Summer 2024 was all about collaboration! Our high school students in Young Women’s Design + Building Institute and Advanced Design/Build each worked on various projects for the large renovation of a community garden in Petaluma, and our middle school students in Builder Bootcamp tackled a fantastically feline construction project for our local animal shelter. It was a hot summer with a lot of laughter, sawdust, and joy! It was also our first summer in our new workspace off Second Street, which made it all the more special and memorable.
Young Women’s Design + Building Institute, June 2024
As always, we started summer programming strong with the Young Women’s Design + Building Institute, a 2-week program that brings together a diverse cohort of 30 high school students from across the Bay Area to work on a project for a community client. Many of these high schoolers have never been to Girls Garage or touched a power tool, but they were fast learners and immediately got to work using the chop saw, drill and impact driver, jig saw, and band saw. They built 12 redwood garden boxes and 6 Adirondack chairs to be installed on-site at La Tercera Community Garden, run by this summer’s client Petaluma Bounty.
On the design side of YWDBI, our students were each assigned a letter in the phrase “WELCOME TO LA TERCERA COMMUNITY GARDEN” to mosaic onto a cement paving tile. Creating mosaics in the print studio offered our students a calm respite from the whir of sawdust and machines in the wood shop—just another reason why we’re grateful to have such a larger workspace!
Photo credit: Dan’Nelle Evans, My Way Creative
Builder Bootcamp, July 2024
For this summer’s Builder Bootcamp, our middle school students were tasked with one of our silliest projects to date…building a gigantic wooden cat sculpture for our local animal shelter, Berkeley Animal Care Services! To build the cat, our students learned how to use 3 types of power saws (chop saw, jig saw and band saw), as well as the drill and impact driver. After assembling the cat’s body, they built redwood planter boxes to attach to the legs and haunches in order support the sculpture. The cat sculpture was installed outside of Berkeley Animal Care Services, where it will hopefully entice visitors to adopt more cats and kittens!
On the design side of Builder Bootcamp, our students took a field trip to the animal shelter to visit the dogs and cats (and guinea pigs!) that were available for adoption. They then designed adoption flyers for each individual animal, advertising them to potential adopters! This was such a cute art project, and our students took the task very seriously and were beyond thrilled when some of their animals got adopted by the end of the week.
Advanced Design/Build, August 2024
To wrap up the Petaluma Bounty project, our Advanced Design/Build cohort traveled to La Tercera Community Garden in Petaluma to build a slatted shade house on-site. This was the third summer in a row of traveling for on-site projects, and the experience did not disappoint! Our students worked quickly and collaboratively, making sure each measurement, cut, and screw was precise before moving onto the next step of the process. Their attention to detail paid off: the shade house is gorgeous! In their spare time, our high school students also took the initiative of building a potting table and installing a kitchen sink in it for the local gardeners to use. This is such a special group of students, many whom have been with us for 10 years, and we love witnessing them use their hard-earned technical building skills for these projects. Nothing makes us prouder!
As always, our students were the stars of this summer’s show. But we couldn’t have created the opportunities for them to learn and grow here at Girls Garage without the help of our corporate supporters and community partners.
A big thank you to our cornerstone partners, who donated $10,000 or more to support year-round free programming, including this summer’s: Cello & Maudru Construction, Clark Construction, Hensel Phelps Construction, Kiewet Construction, NOVO Construction, Overaa Construction, and Turner Construction, and Wareham Development. Lumber-wise, thank you to Ashby Lumber and Golden State Lumber Santa Rosa! Their donations literally and physically make our projects possible. And thanks to ARCO Murray Construction, Arterra Landscape Architects, Ashby Lumber, Carmel Construction, Chronicle Books, Dome Construction, Jetton Construction, and Joseph J. Albanese, for financial support, as well as Commotion West Berkeley and Zellerbach Family Foundation.
It takes a village to make Girls Garage magic, and we couldn’t be more grateful for all of our supporters! If you’re interested in becoming a corporate supporter, please reach out to Director of Development Kristy Higares at kristy@girlsgarage.org.
In other news:
- We received a $300,000 multi-year grant from U.S. Bank Foundation!
- We said goodbye to our beloved Communications Manager and arts instructor Bethany Kaylor, who moved to the Midwest to get her MFA in nonfiction at the University of Iowa. While we’ll miss her greatly, we’re thrilled she’ll be continuing to work with Girls Garage as a Communications Consultation and a summer arts instructor!
- We’re just about to celebrate our 1-year anniversary at our new workspace off Second Street in West Berkeley! It’s been an awesome year at this new space, and we’ve made the most of our bigger space, building bolder and more technical projects and using Clementine the forklift for assistance.