CoLab Project Spotlights
What We Built Together
In CoLAB’s inaugural year (AY 2025-26), we partnered with seven individuals and units across Northwestern and the surrounding community. The projects took many different forms. Some partnerships created space to explore an emerging idea and imagine what might be possible—the kind of early-stage, exploratory work that now has a home in our newly created Futures Lab. Others supported community events or helped partners move an existing project forward. And a few resulted in resources designed to live beyond the collaboration and be shared more widely.
That range is part of what CoLAB is built for: not every good collaboration needs to arrive with the same starting point—or end with the same kind of product.
Below are two examples of partnerships that resulted in resources you can explore and use.
Making Pathways to District 65 Easier to Find
In partnership with Kristen Perkins and the Office of Community Education Partnerships
Northwestern students and staff are already contributing their time and skills to projects across Evanston/Skokie School District 65—but finding the right opportunity and understanding how to get involved was not always simple. Our CoLAB partnership focused on making those pathways easier to see and navigate.
Working with Kristen Perkins and their team, the Education Team served as a thought partner and helped develop a centralized Pathways Hub where Northwestern students, staff, and District 65 partners can find current opportunities, learn about onboarding, and hear from people who have participated in the program.
The project also reminded us that meaningful community engagement does not always require creating something entirely new. Sometimes the most useful intervention is building better infrastructure around the rich network of people and opportunities that already exists.
Explore the NU/District 65 Pathways Hub.
Bringing 40 Years of Women’s Center History to Life
In partnership with Sarah Brown and the Northwestern Women’s Center
How do you tell the story of forty years of programs, people, ideas, and community without reducing that history to a timeline?
That question shaped our CoLAB partnership with the Northwestern Women’s Center. Together, we worked with archival photographs, decades of program and event information, and audio reflections from current Women’s Center staff to imagine a more interactive way of sharing the Center’s history.
The result was a digital calendar that brings past, present, and future into conversation. Visitors can move through significant moments in the Women’s Center’s history, encounter voices from people connected to the work, and see how its programming and priorities have developed over time.
For us, the project became an experiment in what it can look like to treat an archive not simply as a record of what happened, but as material people can encounter, explore, and make meaning from.