A few years after Meg Hammond graduated from college, she joined a youth conservation corps to teach environmental stewardship to elementary school kids and clear trails in the New Hampshire woods.
“I learned how to use a chain saw. I learned how to fell a tree,” Hammond recalled. “I learned how to sharpen tools, how to take care of tools, how to use the tools.”
Fast-forward about 25 years, and Hammond still marvels at the tools at her disposal. In the metal shop at Burlington’s Generator Makerspace, where she now serves as executive director, a plasma cutter can shoot a beam that will slice through a piece of metal lying on a giant square grate.
Access to this equipment makes Generator a boon to makers who have a vision but no room or money for such colossal and advanced machinery, Hammond said. “It’s freaking amazing what this place is.”
“Creativity drives innovation, and innovation solves futuristic problems.”
Meg Hammond
At Generator, Hammond has continued a lifelong trajectory of connecting industriousness with artistry. Over her career, she has immersed herself in the communal creativity of the Northeast Kingdom, founded the now-defunct Langdon Street Café performance venue and bar in Montpelier, and worked at Sterling and Goddard colleges, becoming a fundraising dynamo. To her mind, taking the position at tech-oriented Generator was a natural leap to a community of inventors who feed the Vermont economy.
“It’s about creativity,” Hammond said in early October, sitting near the kitchen of Generator’s Sears Lane building. “And creativity drives innovation, and innovation solves futuristic problems.”
Hammond, 50, took the helm of Generator in January 2020, making her the longest-serving executive director in the organization’s 11-year history. “The thing with Meg, you could tell she immediately got the maker ethos and the community presence that we strive for,” said Dan Harvey, one of the former Generator board members who hired Hammond.
On October 16, she cut the ribbon — actually, a long orange power cord — on Generator’s upgraded Electronics Lab in a ceremony attended by Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, state Treasurer Mike Pieciak and Lt. Gov. John Rodgers. The center is outfitted with the latest equipment to support specialized tech projects, particularly those involving gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductors.
The highly efficient power source is increasingly in demand for use in medical products and extreme environments, such as outer space. Generator is a supporting player in the Vermont GaN Tech Hub, an initiative of the University of Vermont and chip company GlobalFoundries, to encourage startups focused on GaN. The makerspace plans to host a business boot camp called GaNeratorVT next fall, Hammond said.
“My interest is the ecosystem, because this ecosystem is good for all of Vermont,” the Montpelier resident said. “This resource is attractive for people thinking about coming here.”
One of Hammond’s priorities, she said, is elevating Generator’s profile and public awareness for its role in attracting, growing and keeping Vermont businesses. As with the GaN effort, Hammond has expanded Generator’s programs in teacher training and classroom curriculum to bring science, tech and design tools to youths.
Paul Shepherd, an electrical engineer and entrepreneur, has a studio at Generator and helped equip the new Electronics Lab with an oscilloscope for measuring voltage and a reflow oven for making circuit boards. His company, Rugged MicroPower, is working on a GaN power source for satellites and other applications in space.
He applauded Hammond’s push for Generator to take a lead in the larger GaN effort by reaching out to state officials and leaders of business accelerator LaunchVT. “She was already making those connections,” he said.
Hammond is a doer. Last month, she showed up with a shovel to help a Generator member set up his sculpture for the annual Art at the Kent exhibition in Calais. In 2006, she ran the light board — with no previous experience — for the first performances of Hadestown, created by her close friend Anaïs Mitchell. Hammond even worked a circular saw to cut watermelons for Phish fans during the band’s final Vermont concert in Coventry in 2004.
Generator has 150 members who pay $105 per month for access to the workshops, trainings and facilities. A designated studio costs an additional $285 monthly.
Product inventors and metal sculptors share space with jewelry designers and woodworkers, engineers and retirees who want to tinker. Current makers include a toilet seat consultant and an entrepreneur who created more durable rims for mountain bikes and is about to outgrow Generator. Members often collaborate; one might help another with the 3D printer or lend expertise to solve a problem.
Directing Generator requires a background in fundraising, technology, education, the art world and business operations, said Michael Metz, one of Generator’s founding board members. Hammond checked all the boxes.
“She’s scrappy, meaning she will make do with whatever resources she can get,” he said. “She’ll make it work. And she had a demonstrated history of that.”
Hammond is a direct, fast talker, with barely a hint of her native Pennsylvania accent. She has a round face, framed by a crop of caramel-colored curls and funky turquoise-and-tortoiseshell glasses, and a quick sense of humor.
