Activation Impact Maker Donate
Programs

Activate the gift. Then equip it.

Teach, equip, encourage, impart — until a person is ready to stand in a job. The finished half of the first floor runs six days a week already; the classes further down are the ones still waiting on a room.

Every teacher at A.I.M. has passed a background check, and our art classes are led by master art teachers. If you are deciding whether to send your student, that is the first thing you should know.

Running now

The week, as it actually goes.

Two strands of one path. Daytime and afternoon hours build trade skills and work ethic. Tuesday and Thursday evenings build the rest — spiritual encouragement, emotional maturity, and a community that mentors — because becoming ready for work is not only a technical problem.

All of it happens in the finished part of the building, which holds up to 50 people.

Mon–Fri · 10am–2pm

Entrepreneur hours

Business owners cowork in a creative space — meeting, collaborating, or just getting their own work done somewhere quiet. It runs until 2pm, before the after school students arrive.

Mon–Fri · 3pm–6pm

After school program

Where we teach teenagers, foster care students and home schooling groups — along with students with special needs, co-ops, veterans, ladies, and anyone who wants to learn the trades and carry their education further.

Available as a membership or as individual courses.

Tuesday · evening

Holy Spirit art night

Spiritual growth and maturity, worked out through making something.

Thursday · evening

“Recovering YOU” night

Renewing your mind through creative art. Changing patterns, addressing thought processes, and opening your inner gifts and talents.

Discovering the YOU that you were always meant to be.

A man in the A.I.M. studio smiling as he holds up his own pen-and-ink drawing of the face of Christ crowned with thorns, with red brushstrokes behind it.
Work from a Tuesday night. Renewing the mind through creative art — and something to hold at the end of it.

We believe we each have the power to rewrite our inner thoughts. Renew your mind. That takes repetition — of healthy new thoughts, behaviours and patterns — and it takes a community of healthy mentors around you. Our studio offers both.

We have found that opening your creative side, within your own gifts and talents, is a very healing way to rediscover you. Your original destiny. Your original design. Art and creativity are healing, especially coupled with a community to support and encourage you.

Ages 6 to 24

Lion Hearts Youth Program.

Empowering young leaders to lead with the courage of a lion and the heart of gold.

The Lion Hearts Youth Program mark: a crowned lion inside a gold heart, wearing a cross.

Eight things the program covers, from six years old through twenty-four:

  • Moral compass
  • Work ethics
  • Love who you are
  • Adulting 101
  • Skill trades
  • Job platform
  • Entrepreneurship program
  • Community service

Lion Hearts has its own line — 816-856-0935
actimpactmin@gmail.com

Three young Lion Hearts members sitting around a table in the studio, coloring and working with a tray of craft materials between them.
Lion Hearts, on an ordinary afternoon. Six years old and up, around one table, making something.
In the shop

Lay it out first. Then build it.

Nobody touches a tool until they have drawn the thing. That order is most of the trade — it is what separates a tradesperson from someone who owns tools.

  1. Instructor Alan Voyles sitting at a table with a student, going over a hand-drawn layout on paper with a tape measure and ruler beside it.
    Alan Voyles teaching layout design, before production. Paper, a ruler and a tape measure, and the drawing gets right before anything gets cut.
  2. A student sanding a board at a table saw in the A.I.M. shop while an instructor watches.
    Then the same student in the shop. A twenty-year-old being trained on the tools — hands on the work, someone experienced standing next to him.
Still to come

Three classes waiting on the maker space.

Needs the classrooms

Basic Work Ethics

The habits an employer is actually hiring for: turning up on time, finishing what you start, telling someone when you are stuck, and working alongside people you did not pick.

Needs the classrooms

Adulting 101

Running your own life. The documents, the money, the appointments, the decisions nobody sits you down and explains — and which school is not required to cover.

Needs the classrooms

Pre-apprenticeship

Preparation for going into the union or taking a construction trades position. Built on many years of doing this work in the trade, not on a curriculum written from a distance.

Open today

The studios downstairs.

Half of the first floor is finished, and these three studios run in it now. The same space is our business equipping center during the day.

Open

Pottery studio

Open

Fine arts studio

Open

Resin epoxy studio

The A.I.M. art studio: shelves of paint arranged by color along one wall, easels set up on tables, student artwork laid out in the foreground and a lit studio space beyond.
The art studio, as it is today. Paint on the wall by color, easels up, work in progress on the tables — this is the room that is finished and running.

The trades classes are waiting on a room.

The maker space classrooms are the next stage of the building. The evening and afternoon programs run today in the finished half-floor, but Basic Work Ethics, Adulting 101 and pre-apprenticeship need space that does not exist yet.

Please give to equip the next generation.

Training up the youth. It takes a village to raise a child.

Keep the trades alive. Let’s keep the kids off the streets and give them a safe place to learn and grow.