The Design to Thrive program focuses on life skills, leadership development, career exploration, and on creating meaningful improvements to schools, camps, and neighborhood youth spaces. The program was founded in 2020 and has grown in the years since to expand the range of skills we teach, to incorporate more STEM, and to diversify opportunities for service, deepening the impact of improvements to spaces for youth.
Design to Thrive teaches carpentry skills through projects like communal tables and benches with planks that we milled from old-growth trees downed in storms. We work with youth on the design, planting and construction of big projects like a new garden, covered stage, or the ecological restoration of ponds and streams. We teach the foundation skills through simpler projects like making camp signs, a swing, or saw horses from sustainable materials, or assessing the existing ecologies of a site. Youth love the sense of achievement of creating something that is well-made, and that improves their school, camp, or community.
In 2024 we began to add hands-on environmental education—ecological survey, tree identification, planting, remote sensing technologies, wetland restoration, and regenerative agriculture projects—to our programming. We engage environmental experts in the region to help us shape and teach these projects, but most of the teaching is done by our graduate students, college seniors and recent graduates. Teenagers are excited to learn from young role models who have already developed impressive skills. Youth ask questions about their teachers’ college and work experiences while building something side by side—a comfortable setting for mentoring conversation. Everyone learns and works together to pull off projects that expand their sense of agency.
