Fifteen refugee families from the Glenbrook Apartment community received a very warm Boise welcome from One Stone students who spent Saturdays in September and October exploring all the city has to offer. With a focus on access to learning resources and free fun, the team connected families with new library cards, maps, computer lessons and a science fair. The design thinking approach helped the One Stone team plan these learning opportunities with their end user in mind, understanding the possible transportation, cultural and language challenges, and working through them for a highly successful community building project.

Explore Camp, a healthy lifestyle and self esteem building project, is an example of what’s possible when you believe in yourself. The camp, in collaboration with St. Luke’s Health System YEAH! Program, Bogus Basin, Boise Parks and Recreation and One Stone, came to be known as the Think, Believe, Explore, Dream, Build, Commit, Discover, Act, Choose, Live Camp, where we did just that.

After extensive empathy work with special needs kids and their parents and teachers, we learned that positive mentorship and play are often difficult to access. Because of this, the kids and their parents can experience a sense of marginalization. To address this need, a crew of One Stone students, in partnership with Cynthia Mann Elementary, created an end-of-year celebration event that provided the opportunity for play, movement and creativity for kids with special needs.

After learning about some of the challenges kids in the foster care system face, a team of One Stone students went on a mission to create a project that would provide a sense of community for these kids. They worked with foster care parents and program experts from the Department of Health and Welfare to develop Bright, a three-part project focused on building self-esteem and confidence—encouraging each person to be their “brightest self”.

A Little More Kind was a campaign to encourage a culture of kindness through small, selfless acts that were easy to do—demonstrating that just about anybody could find a way to do a kind thing in the course of their day. People who did random acts of kindness (RAKs) were encouraged to photograph it and post in on a facebook page we created to promote the groundswell, with the hashtag “alittlemorekind.”

For Break Through 2014, One Stone students traveled to the Idaho Youth Ranch campus in Rupert to spend two days teaching and learning from each other. The Ranch is a residential care and education community for youth in in crisis, and is the longest running program offered by our partner, the Idaho Youth Ranch. During the course of the project, students learned equine therapy and ranching practices and did hands-on improvements to the ranch