She grew up outside Philadelphia on a large farm where her father managed the gardens and greenhouse. He later opened a florist shop. At age 11, Hammond would stand nose-level at the counter, adding the greens to wedding bouquets. She worked there through high school and college.
The first in her family to get a four-year degree, Hammond initially majored in business at Bloomsburg University in central Pennsylvania, but she preferred the crafts classes. Assigned to weave a basket, she instead pulled grapevines from the woods and wound them into a six-foot-tall figure.
She switched majors to study sculpture, ceramics, photography and painting. A selection of her paintings hangs in the Generator seating area. Their bright colors and organic shapes evoke plants with roots gripping the ground and fronds swirling or stretching to the sky.
After graduating and finishing the 10-month youth conservation program in New Hampshire, Hammond moved to Utah and did wilderness therapy with at-risk kids.
“You want to talk about tech: I can make a fire with a bow drill,” she said.
In Utah, Hammond fell off a skateboard and suffered a serious brain injury. Her sense of smell disappeared for several months, and the recovery took a year, during which she lived with her parents. “The biggest challenge was losing the sense of myself,” she said.
To get past that ordeal, Hammond spent four months as a volunteer in Thailand building cob houses, a traditional construction method using clay, sand, straw and water.
A friend who was living in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom with a “house full of fun people” called to tell her about a job in the work program at Sterling College. Hammond had loved Vermont since childhood, when her father and a group of his oldest friends bought land near Clarendon Springs. Her family would drive north to camp there, arriving late at night. Hammond remembers waking to crisp air and a view of the mountains.
At Sterling College, she called her office the “fun box” and held dance parties for students turning in their time sheets. She lived in rural Danville with her friend Wes Hamilton, now co-owner of Three Penny Taproom in Montpelier.
On a visit to that city, Hammond decided it needed an “intergenerational hangout” for activists and artists to have deeper conversations over coffee. She conceived of Langdon Street Café with a collective of friends, including Hamilton, Mitchell and Mitchell’s future husband, Noah Hahn. Ben T. Matchstick, a Bread and Puppet Theater performer, joined the fold.
He and Hammond became a couple. In the house they shared with Mitchell and Hahn, Hammond helped build sets for Hadestown while Matchstick collaborated on the musical. She was working all day at the college, driving Matchstick to Glover for Bread and Puppet performances, and bartending at the café until 3 a.m.
“I was fueled by fun,” Hammond said.
In 2011, Langdon Street Café was struggling financially, and Hammond and Matchstick were busy raising their 2-year-old son, Django. They shut down the bar with a final circus party and a surprise proposal: Hammond asked Matchstick to marry her using three burlesque dancers, who revealed the words on their bodies one at a time.
Around that time, the president of Goddard College asked Hammond to run its Haybarn Theatre. She hosted Goddard’s 150th anniversary, started its alumni association and became its director of development.
Meanwhile, Metz and others founded Generator in 2014 in the basement of Memorial Auditorium; they outgrew that space and moved to about 11,000 square feet on Sears Lane three years later. In 2019, Hammond heard Generator needed a new leader. She initially balked at applying, though Matchstick loved the makerspace, where he had started his cardboard pinball machine company, PinBox 3000. Hammond agreed to interview and realized that Generator was a good fit.
Three months after she took the job, the pandemic hit. Generator’s makers churned out 20,000 plastic face shields, and board members helped distribute them to state agencies and other organizations.
Hammond describes herself as a “systems thinker.” She has expanded the board since Generator’s original board members all ended their three-year terms and shifted it into an operational structure, focused not on getting off the ground but on running the nonprofit, which has a $1 million annual budget. She also grew the full-time staff from five people to nine.
About 60 percent of Generator’s funding comes from grants, donors and corporate sponsors. Members contribute about 20 percent. The remaining 20 percent of revenue comes from fabrication services, paid programs and rental of the space.
For Generator’s 10th anniversary last year, Hammond threw a big party and set up oversize versions of classic games such as Connect 4, Operation and Jenga. “Play helps us invent,” she said.
These days, Hammond said, she’s focused on fundraising and boosting the educational programs. She’d like to find money for more space for Generator’s metal and wood shops.
The job is hard, she admitted, but sustains her in important ways.
“Generator is inherently hopeful,” she said. “I need that hopefulness and possibility.”
Generator Makerspace will be exhibiting — and hiring — at the Vermont Tech Jam on Saturday, October 25, 10 a.m.-3 p.m., at Hula in Burlington. Preregister for the free event at techjamvt.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Making It | Meg Hammond merges art and tech to lead Burlington’s Generator Makerspace”
This article appears in The Tech Issue 2025.
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