Marisol Castaneda-Salgado

Beam’s April installment of our Staff Spotlight series features Beam Camp City’s Director, Marisol Castaneda-Salgado. Beam Camp City is our day-camp experience on Governors Island for groups of campers grades 4 and above from publicly funded schools or community-based organizations.

Marisol graduated from Columbia University with a master's in Social Work in 2019 and began working at Beam Center, where she facilitated workshops for youth on the topic of Designing for Liberation. In addition to facilitating these workshops, Marisol also coordinated youth employment at Beam and co-designed our “Learn Anything” program. Marisol says that Beam Center was the type of space she was looking for in her work, because Beam upholds values that are core for Marisol: popular education and challenging the traditional education system. “When I came to the Beam Center for my interview and I saw the space,” she says, “I knew this was the space that I would love to be a part of.”

As the Beam Camp City Director, Marisol oversees a variety of  teams that help manage programming in Beam spaces on Governors Island in both the summer and during the school year, including our summer day camp, school field trips, and more. She says her main role as the director is to “support and coordinate the team that will allow Beam Camp City to be this amazing experience for youth workers and campers.”

When asked what makes Beam Center unique, Marisol said, “It’s a non-traditional space for learning, and what I really love is that learning is not understood as this idea of ‘learning happens just in the classroom and in one direction.’ [Instead] learning happens surrounded by colors and plants and people that look different and speak different languages and it happens in multi directions.”

We’re continuously grateful to have people like Marisol on the Beam team!