking) New senior housing under construction, probably gonna get hit by a Bobcat here.

- [Mike] The Highlander neighborhood.

Seventy Five North, the non-profit behind this, calls it a community within a community in North Omaha.

- At our core and in our mission, that's what we're trying to do is is to end neighborhood decline and intergenerational poverty.

And we're doing that through all the things that you see around here in terms of the physical changes, the landscape changes, but in terms of the program availability and the resources.

And I don't know, I'm just kinda thinking aloud.

- [Mike] Franklin knows the neighborhood.

She lived a few blocks North of here as a kid.

You'll see that's a reoccurring theme.

Franklin knows the challenges knows what they're doing is the solution.

Adapted from a national model called Purpose Built Communities.

It's a three-pronged approach: education, housing, health and wellness.

- All the things that make life exciting and vibrant and worth living for.

- [Mike] There's apartments, duplexes, townhouses, senior living.

About a third are rented at market rate.

Two-thirds are subsidized at different levels for moderate and low income residents.

Everyone lives side by side places equal in quality and design, creating an economically diverse neighborhood with more than 200 units for a thousand people eventually.

- That economic diversity breeds resiliency, strength in neighborhood.

- [Mike] Destini Marshall's lived here a couple years.

She interned with Seventy Five North before taking a job at her alma mater, Creighton University.

- And I just thought it was awesome what they were doing here.

I love the community, I love my neighbors.

I love that they put on programs every summer and get the community engaged.

I also love that they have a big emphasis on education.

- [Mike] A century-old building full of new ideas.

Howard Kennedy, an Omaha Public Schools Elementary, is a few blocks north of Highlander.

The school and Seventy Five North are in a five-year partnership to improve education using a charter school model.

For starters school days here are an hour longer, leaving more time to customize learning for each student.

- So basically the kid comes in at a certain level.

We adjust their needs or their instruction to their needs at every level, in addition to more instruction.

And when you look at what we were prioritizing with our kids in their learning, we made sure that those things are tight within our ability.

What's loose is how our teachers do it.

- [Mike] Sometimes with $500 grants for specific projects from Seventy Five North, which finds ways to financially support other things like extra staff.

About 300 kids go to school here, a small but growing number live at Highlander, almost all live in some level of poverty.

They call it a cradle to college pipeline, starting with a new Early Learning Center that's part of the Kennedy campus.

Here, there's care and education for infants and preschoolers, training and education for providers.

- With the right tools, with the right training and resources, these kids can reach the same goals as their wealthier peers in other neighborhoods.

- What are those things on the ground?

You know what those are?

- Saddles.

- They're saddles, that's right.

- [Mike] Gunter is excited to be back in his childhood neighborhood.

His school has lofty goals, like in 10 years students performing in the top 15% of all public elementary schools in the state.

- They take what I teach and learn and using the technology, this is at four or five years old?

Yeah, I'm pretty impressed.

That's how we know we're on the right track.

- [Mike] COVID had quieted this usually vibrant place when we were shooting the story.

No weddings or other gatherings in the event center, no classes in the Creighton and Metro Community College spaces.

(upbeat music) Photos and video from the Highlander folks show what it's normally like.

Still, Highlander sponsored ACT test prep for high schoolers happening virtually.

Inside Metro's area, they're creating science programming using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Science on a Sphere tool.

Downstairs is Hardy Coffee, Highlander's first business.

- Why did you wanna be here?

- Oh, for so many reasons.

I grew up in North Omaha.

This is my home, my husband and I live not far from here.

And so when we had the opportunity to invest with a coffee shop in our own neighborhood, it felt like a really great opportunity.

I think that it's just an investment in resources where it's needed in the city most.

- It was my mom's vision to be a part of the Highlander project because she grew up in North Omaha.

- [Mike] After "Big Mama" Patricia Barron passed away her daughter turned that vision into reality and moved their well-known North Omaha restaurant here.

- [Gladys] And moving here was just perfect because this space allowed us to have live music and things happen outside on the lawn.

- Is there an energy with all of this?

- Yeah, there's a, the energy that's here at the Highlander is a sense of community.

- [Mike] Highlander is a big endeavor with a big price tag.

More than a hundred million dollars.

- So we've got a crazy diverse mix of funding here.

So I'd say roughly 35 to 40% of our funding comes from local philanthropists.

- [Mike] Things like federal and state programs and tax credits cover the rest.

It's a work in progress.

There will be more places for people to live.

possible partnerships to bring employers and jobs to the campus.

Cydney Franklin says there's innovation in things you can see.

Like design.

Streets built to connect to non Highlander neighbors, community spaces bringing people together.

Structures designed by four different architects.

- [Cydney] We didn't want this to look like some cookie cutter subdivision that was just dropped in kind of carelessly into the neighborhood.

- [Mike] Plus innovative programming and partnerships constantly evolving to meet the needs of the Highlander community.

- Opportunity, exposure, you know elevation are all things that excite me and taking advantage of opportunity, capitalizing on it as you can and just seeing what the results can be, what can be produced, excites me.

(inspiring music) (theme music) Hey look, found another scooter!

Well that's it for this episode of "What If...".

You can check out all our best work online, or #WhatIfNebraska on social media.

Well, thanks for watching "What If...".

Gotta go.

We'll catch ya next time.

(theme music) - [Crew Member 1] Is this thing still rolling?

- [Crew Member 2] Yeah, looks like it.

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