Ty Juan Swanson-Sawyer always wanted to design and create buildings, but when he was a kid, he didn’t know what a job doing that would look like. That’s a challenge for a lot of young people in Cleveland, he said.
People of color in cities like Cleveland don’t often get exposed to fields like architecture and engineering, he said. “They might have the spark or they might have the passion or the skills to be good at these career fields, but they have no one in the community or even at school that’s pushing them towards that direction.”
With a nudge from his father, Swanson-Sawyer chose the Cleveland School of Architecture and Design for high school in 2011. That’s where he joined ACE Cleveland, a program that connects local high school students with mentors working in architecture, construction and engineering.
From student to mentor
Swanson-Sawyer has since come full circle. With two masters degrees under his belt and a project designer role at IKM Architecture, he now mentors students at the same high school he attended. He’s one of about 2,300 students who have participated in ACE since it started 15 years ago. Now, he’s among the program’s 140 volunteers from 70 area companies.
ACE has mentorship programs in 12 high schools in Cleveland, Warrensville Heights and Shaker Heights. During the year, ACE mentors pull back the curtain on different careers related to architecture, construction and engineering. As students learn more about those careers, they team up to work on master plans for a mock construction project.
“It also pushed me to go deeper into what I love,” said Cedric Infante, a senior at John Marshall School of Engineering, a high school in Cleveland. “I’m not interested in becoming a civil engineer, but when I work with my team, … I’m trying to think of ways I can incorporate what I love into our projects.”
The program also offers a summer course with job shadowing and classes on communication and leadership. Students in the program can apply for scholarships for college and trade schools, too. ACE Cleveland has given out about $1.6 million in scholarships over the last 15 years.
The Cleveland branch is just one of about 70 ACE programs throughout the U.S. Both ACE Cleveland and its parent organization at the national level get funding from donations, including from construction and development firms.
Participation in ACE is open to students of any race or ethnicity, but the school districts the Cleveland branch works in have large populations of Black students. In 2023, just 2% of architects in the U.S. were Black or African American, according to the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards.
“Just seeing the diversity of [ACE], you can almost feel the impact,” said Amir Allenbey, an architectural designer at the Cleveland-based firm Robert P. Madison International who started as an ACE mentor this year.
Solving problems creatively with fresh perspectives
On top of ACE’s racial diversity, Allenbey said he likes that the program brings younger people into the fold as both students and mentors. He’s 31, and many of the program’s mentors are around his age, if not younger.
“Sometimes, when you think of architecture, you think of, like, this monolithic old guy,” Allenbey said. “It’s like, we need some youth there.”
Infante has participated in ACE since his freshman year. He credits the program with giving him more independence as he looks forward to a career in electrical engineering. He feels like he doesn’t have to rely just on his teachers for guidance, he said.
“We’re the ones actually pushing other students to, like, find what they love,” Infante said.
Infante’s favorite aspect of engineering is that it challenges him to solve problems creatively. That’s where young people in the field can shine, he said.
“I feel like people that are younger have a more spontaneous imagination,” he said. “Instead of trying to, like, suppress their idea and say, ‘that’s stupid,’ I feel like a younger generation will be more stubborn and say, ‘How can we make this work?’”
Architecture, construction and engineering need that kind of creativity, said Ryan Ware, another ACE mentor with about 23 years of experience in construction and architecture. Young people will play a pivotal role in figuring out how to bring rapidly advancing technology into the fields, he said.
“I think this industry has been a little bit behind on allowing a lot of that transition, and we need the next generation to come on and solve some of the problems that we’ve been struggling with as an industry,” Ware said.
