Winter 2025 project

For our Winter 2025 session, students will be fabricating seven Murphy beds for Tiny Village Spirit, a tiny home village in Richmond, California, for unhoused and transitional youth. The design of the Murphy bed was prototyped by our Advanced Design/Build cohort in the fall of 2024, and now the Construction + Community crew will pick up where they left off and mass produce the seven beds! These beds require precision woodworking, teamwork, and a lot of mechanical and spatial problem-solving, along with an array of carpentry tools from saws and sanders to drills, drivers, and routers.

PROGRAM INFO

Construction + Community was created as a school-year program for 9th-12th grade girls and a complement to our Young Women’s Design and Building Institute. The course, taking place in three 8-week sessions over the school year, invites high school girls and gender-expansive youth with an interest in architecture, construction trades, design, and engineering, to learn technical construction skills in the context of community service. The program is free for participants, and we also build our projects pro-bono for community clients, focusing on the power of applying our construction skills towards the mutual aid and benefit of our entire community. For students interested in pursuing college pathways or careers in STEM, the trades, design, or architecture, this course is a hands-on exploration of what it means to physically construct the environments in which our community thrives. Using personal power and power tools, we are also building our community, one project at a time.

The cohort of 12 students is led by Executive Director Emily Pilloton-Lam and Shop and Project Manager Augusta Sitney, both of whom have 10-15 years experience in architecture, construction, metal fabrication, and teaching. We also spend time as a group discussing and practicing positive collaboration skills, reflecting on our identities within the work, and how we can best apply our skills towards the goals of equity, inclusion, and community benefit.