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Many young people living in chronically under-resourced communities across the United States struggle to find meaningful, practical, and accessible opportunities for workforce training and advanced educational instruction. Providing these opportunities is a prerequisite for increasing economic opportunity, equity, health, and well-being. That’s the goal of Tech-Teach, a new design and fabrication skills program from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

Join us for a conversation with local leaders working to enhance cultural, arts, and professional building trades education for young people in their communities. Through their efforts, they seek to renew interest in alternative career pathways and encourage communities to reexamine the value in and impact of hands-on, arts, and trades-based education.

We explore the intersection between the arts and professional building trades and the roles that creative work spaces can play in advancing inclusive and equitable community transformation. You can learn more about what you can do to leverage resources to promote funding and investment models that address concentrated poverty, structural disparity, and lack of diversity in the arts and professional building trades sectors.

Featuring

Tyler Nelson, Folklife Festival technical director, Tech-Teach director
Kim Douglas, Town Hall Education Arts Recreation Campus (THEARC)
Joyce Milford, THEARC
Elijah Moses, Wise Young Builders
Shay Stevens (moderator), Center for Transforming Communities