City Year Detroit recently launched partnerships with leading design firms dPOP and Gensler to redesign two school resource rooms in which City Year serves. These partnerships are the local iterations of City Year’s nationwide efforts to improve and beautify its classrooms across the country. To kick off the local initiative, the first of these projects—a resource room redesign at Noble Elementary-Middle School (Noble) led by dPOP—was officially revealed this week. A renovated and redesigned mentorship room is also currently under construction at Osborn Collegiate Academies (Osborn) with Gensler at the helm of the work. The Osborn project is expected to wrap early next month.
“The generosity of the dPOP and Gensler teams on these projects cannot be overstated. The time, hard work and creativity they’ve invested for the benefit of Detroit’s students is remarkable,” said Andrew Stein, executive director, City Year Detroit. “We are fortunate to have vibrant spaces to share with students; spaces that will foster the growth our corps members work so hard to achieve each day. The impact of these partnerships will resonate beyond the projects, and help demonstrate our commitment to the well-being of the students we serve.”
These redesign projects are two of many aimed at upgrading and enhancing the spaces in which the nation’s underserved students learn. The Noble redesign, which was unveiled to students, teachers and administrators this week, entailed a number of components including an updated floorplan and layout, painting, the installation of new carpet and curation of donated furniture, as well as two decorative vinyl wall coverings, white boards, and a new kitchen space.
“At dPOP we understand the importance of an attractive, functional workspace in promoting positive energy and productivity,” said Melissa Price, CEO, dPOP. “To have the opportunity to support our city’s students with our work is a great privilege, and we’re proud to contribute to this partnership with City Year.”
Resource room redesigns have also occurred at City Year sites across the country including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Washington, D.C., many of which are a result of the organization’s national partnership with Gensler.
In November 2016, Gensler began collaborating with City Year Detroit on transforming an underutilized room into a student-focused mentorship room at Osborn. Planned for a reveal in early May, Gensler led collaborative workshops with students and City Year Detroit corps members, to better understand their needs and tap their creative talents. Using visioning sessions with the students, internal brainstorming, and coordinating materials and furniture selection with vendor partners, Gensler and Osborn students created a design rooted in meaning. It is now a dual-purpose space allowing for both mentorship and individual work with a focus on further developing high schoolers at a pivotal point in their lives. As a longtime partner of City Year, Gensler has helped renovate and reinvent spaces in schools around the country using a similar approach.
“As designers and strategists, we seek opportunities to have impact, which is why we love to partner with City Year, whose mission is to help children reach their potential through education. The Osborn mentor and collaboration space in Detroit is a perfect fit for us,” said John Waller managing director, Gensler. “Specifically, we were most excited to workshop with the students and corps members to understand what makes the space and the school uniquely their own.”
In over 300 schools in 28 cities nationwide, City Year supports students, teachers and schools by providing the “people power” to effectively meet each student’s academic and social-emotional needs. Diverse teams of City Year AmeriCorps members serve full-time in schools alongside teachers, establishing developmental relationships with students and providing research-based interventions to help students and schools succeed. Our AmeriCorps members partner with teachers and principals to increase academic achievement and student engagement, while enabling schools to create learning environments that are responsive to students’ unique needs. Through direct support in the classroom, City Year AmeriCorps members bring additional capacity to help differentiate instruction and meet the needs of the whole class. At a school-wide level, City Year partners with administrators to provide whole school enrichment activities to improve climate and foster student engagement.
Gensler has been an integral part of Detroit for more than 20 years – helping local clients envision their neighborhoods and design their places. || Gensler is a global architecture, design and planning firm with 45 locations and more than 5,000 professionals networked across Asia, Europe, Australia, the Middle East and the Americas. Officially founded in 1965, Gensler serves more than 3,500 active clients in virtually every industry. Gensler designers strive to make the places people live, work and play more inspiring, more resilient and more impactful.
dPOP is a full-service commercial interior design studio located in the heart of Detroit, dedicated to creating inspiring workplaces for culture driven organizations. We dig deep to find out what really makes our clients tick; to understand their history and future aspirations. These findings inform each and every step of the design process, resulting in truly unique and functional environments built to foster productivity, creativity and collaboration.
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