Learn by Doing: Why We Support Jewels Academy

A catapult built by a sixth grader either launches or it does not. A cricket habitat either keeps crickets alive or it does not. There is no partial credit, no polite nod, no waiting until the test comes back. The project tells you the truth immediately, and then you fix it.

That is the ordinary magic of what happens at Jewels Academy, and it is one of the reasons we are proud to support their work in Des Moines.

Sessions That Finish Something

Jewels Academy offers STEM and self enrichment programs for underrepresented young women in fourth through twelfth grade. The format is deliberate. Workshops run several hours, and each one is designed so that participants complete an actual project and see how it connects to a real STEM career. Troubleshooting is not a detour from the lesson. It is the lesson.

Recent Young Emerging Scientists programming has had students designing and building mechanical engineering projects, creating habitats for live insects, and working through environmental science activities. This fall the organization is running after school workshops with Des Moines Public Schools, bringing the work directly into the buildings where the students already are.

A Ladder, Not Just a Door

The detail we find most telling is what happens to the older students. Tenth through twelfth graders at Jewels Academy do not age out of the program. They come back as assistants to the workshop instructors.

That single design choice changes everything. A ninth grader looking for evidence that she belongs in a lab does not have to imagine it. She can see a seventeen year old from her own neighborhood running the room. And the seventeen year old learns the thing that no amount of coursework teaches, which is that you understand a subject when you can hand it to someone else.

Founder and chair Dr. Kimberly S. Wayne has been clear that cost should never be the reason a young woman misses this. Scholarships and partner funding have allowed students to attend at no charge, which for many families is the difference between an opportunity that exists and an opportunity that is available.

Iowa Roots, Iowa Girls

Half of our board lives on Iowa soil, and our education pillar has long carried a particular emphasis on drawing young women into science and engineering. Jewels Academy sits precisely where those two commitments meet. It is small, it is local, and it is doing the unglamorous work of showing up again and again in the same schools with the same students until something takes hold.

On September 17 the organization gathers its community for the annual Bright Minds, Bold Futures celebration, an evening for the students, the instructors, the volunteers, and everyone who helps keep the workshops running. It is worth pausing on what all of that effort adds up to. A girl builds a thing. The thing works. She finds out what she is capable of, on a Saturday, in Des Moines.

We are honored to stand with Jewels Academy.