Giving back through mentoring

Buro Happold is known for engineering high-performance buildings and pioneering city-level strategies for creating vital, more sustainable communities.

But we also are committed to serving the communities where we live and work. From mentorship programs and supporting communities in need to sponsoring scholarships and lectures, here are just a few areas where Buro Happold has given back.

Mentoring the Future – New York and Los Angeles

Since 2013, Buro Happold joined the national ACE (Architecture, Construction, Engineering) mentoring program for high school students interested in careers in the design and construction industries. During the 2016-2017 school year, every other week, ACE’s student teams in New York and Los Angeles visited Buro Happold’s offices as well as other participating companies to learn about the design process in preparation for their final assignment – to design a project of their own.

In New York, one team designed a mixed-use, high-rise development in Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s west side while the other proposed transforming an abandoned City Hall subway station into a history museum. The students’ experience culminated with presentations to the other teams, mentors, family, and community members.

In Los Angeles, students from across the city worked together to create their vision of the Olympic Village. Each team created one component of the Village and the projects were combined into a collaborative model.  The teams presented their work at the ACE End-of-Year event in May where two of the Los Angeles ACE participants received scholarships from the organization.

In addition to our staff providing mentorship, Buro Happold’s non-profit arm, The Happold Foundation has set up a scholarship fund in collaboration with the ACE program to award annual scholarships to graduating seniors participating in the program in three cities: New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Since 2016, Buro Happold’s Los Angeles office has also hosted five middle-school students as part of Spark, a national program providing workplace mentorship for middle-school students in underserved neighborhoods. This year’s eight-week program culminated at Dodger Stadium where five students presented their final projects. Buro Happold has mentored 15 students over the past two years through the program.