A parklet built by Girls Garage.
For designer Emily Pilloton, the corporate world was never a fit. After completing graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, she entered the workforce with a desire to “get dirty on a job site and build things that had an impact on communities,” she explains. Instead, Pilloton found herself at a firm where she spent her days detailing plumbing systems for the second, third and fourth homes of wealthy people. “I didn’t last very long,” she admits. By 2008, she had ventured out on her own and began nonprofit Project H Design. In 2013, she rebranded as Girls Garage and created the Bay Area-based architecture and design education organization that teaches female youths woodshop, metalshop, printmaking, art and design skills that ultimately allow them to physically build full-scale structures that support their own communities. Today, Girls Garage is helping more girls than ever toward empowerment through power tools.
“Girls Garage started because I love building things, real things, with young people,” she says. “Even as a female instructor [at Project H Design], I was still feeling this intangible gendered difference. When I walked on the job site, people didn't think I was the boss. My female students had tools taken from them and weren’t taken seriously. Girls Garage was founded in response to that.” Located in a 3,600-square-foot space in Berkeley, California (what Pilloton found was the midpoint between where the majority of the program participants lived), the Girls Garage workshop contains a woodshop, metalshop, print shop and art areas, all with industrial-grade tools and equipment. Programs are offered in each area to girls ages 9 to 18. All classes are free and lead to building those “real things” Pilloton craved making when she was an architecture graduate. Girls Garage projects range from a trellis-covered sandbox for a local preschool to a 500-square-foot chicken pavilion that the advanced build class completed this summer for Urban Tilth, an urban farm in nearby Richmond, California that provides produce to its surrounding community.
“Though its founding came from a sense of frustration, Girls Garage is a physical space carved out for girls where we don't have to put energy to all of that social calculus. You want in and we will build,” says Pilloton, who sent toolboxes with over 30 tools home to 250 girls when COVID-19 barred in-person classes this spring. Now, classes have resumed in smaller groups. “We do talk about what it means to be a woman in the trade but it’s from a supportive, identity-driven place. It doesn't come from grievance.”
About 70% of the participants are girls of color and two thirds identify as low income, says Pilloton, and while the program does not push college-bound graduates into architecture, design or STEM majors, several former Girls Garage members have found it is where their career or study interests lie. Last year marked the first year that the program had a full graduating class of participants, 17 young women who had been designing and building with Pilloton since 2013. All of them are now at two- or four-year colleges and about half have already declared majors or entered trades directly related to the skills they learned at Girls Garage. “I’ve never pushed anyone into a specific career, but many do enter the trade and that will change the way that those industries look. That’s a goal of ours,” she says.
More than anything, Girls Garage instills girls with a sense of confidence, belonging and sisterhood that will make them future leaders. For Pilloton, the future of Girls Garage is not necessarily an increase in the number of program participants but in the quality of instruction and projects. She wants to do more work that is social justice-oriented and engaged in political issues like gentrification, and so go the girls. “If ever there comes a time where a girl walks in the door and I don't know her name, we are too big,” she opines. “I think about growth in terms of depth. How are we serving every girl every day? Then we have succeeded.”
