After forming a group of friends in the Valley through online gaming in high school, North Bend’s Bryce Saffell and Brandon Comouche have formed the Nerds With Real Lives (NWRL) Guild, a non-profit organization that holds community gaming and do-it-yourself (DIY) technology events at the Sallal Grange.
Saffell and Comouche, who are active members of the Grange, came up with the idea of using the Grange Hall to host their own local area network (LAN) events in 2013.
“Bryce and I were active members of the Sallal Grange, and being active members we saw the venue there. It was an awesome space. We were coordinating monthly game nights at the grange, just getting our feet wet and hosting regular events,” Comouche said.
Their first two events in 2013 were a success, bringing out people all the way from Auburn. The response from attendees was so positive that they held another two LAN event in 2014.
Their second event in 2014 might have been their most memorable, according to Saffell. The power went out right before the event started, but staff and some attendees worked together to bring back power.
“The power went out right before we were going to hold this giant computing event. Luckily we still had an internet connection, but Brandon ran home and grabbed two generators and two other people who were attending volunteered generators,” Saffell said. “They all ran home and brought the generators back. Within two hours we had the event back up and running on four generators. We were only an hour late starting the event.”
The NWRL also started its own DIY technology showcase in 2014 and are planning to host another one in May. The DIY showcase branches out from their gaming roots to cover all kinds of creations from people in the community.
“It’s a DIY expo for people who have created interesting projects, whether they are electronic, or science, or art. It’s a place for general craftsmen of all kinds to come and show off what they’ve done,” Comouche said. “At the first one we had three different 3D printers, I had a booth on LED projects, we had someone who was doing home automation computer controls and someone brought a potato cannon.”
One of the big projects the NWRL Guild will be working on in 2016, aside from the DIY showcase and other LAN gaming events, is the creation of a “maker space” in North Bend. Comouche described this project as a community workshop where people would have access to 3D printers, soldering tools and woodworking tools.
These events are not cheap to put on, but the NWRL Guild has been able to break even on their events. In 2014, they felt the need to formalize as a non-profit organization as they moved beyond being just a club. They even have started a gofundme.com crowdfunding page to help cover the costs of filing to become a non-profit and to cover costs for future events.
“We have been paying for the events out of our own pocket and a lot of the drive to formalize the organization is the fact that we have money flowing through these events. Not wanting to get into tax problems, we need to formalize because we have moved beyond a club,” Comouche said.
“We decided to go the non-profit route because our goal isn’t to make money, it’s to create a community to educate and bring like-minded people together,” Comouche said.
In order to help grow that community, the group is using Facebook and other social media to spread the word about the organization and get more people involved. For more information on the NWRL Guild and their crowdfunding campaign visit nwrlguild.org/index or www.gofundme.com/nwrlguildstart.
