Giving Compass' Take:

• Students in an Architecture & Design course at an upper school in Tacoma, WA, spend the semester planning and building tiny homes for homeless individuals.

• The professor notes that the most meaningful part of the course is teaching students about collaborative work and the impact of intentional problem-solving. How do these lessons relate to the types of collaborative philanthropy happening today?

• Read about the benefits of collaborative philanthropy. 


Allow me a moment to brag about my students. During a recent bout of snow flurries, every single one of my students was outside helping hammer out some last-minute details on the tiny home we were building. Throughout the course of the project, all 16 of my students had demonstrated resilience and adaptability.

My students don’t always work so collaboratively—they are ninth graders, after all, and are accustomed to working on individual assignments for the benefit of their own grades. But something about this project pulled them together. They weren’t completing an assignment for a grade, but building something for real people. And that meant it had to be good.

I teach a course called Architecture & Design in the new upper school for boys at Annie Wright Schools in Tacoma, Wash. Traditionally, Annie Wright’s high school had been all girls. After we opened a parallel all-boys high school, we launched the class to help galvanize our new learning community. We wanted students to understand how to make spaces for others as they share a space with one another, and we wanted to provide an experience where they set their learning at the service of something greater than themselves.

The Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI), based in Seattle, provides the land and coordinates service providers. LIHI is one of our key partners in the project, as well as my mentors at Sawhorse Revolution, an incredible organization that provides opportunities for high school students to design and build tiny homes.

Read the full article about designing tiny homes for the homeless by Joe Romano at EdSurge.