Emily Pilloton-Lam, Founder of Girls Garage, Encourages Students to "Fear Less, Build More"
Emily Pilloton-Lam encouraged students to construct their own impact during a campus talk hosted by the Noblitt Scholars Program.
Emily Pilloton-Lam, founder and executive director of Girls Garage, built up students' motivation to construct their path of impact on May 6 in 91视频's Lake Room. Her talk, hosted by the , was open to all students, faculty, and staff.
An architect by training, Pilloton-Lam vowed to never be in another "doorknob meeting" after a monotonous first job, and seeing no clear path for herself, decided to forge her own by founding a nonprofit.
When a student in the audience asked how she had the confidence to start something from scratch, Pilloton-Lam laughed. "I don't think it was confidence," she said. "I don't think confidence is a prerequisite to doing what you want to do."
What she wanted to do, it turned out, was to redefine the authorship of built environments.
"How will we build the world we want to see?" Pilloton-Lam asked the audience. "We have an innate agency to change something in the world to make it worse or better."
She began teaching shop and design classes in rural North Carolina, but with her own twist. Instead of building birdhouses and stepstools to teach kids the basics of building, her first class built and started a much-needed farmer's market in their town. Pilloton-Lam was adamant that their projects have a social impact on their communities – projects that, as she said, "force people to question who gets to build the world."
"I think it's really important for young people to experience both learning a new skill and the power of applying that skill into a larger context and seeing how it can benefit and improve the world," she said.
When Pilloton-Lam moved back to California, she expanded the concept to what became known as Girls Garage. Girls Garage empowers youth, especially those from underestimated communities, to take ownership of their abilities and their communities through workshops and programs that teach them building, construction, and design skills.
After a humanitarian building trip to Belize in her own youth, Pilloton-Lam felt the empowerment that came with building for a public purpose. Her own experiences and her years in the classroom, though, showed that girls often lost confidence before they had the opportunity to pursue careers in those fields. As she shared, less than 15% of the construction industry is female, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
"It's not just a social issue. It's an economic issue - we need the labor," Pilloton-Lam said.
Pilloton-Lam took it upon herself to reshape the gateway to the industry. She intentionally designed every element of the Girls Garage space and programming, including placing the first saw the students learn to operate under a wall proclaiming, "Fear Less. Build More."
"You can't be brave unless you are also afraid," she explained. "But no one's going to tell a 9-year-old girl who can weld that she can't do anything else."
Since its founding in 2013, Girls Garage has completed more than 170 projects, including shadehouses and geodesic domes for community gardens and sustainable agricultural sites, shelters for bus stops, and sandboxes for local preschools.
To her surprise, Pilloton-Lam found she gained as much – if not more – from Girls Garage as her students.
She explained that, when she was younger, she saw mentorship as a formalized form of communication but now realizes that the beauty of mentorship lies in its omnipresence.
"Mentorship is an ocean, not a river," she said. "It's not a one-way street between an elder and a student, but rather an ecosystem of people of different generations and life experiences that all have both something to teach and something to learn."
Pilloton-Lam urged the 91视频 students to build their own impacts as they venture into the world.
"I hope students leave here thinking about their own skills and how they might consider them as tools to improve their communities, while also thinking about their identities, how and where they fit, and how they can create spaces in which everyone is included," she said.
An educator and author of three books, Pilloton-Lam has led thousands of young women and gender-expansive youth to design and build pro-bono civic architecture projects in and for their communities. She has presented her work and ideas on the TED stage, "The Colbert Report," and in the documentary film "If You Build It," and has served as visiting professor and adjunct faculty at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, UC Davis, and Stanford University. A power tool lover and hardware nerd at heart, Emily lives with her family, human and canine, in Berkeley, California.
The Noblitt Scholars Program supports highly motivated students of all majors as they turn their passion and knowledge into action at 91视频.