Our Story
R3SET didn’t start as a technology company. It started with artists, organizers, and a question about why good work stays invisible.
By the Numbers
7
ID3A Jams facilitated
15
Partner organizations
1,000+
Participants engaged
Since 2019
Doing this work
The Timeline
Helping communities and artists work together to make their community a more creative, empowered place — and running festivals like EQUAROX, the festival of equality, to combine arts, community development, and activism.
We looked at the societal context shaping the arts, and began experimenting with design thinking, crowdfunding, social media, blockchain, and cooperative models — learning how much narrative matters in shifting what a community believes is possible.
Working in Holyoke revealed it: when communities share their stories, they shift their own beliefs about what’s possible. We built SP3AK EASY Studio to help communities and organizations share theirs, and worked with 1Berkshire to launch “That Berkshire Podcast” — the first podcast made to attract and retain entrepreneurial residents in Berkshire County.
We helped launch the Berkshire Black Economic Council and built their first website, then partnered with the Blackshires Foundation on the first EL3VATE leadership accelerator. Blackshires.net now runs on SUCC3SS.
With the Berkshire Black Economic Council, we built a holistic, collaborative framework for Black businesses, community leaders, and the wider county.
Lockdowns started the day of the event. So we reorganized a 120+ person jam into six online events.
We launched the first online group for entrepreneurs in Berkshire County, helping 60+ local entrepreneurs survive the shift to online-only business, and worked with Assoc. of Black Business Professionals, Roots Rising, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Sculpture Project.
We helped launch the first leadership accelerator program for BIPOC leaders in Berkshire County, and celebrated the graduates at the Berkshire Innovation Center with their partners, friends and family.
Every product converged onto a single platform. M3ET, SP3AK EASY, M3SH and their siblings now share one codebase, one account, one cooperative infrastructure. Even this site — where the story began — lives inside the platform it helped imagine.
Case Studies
2023
Partner: Roots Rising
Roots Rising needed a vision for a community youth farm. Through a facilitated ID3A Jam, local stakeholders co-created the design — not from a consultant's recommendation, but from the lived experience of the community members who would use it. The result was a plan rooted in real needs, built by real people.
2020
Partner: Berkshire Black Economic Council
What began as a 120+ person in-person community event was transformed into 6 virtual sessions when COVID hit. Instead of canceling, R3SET adapted — proving the ID3A Jam method's resilience. The virtual format actually increased reach, engaging participants who couldn't have attended in person.
2023
Partner: Multicultural Bridge / ILC
A BIPOC leadership accelerator combining the ID3A Jam methodology with ongoing cohort support. Emerging community leaders built skills, forged connections, and developed projects that continue to create impact in the Berkshires.
2019
Partner: Berkshire United Way
Berkshire County faced a healthcare workforce crisis. Through a facilitated ID3A Jam with United Way, healthcare providers, educators, and community members co-designed pipeline strategies that addressed root causes — not just symptoms.
What People Say
Team R3SET has become an integral partner in a breadth of economic development, entrepreneurship and community dialogue facilitation over the past few years. Their Idea Jam product has become a great model for bringing together collective voices over common challenges and opportunities.
Impactful equity work is guided, and measured, by the voices of the community. The Idea Jam not only collects and displays the full breadth of whichever theme we explored, but it is also the most inviting tool for crowd sourced engagement that I've ever had the pleasure of working with.
What We Learned
We went looking at the context shaping the arts and found narrative underneath all of it: what a community believes is possible sets the ceiling on what it will attempt. So before you build anything else, build the ability to tell your own story. That is the whole reason SP3AK EASY exists.
The work that lasted is the work we built alongside the people already doing it — a first website for a council we helped launch, a first pilot with the foundation running the program, an online group for the entrepreneurs who needed it that week. You don’t hand a community a solution. You build it next to them, and it stays.
Lockdowns started the day of the ID3A Jam. We didn’t cancel — we reorganized a 120+ person jam into six online events. What people came for was each other, and that survives any format you have to give up.
Who We Work With
Some of the people we’ve built with
The Founders
Chief Executive Officer
John saw what communities needed before most institutions did — not more consultants parachuting in with solutions, but infrastructure for self-directed transformation. He leads R3SET with a vision for cooperative economics, community sovereignty, and celebration as strategy.
Chief Innovation Officer
Devin turns bold ideas into working systems. As the architect of R3SET's integrated technology ecosystem, he builds the platforms that connect every product, service, and community — turning the cooperative vision into infrastructure that actually works.
Where We’re Going
The work that started in one county is now infrastructure other communities can run on.