It’s rare to hear the head of a nonprofit admit that, in fact, the organization should not work. But Chris Thompson, the outgoing executive director of Generator, will tell you that even as he stands in Burlington’s 11,500-square-foot maker space: Such facilities often fail.
When Thompson and a group of other locals launched Generator in 2014, they had relatively low expectations. Generator was originally billed as a pop-up, an experiment in shared community workspace, in the basement of Memorial Auditorium on Main Street.
“We thought, The worst thing that could happen is, we’ll just sell all the tools,” Thompson said.
But in early 2017, Generator moved into its current location on Sears Lane in the South End; today, it has an operating budget over $500,000, according to its 2018 tax forms, and Thompson said…
