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Building Desks for Alexandria Students in Need

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When Building Momentum, an innovative Alexandria-based maker space, came to Virginia Tech with an idea to help kids in need, alumni jumped at the opportunity to help. Building Momentum designed the desk prototype, The Carpenters Union donated the plywood and Virginia Tech alumni were the muscle behind the work actually manning the equipment and building the desks. Desks were donated to students at Casa Chirilagua in Alexandria. 

We are building desks for school children in the Alexandria City public school system. With COVID, children are generally being schooled at home these days and so we thought this was a great way to provide a resource for folks to have the most effective learning environment possible. It's really important as a chapter and as an alumni that we focus on the motto of Virginia Tech which is Ut Prosim and so we always are looking for opportunities to give back to the community and really live out that, that motto of Ut Prosim. My favorite part about it so far has been the, the just kind of enthusiastic willingness to show up already. The fact that the alumni group and the school at large and the Innovation Campus and all of the teams. Everyone, when we said hey, we have this idea to help kids. Everyone from Tech was just like, yeah, we're there. We're onboard. Let's do it. The students in this neighborhood tend to fall behind academically for a variety of reasons. And we're just so grateful that we can introduce a solution to one of the barriers. And that barrier is that many students don't have a dedicated learning space at home. They are sharing a space with many family members where they might be distracted by other siblings or other family members. Sometimes they don't even have a place to put their feet on the ground and sit up straight and be able to concentrate. So it's so important for them to be able to have these desks and just help them with their school work. Do you like the desk? Yeah. The commitment of Virginia Tech to be able to come in here and provide some things for our community is very important because we want to make sure that we're establishing that everybody can, can prosper from economic development to make sure that some of the communities, like this community here in Chirilagua can really benefit from the arrival of Virginia Tech. Oh, so stylish.