With the support of TRADART Foundation, the Women’s Fund of Santa Barbara, and many partners in construction, high school students across Santa Barbara have built three unique tiny homes from the ground up in their woodshop classes and are now getting ready to auction them off on May 23.
Since their near-obsolescence in the early 2000s, woodshop classes in Santa Barbara have made a huge turnaround. In fact, there were only two functioning woodshop classes left in the Santa Barbara Unified School District when TRADART, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of craftsmanship training, was launched in 2000.
“When TRADART found out about this, we stepped in with the district and offered our services through the Tools for Schools program,” said founder Leslie Meadowcroft-Schipper, who believes that every student should have the choice to learn the trades.