Anelise

This month’s installment of our community spotlight features one of our current interns at Beam Center, Anelise. Anelise lives in Brooklyn and is a junior at The Packer Collegiate Institute. She attended Beam Camp for four years and has been interning with us for the last two years. In her free time, Anelise reads, draws and sews; she also enjoys welding and metalworking. “I love Korean food, traveling, and movies from the 90s. I hope to go back to Barney’s [the metal shop at Beam Camp] one day.”

During her internship, Anelise collaborated with another Beam Camp intern to design a playground and built a prototype for it. When asked why she decided to build a playground, she says, “Whenever I think about a playground, I think about if kids could design their own playground, what would it be like because they are the ones playing on it. I wanted to see if I could build it and get other people on board in the process — and see if it would impact the people around me.” She also adds that she learned to understand the process of designing and building something from scratch. “You can have a lot of really cool ideas but it might be harder to execute in terms of resources and what’s safe” she continues. “I learned the balance between ideas and reality but also how to push the limit as much as possible; so I can make my idea come to life.”

In addition to helping around the center and building her own project, Anelise was also part of our Big Project selection committee for Beam Camp 2024. Speaking about her experience with that Anelise says, “That was really cool because as a camper I was so used to being like the project would be revealed to me and then I would just build it. But now I got to see all the submissions and saw what goes into the decision process of selecting the projects, which was really awesome.” 

Anelise attended Beam Camp from 2017 until 2022, and now hopes that she can go back again as a staff member. She says that being at Beam Camp made a big impact in her discovering her interests, like metalworking, welding, and sewing. She says, “The fact that I got to weld when I was eleven was really impactful to me. I would’ve never been able to discover that I really like doing that if I didn’t go to Beam Camp.” 

When asked what she thinks is unique about Beam Camp, she says, “The thing I think that is really special about Beam Camp is that they trust kids in terms of what they want to do and with the tools which I think not a lot of places allow for kids to really explore.” She continues on to say, “That’s like the one place I can really explore my interest because I feel like that stuff isn’t always available to kids in other spaces.” While at Beam Camp, Anelise says she learned that the people around her can help develop her interests and things that she values. 

We’re grateful that Anelise continues to be part of the Beam community. Thank you for being part of Beam, Anelise!