Earlier this week, I wrote an article highlighting and comparing the many different gym memberships around Grand Rapids. Since then, I’ve learned about a membership at a place that describes itself as “like a gym membership, but with power tools.”
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The Grand River Makerspace (GRM), a new non-profit collaborative space created by Chris Kaminsky and Josh Fennessynear the former Delta Plex building, allows people to pay monthly or per-visit to access tools like 3D printers and woodworking equipment, classes, and a community of creatives and ordinary people all working in one place, collaborating on their projects. It opened in September 2025.
You can make almost anything here, which is exactly what they did when a family reached out to the Makerspace with a bold request: 3D-print a working mobility trainer for their daughter.
Grand River Makerspace’s 3D Printed Mobility Trainer
Ella’s story is a perfect example of ordinary people making “extraordinary things when they have access and support.” A local mom named Laura reached out to GRM to ask if they could create a mobility trainer, similar to a toddler-sized wheelchair, for her daughter, Ella
These chairs can be quite expensive, anywhere from $2000 to $5000, and are rarely covered by insurance. But these trainers can be crucial to a patient’s physical therapy, so Laura began looking for alternatives.
That’s when she stumbled across a non-profit in New Orleans called Make Good that had created a fully 3D-printed mobility trainer design and made the design open source, meaning the plans were available to everyone. All you needed was a 3D printer and a lot of filament. Thankfully, Laura knew where to turn.
“We fired up our machines, community members donated the filament, and people chipped in to cover the hardware,” says Chris Kaminsky, vice president of Grand River Makerspace. “After 200 hours of printing and 10kg of material, every part was printed. All we had to do was put it together.”
For only a fraction of the retail cost, GRM built Ella a chair that, if any part were to break, is easily replaceable. “Situations like Ella’s weren’t in mind when we started the Makerspace, but the spirit absolutely was. The whole point [of GRM] is that someone in our community has a need, and we have the tools and people to meet it. That’s the makerspace model at its best.”…