Chevron Fab STEM Fellowship Reflection
Heaven Whitby
Hosting Grecia Bello through the Chevron Fab STEM Fellowship at Fort Valley State University’s Fab Lab was a meaningful opportunity to connect my work in Middle Georgia with a broader international community of educators and innovators.
Our exchange connected perspectives from Bolivia and the United States around a shared purpose: making technology, fabrication, and creative problem solving more accessible to communities whose talents are too often overlooked.
As a Black woman leading STEM programs at a historically Black university, I approach access through both representation and meeting people where they are. My experience directing the Fab Lab, Mobile STEM Lab, and Precision Agriculture Labs has centered on bringing hands-on learning to minority and rural communities. That work requires understanding the barriers
people face, building relationships, and creating experiences that help learners recognize themselves as designers, engineers, and problem solvers, in some cases, for the first time.
A memorable focus of the fellowship exchange was Grecia’s work with transforming discarded plastic bottles into usable material. Hearing her relate the creation of their community and university lab to her journey in recognizing how useful discarded or simplistic items can be was enlightening. How it all came together to provide a connection between sustainability, engineering, and fabrication is compelling. It offered an accessible starting point for exploring how familiar materials can become resources for innovation.
For my work, that connection is especially valuable. It helped add context to how learners can begin with something they recognize in their everyday environment and move toward questions about transforming material properties, learning machine design, manufacturing, and practicing entrepreneurship.
The experience reinforced the importance of connecting technical education to community priorities. Rural and underserved communities bring significant knowledge, creativity, and resourcefulness to STEM learning. As a program leader, my responsibility is to build pathways that connect those strengths with tools, people, and opportunities to add depth to ideas while
bringing them into reality. Hanging out with Grecia strengthened my commitment to learning experiences that invite participants to investigate a problem, experiment with materials, and consider how their designs could serve others.
It also encouraged me to think more intentionally about integrating sustainability into digital fabrication instruction. Material reuse can provide a foundation for lessons that connect engineering with textiles, product development, and business fundamentals. These connections help make STEM relevant to learners with different interests and create multiple entry points into advanced manufacturing and design.
The fellowship demonstrated the value of collaboration across borders. Hosting an international colleague created space for mutual learning and connected our local work to a global network of practice. Sharing lessons through SCOPES-DF can extend that exchange further, allowing educators to adapt ideas to their own communities.
We hosted a workshop that allowed individuals in my community to fellowship with her and hear her journey firsthand. Deepening the view of “other” representation within future forward spaces.
I took her deep into my community. A city where generations of my family have worked the resources of the community. Once as slaves, then educators and servicemen, and now engineers and leaders. I explained how transformative perspective shifts are as we discussed the journey of black Americans on a community podcast and on a short trip to the MLK memorial in Atlanta. I was grateful for the opportunity to share my community and how far we’ve come and plan to go.
My strongest takeaway is that expanding access requires sustained leadership. The ability to build trust, create relevant learning opportunities, and help people see that their ideas deserve development, is a gift and an honor. The Chevron Fab STEM Fellowship strengthened my commitment in service to this work and to connecting minority and rural communities in America with the knowledge, relationships, and resources to participate fully in innovation.