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FEATURE STORY
Driving Community Engagement
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The smell of fresh wood, the screech of a hand saw and the grind of a sander filled MSOE’s Construction Science and Engineering Center this winter as students got to work creating 100 desks for local families in need during the university’s Desk Drive. Over the past year, we were all too familiar with the intricacies of working from home. For many households, parents and children were working and learning together under one roof, battling for bandwidth and quiet workspaces. Desks became luxury real estate in homes and hot ticket items for online purchases, causing a spike in prices.
A Forest Home Avenue School student proudly works at his new desk and computer in his athome learning space.
Natalie Villegas ’12, project coordinator in the CREATE Institute, and Anne-Marie Warren, an architectural engineering senior and CREATE Institute student fellow, came up with the idea to host a Desk Drive to help mitigate the economic burden placed on households to purchase desks for school age children. “Anne-Marie and I were discussing how difficult it was to find desks for ourselves during the pandemic. We started to think if it is hard for us, it must be even more difficult for people that have been hit with economic hardship,” said Villegas..
