We recently connected with Kimberly Montes and have shared our conversation below.

Kimberly, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with a hypothetical question – if it were up to you, what would you change about the school or education system to better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career?

If I could change something about the educational system, I would definitely incorporate internships and field experience into high school classes. My experience with my partner’s school, Big Picture Philadelphia, has been one to remember. Their educational model is to incorporate internships and cohorts with real-world learning. What I love about this experience for my students is that they get a connection with different careers. Many of the students I worked with got a chance to experience Interior Design and Architecture as a potential career opportunity. This is one of our nonprofit’s largest missions: working with schools that promote fulfilling lives and career choices, helping to increase their chances of selecting a career that best suits them, and potentially starting a path to a better future. This past year I have been granted the opportunity to work with such a great group of kids that were exposed to all sorts of experiences. I believe that if all schools were to incorporate this internship program, it could create a phenomenal opportunity for students unsure of what to do after graduating high school. Some of the experiences that my students encountered were visiting different firms, such as landscape architects, colleges, and different fields within architecture and design.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am Kimberly Montes-Bacon, and I grew up in Kensington, Philadelphia. In the early 90s, Kensington was considered to be “badlands.“ This stood for an area that was very dangerous, one of the most dangerous areas in Philadelphia at the time. Growing up in such an environment molded me in an extremely positive way. My mother really pushed to get as many free programs for us to be involved in as possible. I was beyond grateful to be a part of such an amazing community. Even though I was growing up in such a dangerous neighborhood, there were so many free opportunities to help community members, and just seeing the amount of effort others were pushing to improve their neighborhood was so touching and impactful to my life. My childhood experiences and living in a very small home with minimal space for a family of five got me interested in Interior Design. My first involvement in interior design was actually through fine art. I majored in fine arts and found that gaining the essentials of color theory and understanding different fine art aspects let me open up my creativity and become a better designer in the future. Before going to design school, I became a teacher. I taught all grades from my earliest grade preschool to now, teaching college-level students. At the time, I was teaching second grade, Spanish, and other courses to go along with the curriculum. I knew that I loved teaching. I also taught art and loved the idea of teaching kids creativity, showing them what they can create, and having see their potential. Long behold, I was forming my love and passion for teaching. Pushing further to develop my career after several years of teaching, I applied to Drexel University for a Master’s degree in Interior Architecture and Design.

After getting accepted to Drexel, I realized how much I loved the Design field. My final thesis research mainly focused on community engagement and designing for those most in need. I soon realized that I wanted to develop a program that allowed for this after graduating. I entered a competition that called for a start-up that included technology. I took that as an opportunity to develop further this idea of educating students in the design field. My technology aspect was primarily the computer programs that we all learned in the field. I came in second place and soon fell in love with the idea of Youth Design Philly. I spent three years researching and developing ideas for this nonprofit. I did some pilot tests and programs with different organizations and finally launch the nonprofit in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, not realizing that this would be such an essential need for so many students. While developing the nonprofit business aspect, I learned that there weren’t many programs that expose students to Interior Design and Architecture, so I reached out to several schools and partnered with a few of them to develop after-school programs and expose the students to Design careers. Along with that, I worked on developing a design service that would benefit students in need.

My hope for the service was to provide a well-designed space for students at no cost to them. While learning about design, all I ever saw were rooms designed for the wealthy and those with the means to do so. It really bothered me to think that people who are in poor or different conditions were not able to access a well-designed space. During the process of my research, I came across a few articles that stated how important an environment in a classroom can impact a student’s learning. I immediately thought about their room environment, reflecting back to my room as a child and how much I struggled in school as a person with dyslexia and other learning differences. I wonder what it would be like if I had a room to help me to learn better. It was then that I realized this is an essential need for those who didn’t have the funds to purchase a desk during Covid to better focus on their homework. What makes me so proud about Youth Design Philly is that we can provide an opportunity for students to experience design. My team and I work really hard to create fun designed spaces for our students. Either way, they are exposed to design, whether it be through our educational program or having an opportunity to be exposed to a well-designed space. They are still going to get the benefits of a better education experience.

Our mission today is to focus on the exposure of design and develop our lesson plans to fit better the needs of students who were otherwise unable to access design. We seek to bring them services or educational tools that could either lead them to a career in design or give them a better space to study.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Funding my business started with birthday savings and personal funding to really get things rolling with the paperwork, and I made it a mission to raise money on my 30th birthday towards Youth Design Philly. That first week we made a little over $500, which was just enough to help our first student room renovation. YDP would not have been possible without the strong community around us and offering donations to help our mission. That first year we ran solely on donations before we got into schools because we were not eligible for grants yet. Partnering with schools to have our educational services to fund our program was beyond helpful. When starting a nonprofit, there is a lot of trial and error, and the hardest thing is figuring out funding since grant providers don’t really fund new start-up nonprofits. Our first three years were highly focused on fundraisers and education to be able to make other things possible, like our room designs for our students. Much of what we worked on focused on just getting the bare necessities done. So, for the most part, our team was volunteer-based. It is just now that we are able to afford a very small stipend for me as the founder of YDP. We are just now turning three years old and are now becoming more eligible for grants and funding, but they are still hard to win. So we still have a lot of proving to do. In the meantime, we will continue to push on our education services as our funding source and hope that we will be able to reach more grant providers soon.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

A journey that illustrates my resilience has definitely been my entire life. And I laugh when I say this because, as a person of color from an impoverished neighborhood, being expected not to succeed and overcoming these issues has made me so resilient in so many ways. Some stereotypes that have been placed on me were a lot of people expected me to be a teen mom, never did expect me to go to college, let alone be good at it, and to start a business; that was probably the last thing on their mind. Still, I have overcome almost every stereotype placed on a person like me, and I hope to be an example for future people and students that are experiencing similar situations.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://youthdesignphilly.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/youthdesignphilly/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/YouthDesignPhilly/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/youthdesignphilly/
• Other: https://kimberlymontes.com/

Image Credits
All photos were taken by the YDP team.