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Empowering Designers From K through Career
Throughout a student's journey from elementary school to applying for their first design job, we are interested in sparking their creativity, introducing them to potential career paths, and ensuring that the pathway to a design career is one that is welcoming to all regardless of background.
Collaboration is at the heart of what we do. We actively seek partnerships with organizations, community groups, educators, and designers to create meaningful experiences for K-12 students. By leveraging our collective expertise, we broaden the horizons of our participants and foster a sense of belonging within their communities.
We engage with our local universities through a volunteer-led network of administrators, faculty, and students from architecture departments about creating a more inclusive and welcoming culture for BIPOC students. This effort is called the Justice Alliance in Design Education and is the focus of this application, as we will elaborate on momentarily. We also run an international urban design student competition, the Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Competition.
DesignPhiladelphia currently offers two scholarships and will continually add more scholarships from our community -- so that we can be a go-to resource for students interested in design in our region.
Our Women in Architecture Committee Scholarship is for high school students who identify as female and want to explore a college degree in architecture or design. Our Matthew J. Koenig Memorial Scholarship is for a current Temple University architecture student, who is BIPOC (Black, Indigenous or a Person of Color) or a person who identifies as female.
Lastly, we offer a summer JADE Fellowship program, which is a leadership and professional development program with the goal of supporting Black, Latinx, or Indigenous individuals currently enrolled in a design program at Temple University, University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, Thomas Jefferson University, or the Community College of Philadelphia. For our inaugural JADE Fellows cohort in 2024, only students in the architecture programs can apply. We expect the Fellowship to open up to all design students in 2025.
