Derrick Willard - Augusta Prep
“I wanted people to be inspired by spaces we should emulate”
- Derrick Willard
In 2019, when Derrick Willard was moving to Augusta to become Augusta Prep’s head of school, he turned to Google.
“I was coming from a school that had a strong bent toward innovation and entrepreneurship and was teaching those skills to kids in middle and high school,” Willard says. “So, I was really curious: Did that exist in the Augusta community? And was it present in schools and the business community?”
What he found, he says, was theClubhou.se. “At the time, they were really the only players.”
One of the first things Willard did when he arrived in Augusta was set up a meeting with theClubhou.se cofounders Grace Belangia and Eric Parker. Inside the River Room of theClubhou.se’s brand-new location in the Georgia Cyber Center, Willard remembers knowing immediately that he wanted to join the club. Augusta Prep has been theClubhou.se’s only K-12 school member ever since.
“I had a vision for finding a way to bring innovative spaces to the school,” Willard says, “for trying to develop some sort of programming for students so they could build mental muscle in terms of innovation and entrepreneurial skills. That’s why we became partners.”
At the time, Augusta Prep had only a “rudimentary” makerspace and buildings dating back to the 1960s. But it also had staff capacity for innovative programming and a promise to build modern science facilities—a promise Willard wanted to fulfill.
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As a member of theClubhou.se, Willard started holding every Augusta Prep board retreat and senior leadership retreat at the River Room. “I wanted people to be inspired by spaces we should emulate,” he says.
The concept for Augusta Prep’s new W. Rodger Giles Institute for Inquiry—which just celebrated its groundbreaking in January 2023—is taken directly from theClubhou.se. But Willard wants to replicate more than just theClubhou.se’s makerspace or its open and flexible layout. “It’s the spirit of the place,” he says, where out-of-the-box thinking is welcomed and innovation is celebrated.
“I had a vision for finding a way to bring innovative spaces to the school”
That’s why Willard, along with Belangia and Parker, have been putting together a prototype for a Young Entrepreneurs Program, the first of its kind in the region. The pandemic slowed down progress, but “I’d love to pull this off,” says Willard. “It’s happening all over the country, but it’s not happening in this market for K to 12. Somebody has to set a standard for that to get the ball rolling.”
For theClubhou.se, which has been described as Augusta’s best-kept secret, sometimes it takes an outsider to see what’s really there. “theClubhou.se is really the only innovation incubator in town,” says Willard. “These folks are successfully working with individuals, teaching them the entrepreneurial mindset and the skillset and in some cases providing the ability to physically prototype and launch a business. I think we just need more of that. I want to be in that discussion—this is part of the skillset kids need to be more successful, whatever their next step is.”
