In the summer of 2024, Sawhorse teamed up with the UW’s College of Built Environments (CBE) to lead an intensive program on campus, with our team of 15 students exploring all the facets of designing and building a structure in a hyper-condensed three-week schedule. While professionals in Architecture and Construction remain primarily white and male, this program aims to create more pathways for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People Of Color) youth to access whatever career they wish.

This program was our first to require an application for participating youth, and we were blown away by the thoughtful responses sent in by our students.  We reviewed over 40 applications for the 15 student slots, and were brought to tears by the curiosity, confidence, and drive of our hopeful participants, who responded to questions like “How do you see yourself contributing to your community in the future?”

In this program, we designed and built a “pollinator village” to reside in the meadow outside Burke Museum on University of Washington’s main Seattle campus.

The students were inspired by Pacific Northwestern flora and fauna, and created their own folk narrative to accompany the three villages, with representations of the story hammered into copper bands surrounding the base of each one.