We want to change the creative learning landscape.
Whistling Finch founder, Lizzy Martin, with a middle schooler who attended a fashion program where she combined her own jean jacket with her uncle’s army jacket.
Our Story
Our Mission
Whistling Finch Labs builds intergenerational creative spaces to empower tweens and connect communities — through hands-on making, intergenerational learning, and circular innovation that designs a more just, regenerative, and connected world.
What We Do
We are building hands-on, immersive, creative Labs — in reimagined storefronts, schools, libraries, and museums — where tweens (ages 9–15) work alongside mentors of every age across four universal creative outlets:
Fashion — what we wear
Music — our universal language
Cooking — what we eat
Building — what we use every day
These aren't "the arts" to us. They're the foundation underneath entire creative careers — design, engineering, architecture, marketing, and more — and every tween is already living inside all four, whether or not anyone's handed them a tool to go further.
Our Values
CREATE
Space for hands-on making.
CONNECT
Space to meet new friends, neighbors, ages, and mentors.
RESPECT
Space to feel like yourself, and to honor others doing the same.
EMPOWER
Space to develop confidence and a sense of agency to build real skills— social, physical, professional, and emotional.
Our Story
Whistling Finch Labs began during COVID, when our founder — after a decade designing cultural exhibits at the Children's Museum of Manhattan and a prior middle school health teacher — started asking why middle school students had such little access to anything like the mentor-led, hands-on experiences she'd spent her career building for young children and families at the museum.
The answer became our first pilot: a week-long fashion program at the Riverdale School in the Bronx, where private and public school seventh graders designed, sewed, and showcased original clothing lines together — donated fabric from Ralph Lauren and Theory, real mentors from New York's fashion world, and a student-run fashion show at the end of it. One seventh grader looked up partway through and said, "I have nothing like this. This is made for me." We haven't stopped building toward that sentence since.
[Read our full story →]
Leadership
Whistling Finch Labs is led by founder and Board Chair Lizzy Martin, whose work bridges education, cultural institutions, and creative program design, alongside a growing network of mentors, advisors, and board leaders from the arts, business, and community development sectors.
Lizzy brings over 15 years of experience designing transformative learning environments for youth and families across New York City. She began as a middle school health teacher before serving as Director of Exhibitions at the Children's Museum of Manhattan, where she led culturally responsive exhibitions and educational programs for diverse, multigenerational audiences. She is currently a Project Strategy Director at Luci Creative, a nationally recognized museum design firm, leading complex, multimillion-dollar projects from concept through execution.
Whistling Finch has also been shaped by fashion designers, makers, and creative professionals — from the Global President of Alexander Wang to local seamstresses and artists — who have contributed expertise in creative making, entrepreneurship, and global design culture.
Our board brings expertise in nonprofit leadership, education, finance, branding, youth development, and cultural programming, including leadership experience from organizations such as Ballet Hispánico, The Apollo Theater, CUNY, and Columbia University's Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
Get Involved
We're building our first permanent Lab in New York to start our network of labs — and we can't do it alone. If you're a parent, a mentor, a funder, or a landlord with an empty storefront, we want to talk to you.
[Bring your tween to a pop-up]
[Become a mentor]
[Support our work]
Driven by a problem and a passion for tweens
America's tweens are growing up without access to the creative fields that expand their understanding of self and the world and build real career potential — in school or out of it. Millions of youth never get the chance to discover their purpose or their talent, and that talent is going to waste, especially in marginalized and under-resourced communities that have the fewest alternatives when schools cut the arts.
The stakes have never been higher. Roughly one in five adolescents reports symptoms of anxiety or depression in any given two-week period, and the U.S. Surgeon General has formally declared an epidemic of loneliness and isolation, with rates highest among young people. At the same time, out-of-school “third spaces” — the community settings adolescents need to build identity and connection outside home and school — are disappearing, particularly in under-resourced neighborhoods.
OUR MODEL
Whistling Finch Labs closes that gap with a network of storefront-based Labs built around four universal, cross-disciplinary creative outlets — fashion, music, cooking, and building — chosen because every tween already lives with them daily, regardless of income or background. Each Lab pairs real tools and materials with mentors of every age, creating a genuine intergenerational third space rather than a youth-only program