Beam Center Inc

Beam Center is a Brooklyn-based community where artists guide young creators aged 6 to 18. Our hands-on programs in technology, imagination and craft help young people build their character, courage to think for themselves, and capacity for collaboration and invention. Beam Center is a place where artists, thinkers and makers learn to share their process and work; and where teachers explore new ways to integrate hands-on making and design-thinking into their own educational practice.

We believe the most lasting way to help young people form deep interests and connections to learning is through relationships with adult creators who share their passions and practices. We leverage pre-teen kids’ imagination and openness to expose them to many ways of making things and telling stories that can guide them to identify as creators rather than consumers, to think for themselves and to find intrinsic motivation from a job well done, a thing made more beautiful or useful. For teenagers it means preparing them for what lies beyond high school by connecting real work with meaning and continual learning through collaborations on large-scale projects with designers, builders, engineers and artists.

We need your help to continue and expand Beam Center's afterschool scholarships for low-income elementary and middle school students and to spread BeamWorks, a promising new initiative for at-risk teens from low-income neighborhoods.

A BEAM IS WHAT COMES FROM A LIGHTHOUSE

The Beam Idea took root in the mid-1970s at a landlocked Lighthouse.. It was then that twelve-year old Beam Center Co-Founder Brian Cohen spent three summers at the Lighthouse Arts and Music Camp in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. He went to study jazz saxophone. He left inspired by the camp’s culture; its socio-economic blending, the loose way it encouraged serious learning and practice, its commitment to ensemble collaboration and most importantly by its people. Lighthouse’s staff of musicians and artists worked with the campers not as teachers or caretakers, but as collaborators and mentors with a passion to share their craft with young people.

After decades of daydreaming about recreating his Lighthouse idyll, in 2004 Cohen and partner Danny Kahn began a conversation (one that continues unabated ten years later) about what would benefit kids most in a summer camp. As kids’ environments became increasingly defined by the consumption and use of digital media and devices, Cohen and Kahn saw attention-spans waning, communication becoming abbreviated, and connections becoming shallower. At the same time, they looked into a future world and workplace that would demand even greater adaptability, interconnectedness, and focus. They were determined that their camp would provide an experience in collaboration and creative problem-solving that would encourage kids to reach beyond the perfect digital interfaces to consider and explore how things and authentic relationships are forged. Important work and learning that could be made uniquely rewarding within a camp’s natural beauty, community and fun.

Since August 2005, Beam Camp, located in southern New Hampshire, has served 892 campers, aged seven to seventeen. Beam Campers cultivate hands-on skills while exploring innovative thinking, design and the creative process.

Campers are guided by adults who make a life and living from pursuits that require invention, design, planning, and production. Campers cultivate hands-on skills while exploring innovative thinking, design, and the creative process. Through an international design competition, Beam Camp commissions unique large-scale collaborative Projects that are brought to life by campers and staff. In running Beam Camp, Cohen and Kahn recognize that knowing how to use tools, how something works, how to finish something, and how to work together contribute to the formation of a healthy and reflective social and individual identity.

Recognizing the value of the Beam Camp experience to kids and their families, Kahn and Cohen founded the non-profit Beam Center in 2011. Their aim is to translate the Beam Ethos into a school-year context and to connect with professionals in education and youth development how the Beam approach can help all kids and teens set and achieve ambitious goals in school, at work and in life.