AT&T on Wednesday announced a $35,000 donation to the EAST Initiative as part of its partnership with the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub.
The nonprofit Innovation Hub is renovating space in downtown North Little Rock that will become the Argenta Innovation Center and include EAST’s STEAM Lab, a technical training space focused on science, technology, engineering, arts and math for use by students and the community at large.
The gift will enable EAST, a Little Rock tech-based educational program, to procure the technology and equipment for the STEAM Lab such as 3-D printers, Apple iMac computers loaded with professional software, HP Plotter large-format printers, Arduino microcontrollers for coding as well as photography and video equipment.
EAST, which stands for Environmental and Spacial Technology, was launched in 1996 and hosts more than 400 students in roughly 100 technical training sessions annually from its west Little Rock workspace. It operates 221 project-based, service-oriented programs in five states — Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Pennsylvania.
EAST schools are equipped with state-of-the-art classrooms with workstations that provide servers, software and accessories; GPS/GIS mapping tools; architectural and CAD design software; 3-D animation suites, virtual reality development tools and more.
AT&T’s donation is part of its Aspire student empowerment program. Since its 2008 launch, the program has impacted more than 1 million students in all 50 states.
EAST president and CEO Matt Dozier said AT&T’s gift will enable the STEAM Lab to become a beacon for students across the state.
“What we’re going to do with the Innovation Hub will affect Little Rock and North Little Rock and ripple out across the state,” he said.
Innovation Hub director Warwick Sabin called EAST a model program for STEM education and stressed the importance of linking education to economic development.
“We need to have the right kind of jobs ready for our students after we’ve educated them,” he said. “Our focus is on developing and retaining homegrown talent, and then we can begin attracting it to the state.”
Renovation at the Hub’s Innovation Center in Argenta, located at Poplar and Broadway, is nearing completion. Sabin said operations for the STEAM Lab and the Launch Pad, the Hub’s maker space component, could begin officially at the center next month.
The Art Connection, an after-school program that connects the arts and entrepreneurship, is already up and running at the center, which eventually will include the Silver Mine co-working space.