Magic at Lightspeed

As a new teen specialist at Meridian Library District in 2011, Nick Grove drew on a disengaged after-school crowd to grow program attendance by 233 percent in three years, partly by buying teen-relevant technology, such as six 3-D printers. Grove capitalized on those purchases: when he challenged a bored teen to read a chapter in a book, the teen read three and was rewarded with a 3-D version of the book’s logo. “We struggled for two months together,” says Grove, “to figure out how to print the logo; the teen became an advocate for library programs…and a bigger advocate for the book.”

In 2015, Grove proposed unBound, a tech laboratory and educational facility that marries community needs with library expertise by offering access to emerging technologies, content digitization and creation, and related programs. Impressively, Grove brought this idea to life in record time—eight months from pitch to ribbon-cutting. “Nick can see the future,” says Gretchen Caserotti, library director at Meridian and a 2010 LJ Mover & Shaker. “He leads by example, he leads by inspiration, he leads by experimenting.”

Since opening in November 2015, unBound has served 1,440 people (from students learning 3-D design, entrepreneurs, and small business owners to “great-grandparents creating parts”), and the pace hasn’t slowed. In December, partnering with the STEM Bus (stembususa.org) on an Hour of Code event, Grove worked more magic. “The event was put together and implemented in seven days,” he says, and drew 160 people for tours and coding workshops. Grove’s goal: to “make [unBound space] part of people’s routine.”