Empowering Building Heroes.

858 Remote Learning Desks & Stools

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when homes became classrooms, we quickly heard from community members, students, teachers and social service organizations that free laptops and internet access were not enough; Philadelphia public school students NEEDED dedicated places to learn in their homes. Off the shelf solutions didn’t work because they were either too big for Philadelphia row homes or too small to support the types of learning required of students. Tiny WPA’s Building Heroes worked with families to understand their specific needs, developed numerous stool and desk prototypes for families to test, and then designed a factory to meet the huge demand. This included young adult Building Heroes designing their workweek and production schedule, creating specific tools to improve fabrication speed and quality, and developing the distribution process. In 20 weeks with 17 Building Heroes and 79 community volunteers built 858 desks and 841 stools for 453 public school families in Philadelphia. To support families everywhere, the team created a free Build Your Own Desk guide and the desk design was copied by organizations in places as far flung as Baltimore, Detroit, and Berkeley.

Mobile Playgrounds for PlayStreets

In the Spring of 2020, with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Tiny WPA was asked by City agencies to help develop strategies for reopening public spaces and playgrounds. With most recreation centers either closed or facing extremely limited access, with the support of the Philadelphia Department of Parks and Recreation, Tiny WPA developed two prototype mobile ‘Build-Your-Own’ Playgrounds for the City’s Play Streets program. Throughout the summer Parks Dept. staff brought the two ‘playgrounds’ to different blocks around Philadelphia. The playground kits were developed with and fabricated by ten young adult Building Heroes, who continually adapted the designs based off of ongoing kid, neighbor, and Parks staff feedback throughout the summer. The kits—which truly enabled kids to redesign their street—include large scale ‘building blocks’, balance beams, ‘speed bumps’, scoot boards, big wheels, seesaws, a ‘sports field’, large scale building games, literacy games, and beautiful misters for providing incredibly important cooling. The mobile playgrounds will deployed again in 2021 and Tiny WPA is working to evolve the design of our hugely popular cooling misters so that more Play Streets can have their own.

Do You Want to Be a Building Hero?

The Building Hero Project is a community design leadership initiative for individuals ages 14 and up who want to be a part of a diverse community of civic change agents, learn how to design-build great things, and develop critical life-skills to lead others in making Philadelphia a better place to live through design. Through innovative training in design, collaboration, leadership, fabrication, and entrepreneurship, the Building Heroes gain valuable life-long life skills, experience, inter-connectedness, and exposure to rich opportunities that enable them to make and do great things in Philadelphia and beyond. Be on the lookout for the new dates and activities coming soon or sign up for our newsletter below and we’ll be in touch with you!

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Playful Neighborhood Monuments 

In 2020, the Brewerytown Sharswood Neighborhood Coalition hired Tiny WPA to work with stakeholders to develop a series of playful learning monuments that celebrated important people and moments in North Philadelphia history. Tiny WPA worked with community members, alumni groups, and stakeholder organizations to develop monuments at Vaux High School, Cecil B. Moore Library, and the North Philly Peace Park. This included helping build consensus around ‘who’ and ‘what’ events should be celebrated, documenting oral histories, designing the installations, and installing the monuments with stakeholders. Ultimately this included playful monuments to heavyweight boxer Bennie Briscoe neighborhood’s rich boxing history, actress Marilyn Coleman, activist Captain Reggie Schell, basketball player Dawn Staley, printmaker Dox Thrash, the 7 time national championship winning chess team from Vaux Middle School, and more. Each installation has unique playable elements that encourages passersby to more deeply engage with and explore the neighborhood’s rich history. In 2023 the ‘Did You Know’ project will expand to other parts of North Philadelphia as well as Mantua, in West Philadelphia.

Build Your Own Public Space Toolkit

We started developing the Build Your Own Public Space toolkit a few years ago in response to our neighbors in West Philadelphia requesting things like shade canopies, benches, planters, playable structures, etc. for public spaces that are important to them. We’ve interviewed 100’s of neighbors; mapped the vacant lots, under-resourced recreation centers, informal play spaces, community gardens, etc. that are important to everyone; identified the most commonly needed amenities; and have been designing/testing/redesigning solutions to meet those needs. Covid-19 derailed what would normally be a very deep participatory design process with stakeholders but Building Heroes moved the studio to the sidewalk, took prototypes to various sites and stakeholders, tested many in other projects, and tried to break them! In September 2020 we began implementing with stakeholders through limited community builds in public spaces in the West Powelton, Mantua, and Belmont neighborhoods of West Philadelphia. This month, we will be releasing the BYO ‘how-to’ guide for free download. The document will not only describe how to build the amenities but it will also include our various techniques for leading community builds.

Interactive Music and Library Carts

In June 2019, Fairmount Park Conservancy and Philadelphia Parks & Rec hired Tiny WPA and its Building Heroes in collaboration with Interface Studio to design and build mobile library and music carts to activate underutilized public spaces. This included stools, which double as drums, that were largely designed, tested and perfected by Tamir, a 20-year-old Building Hero. Pictured above is the mobile music cart along with a handful of stools in Love Park. The carts and stools were located at the Oval near the Barnes Foundation for 4-weeks in the summer of 2019 and then moved to Love Park. Participants stopped by to read books, play instruments and participate in organized activities around the carts. The carts are part of a mobile tool kit of ‘play’ and ‘learning’ elements that Tiny WPA has been developing with Philadelphia Parks and Rec, the Fairmount Parks Conservancy and other partners to activate public spaces.

Stop By + Build 

On Wednesdays from 4 - 7pm, Tiny WPA hosted our free weekly Stop By + Build program. During Stop By + Build, everyone was welcome to drop in to get help with a project or an idea; learn how to use a tool while helping build something great with others; check out the workshop and learn about our numerous community-led improvement projects; and meet other people who want to build things that make a difference.

Stop By + Build was put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At this time, no programs are scheduled. Please contact info@tinywpa.org with questions.

Contract Fabrication

Tiny WPA and the Building Heroes created a mobile game cart for Love Park. The wood used for the cart was reclaimed from downed chestnut oak and black locust trees in Fairmount Park, representing our growing partnership with the City to create meaningful jobs and learning opportunities from these underutilized resources. Building Heroes ages 15-26 helped fabricate the cart. This is just one example of the continually growing interest in Tiny WPA’s contract fabrication services and a great example of how we can translate everyday public space needs into rich opportunities for Heroes to learn and earn while at the same time making a difference in our great city. 

If you are interested in hiring Tiny WPA and the Building Heroes for custom contract fabrication work, contact us! It's a great way to support an apprenticeship/learning experience and get something rad too.

OUR HISTORY

"It would be great if we could build more useful and creative things around our city to make it a better and happier place." 

-D'Ashay, a 17 year old Tiny WPA participant

Philadelphia has 40,000 vacant lots, 20,000 under-loved bus stops, as well as crumbling parks, playgrounds and schools. Throughout the city there are also scores of young adults who need jobs, seek more hands-on experience to make school and learning more meaningful, and deeply want to make their communities better places to live. We believe that incredible things can happen when we connect youth with the needs of our city and empower them to design and build innovative solutions to address these challenges. 

To this end we created Tiny WPA.

Originally conceived as a program of Public Workshop, Tiny WPA has since expanded in response to the overwhelming enthusiasm of teens, the growing interests in creative place-based change, and the need to connect and grow a field of community design leaders. Today, Tiny WPA is a nonprofit organization that places youth and adults at the forefront of stimulating community engagement and civic innovation in Philadelphia by empowering them to design and build improvements to the public spaces, schools and micro-infrastructure in their neighborhoods.