Local entrepreneur Liz Dailey is on a mission to help inspire Philadelphia-area youth through the art of 3D creation.
After leaving her career in public health, Dailey and her life partner, Patrick Cozzi — CEO of 3D tech company Cesium in Philadelphia — formulated the idea to merge their passions of helping others and having a positive social impact.
The result? Welcome to CreateAccess.
The Philadelphia-area nonprofit, launched in March 2023, not only teaches but also helps to jump-start future careers in tech for underserved communities.
“Our whole purpose is to help beginners get started with 3D creation,” said Dailey, the co-founder and executive director of CreateAccess. “We focus on engaging people with limited previous exposure to 3D and members and groups that are underrepresented in tech.”
Dailey says building curiosity and confidence in the space, with the help of professional educators, is a way she hopes many youth members can see the endless possibilities 3D creation can bring for future careers in the tech space.
“We provide freely available education materials on our website called microcourses that help beginners get started with 3D creation using professional creator tools,” she added. “We provide in-person programming in the community for libraries, boxing gyms, and even music camps.”
The impact Dailey says she has seen so far is that people who did not know they could be a 3D creator or that 3D creation was accessible to them can now foresee their creative vision in the space.
Many of the free microcourses don’t require any coding or previous experience with creating.
One of the tools — ‘Unreal Editor’ in the popular program Fortnite— allows creators to build custom 3D experiences that will help carry over into other industry-used tools and scenarios.
CreateAccess provides remote and in-person programs with a footprint in Philadelphia and Delaware County that includes the Upper Darby Township Library and the Upper Darby Arts & Education Foundation.
For their remote setting instructing, CreateAccess has partnered up with instructors and students at UMass Boston to assign microcourses to their students as final assignment options.
Beginning in July, CreateAccess will introduce a six-session 3D creator program with Launchpad in Philadelphia to support 50-60 students in building custom Fornite programs in Unreal Editor.
“Unreal Editor in Fornite is a creation platform that lets people create customized Fornite levels. It’s the same tool professional developers use to build real 3D experiences and generalizable to industry use cases,” Dailey added. “We help beginner creators get started on some pretty focused modules that at the end, they have a Fortnite island that highlights them and their interests.”
The program will also feature the assistance of local interns from Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania, Launchpad, and the high school level.
“Our interns help us develop our microcourse materials for our website and facilitate in-person 3D creator programs,” added Dailey.
Overall, Dailey says as CreateAccess grows, she hopes to establish a young tech community of the future to help pave the way for others in the field.
