About · Mission
Kids learn by doing, and they do better when nobody is grading them.
That is the whole mission, more or less. Everything below is the long version, which we review every other year and argue about annually.
Six values, in the order we actually use them
01
Kid voice is not decoration
Kids sit on hiring panels. Kids review the snack menu. Kids can veto a program rule at the monthly town hall, and they have. Twice.
02
Depth over exposure
One term, one subject, one thing finished. We would rather a kid leave knowing how to sharpen a chisel than having touched six machines once.
03
Free means free
No tuition, no materials fee, no field trip fee, no fundraiser chocolate. If a thing costs money, that is our problem, not a family's.
04
Safety is a material
We budget for it like clay. Ratios, training, background checks, and a real person whose job is to notice.
05
Repair is a subject
Broken things are curriculum. So are broken plans. We teach kids to fix, apologize, and try again in that order.
06
The neighborhood is the classroom
Creek water, hardware stores, the salon down the street, the bus. We leave the building at least once a term per program.
Theory of change
We get asked for a logic model roughly four times a year, usually by a foundation with a very nice template. Here is ours, in plain language:
- If kids have three hours a day with adults who are not evaluating them,
- and real tools, real materials, and a real audience for finished work,
- then they build the thing that school mostly cannot give them: evidence that their own effort changes the world in front of them.
- Which shows up later as attendance, persistence, and the willingness to be bad at something in public for a while.
We measure the third one directly, with a 12-question survey kids fill out twice a year and a attendance record we do not fudge. We do not claim to raise test scores. We have never claimed to raise test scores. Any nonprofit that promises you a test score bump from an after-school clay class is selling you something.
What success looks like
A kid who, in September, will not touch a soldering iron, and in May is teaching a younger kid to tin a wire. A parent who tells us their kid talks at dinner now. A thirteen-year-old who can sit in a quiet room for twenty minutes without wanting to climb the walls. A staff member who stays four years because the work is hard but the room is honest.
What we do not do
- We do not fix kids. Nobody here is broken.
- We do not do test prep, homework packets, or academic intervention. Schools do that; we are the other three hours.
- We do not require attendance at a minimum number of days. Life happens. Come when you can.
- We do not photograph kids without written permission, ever, for any reason, including the annual report.
- We do not accept funding that requires us to collect family immigration status, and we have declined two grants over it.
The mission statement is three lines. The hard part is the eleven weeks where a kid is bad at clay and keeps showing up anyway. That is the actual program.
Read how it works day to day
The schedule, the ratios, the snack, the pickup line — all of it is public.