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Our Mission
Beam Center’s mission is to crystallize self-directed growth through ambitious, collaborative project-making. We support and celebrate young people as producers of learning, culture, and change who take bold steps towards meaningful futures and help guide compassionate, equitable, and vibrant communities.
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Our Vision
Beam Center aims to help New York City kids and teens set and achieve ambitious goals in school, at work, and in life by making mentorship, creation, and collaboration central to their out-of-classroom learning and college or work-preparatory experiences. At Beam Center, we believe that engaging all young people to unlock their own potential and to continue towards a career path or continued education is an issue of social and economic justice.
Our Values
Collaboration
We prioritize working together in all things big and small to accomplish our individual and collective goals.
Responsiveness
We have a steadfast commitment to adjusting to meet the needs of the youth and communities we serve.
Reciprocity
We embrace the exchange of knowledge, perspective, and experience between youth and professional creators. We believe that all relationships are defined by mutual benefits.
Belonging
We embrace the ethos of “come as you are” and encourage everyone to bring their whole selves to Beam and take ownership of our spaces and community as their own.
Compassion
We believe that a community built on compassionate support is what we all need to feel safe and whole.
Equity
We share in the work of creating economic and educational equity for young New Yorkers who face systemic injustice.
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Our Story
As many places do, Beam Center grew out of a dream:
One that took root in the mid-1970s when twelve-year old Beam Center Co-Founder Brian Cohen experienced the Lighthouse Arts and Music Camp in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. While he went to study saxophone, Brian left inspired by the camp’s culture, its socio-economic blending, its loose way of encouraging serious learning and practice, its commitment to ensemble collaboration, and most importantly by its people. Lighthouse’s staff of musicians and artists worked with campers not as teachers or caretakers, but as collaborators and mentors with a passion to share their craft with young people and who acknowledge that youth contributions are valued and necessary.
In 2004 after decades of daydreaming about recreating his summer camp idyll, Brian partnered with his friend, Danny Kahn, to co-found their very own camp experience for young people. As kids’ environments became increasingly defined by the consumption and use of digital media and devices in the early 2000s, Brian and Danny saw attention-spans waning, communication becoming abbreviated, and interpersonal connections becoming superficial. At the same time, they looked into a future world and workplace that would demand even greater adaptability, interconnectedness, and focus. They were determined to provide an experience in collaboration and creative problem-solving that would encourage youth to reach beyond digital interfaces to explore how physical things and authentic relationships are forged. Harkening back to Brian’s experience at the Lighthouse Arts and Music Camp, our co-founders were drawn to the concept of a “beam;” thus Beam Camp was formed.
Since its founding, Beam Camp, located in southern New Hampshire, has served more than 1,000 campers ages 7-17.
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. This guidance creates an environment of knowing, and when youth begin to know—how to use tools, how something works, how to finish something, and how to work together—they are better equipped to form healthy and reflective identities.
Seeing the value of the Beam Camp experience for youth and their families, Brian and Danny brought the ethos of artistic collaboration, skill development, and mentorship through collaborative project-making to New York City with the founding of Beam Center in 2012. Our first project in NYC, Open Stoop, was designed by Playlab and built in collaboration with 12 students from Brooklyn High School for International Studies. Since then, Beam Center has created countless large-scale and small-scale collaborative projects through our school partnerships, youth training programs, youth employment opportunities, and summer camps.
Today at Beam Center, we continue to empower young people and support them as they develop their capacity for resilience, resourcefulness, and creative problem-solving.
Using drills, concrete, welding torches, circuitry, sewing machines, and more, our programs engage more than 4,000 young people a year. Whether in the forests of New Hampshire or the metropolis of NYC, the Beam Center community works together to build the infrastructure of dreams: a 30-foot Kaleidoscope, an asteroid-struck galactic Salvage Station, an ancient tomb and time portal, a 12-foot tall interactive lightbulb, giant working flipbook, and much, much more.
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Help youth create amazing things
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