Likening it to a “community center with tools,” a group of New London residents with a creative itch to scratch are hoping to turn a downtown storefront into a “community makerspace” that would provide tools, training and support for anyone who wants to engineer, fabricate or tinker.

Spark Makerspace, the brainchild of Hannah Gant of New London, would be a community space with a tool lending library, materials, and workspaces for professional and recreational artists.

“Our purpose is to built individual and community capacity to be more self-reliant and resourceful, and to make it easy for people to be hands-on creative,” Gant said. “We’ve kind of evolved into a knowledge-based economy where people aren’t making things as much any more and we think something has been lost.”

As Gant explains it, Spark would operate in a fashion similar to a gym, with monthly membership dues availing members to the tools, materials and classes necessary to do anything from hardcore arts and crafts to light manufacturing.

“It will be an opportunity for a community of makers to create an intentional space for adults to play together, inclusive of people of all ages,” Gant said. “It will be a playful, fun environment that invites people to engage and wake up parts of themselves that our daily lives make kind of inaccessible.”

Already, Gant and others who have joined as part of a business development collective called As the Crow Flies have started meeting to decide exactly what shape Spark will take, and where the first sparks will fly. Currently, the group is in the process of finding the right downtown storefront — ideally 2,000 to 3,000 sq ft., Gant said — to open this summer.

“Because the emphasis is on building community capacity and confidence, we’re looking to open up the phase one space in a downtown storefront so it is a visible part of the community,” Gant said. “Then we hope to springboard into a much bigger space where we can provide studio space and formalize a business incubator program.”

Gant said she and other organizers are not yet certain what kinds of tools and machinery Spark will have because they want to hear what people interested in becoming members think the space should include.

“We’re trying to design a space, a culture and a dynamic that invites community to happen, not just provide access to equipment you maybe couldn’t afford,” she said. “The people who show up will not just have a consumer experience, but by engaging and becoming member of this community they can get some authorship of what’s happening over time.”

After visiting similar makerspaces in Maine and Massachusetts, Gant said she thinks New London is primed for this type of hands-on creative space.

“New London is a center for arts and music. Within the state of Connecticut it has a creative identity already,” she said. “This city has engineers and machinists from (Electric Boat) and the sub base, it has kind of a working class makeup of people who would like this kind of access.”

c.young@theday.com

Twitter: @ColinAYoung