Generations of Spark: From One Phone Call to a Citywide Ripple
How Catherine Lindroth Tapped EXPLO to Help Spark Students at SummerCollab—and Continues the Work with Microschool Generation Today
“EXPLO fundamentally respects the intelligence of young people.” — Catherine Lindroth
When Catherine Lindroth was building what would become SummerCollab, she did not start with a grand plan for a citywide network. She started with a question: how do we ensure all kids have access to extraordinary spaces for learning?
At the time, Lindroth was serving as Director of Community Impact for Teach For America in Delaware. Community centers were reaching out to her, asking for help serving students who were significantly behind grade level. She found funding to place educators in those centers during the summer. But once the work began, a deeper challenge came into focus.
The issue was not simply staffing. It was quality, culture, training, and design. Across the centers, similar operational needs kept surfacing. There was real commitment, but not yet a shared model for creating the kind of summer learning experiences that would engage these young students.
"I had placed 15-20 corps members in these centers across the community, so we were able to get a 360 view. I placed them thinking ‘yay, job well done,’ but there was such a culture shock, actually, between the educators and the community centers, and I ended up having to facilitate."
She found herself problem-solving and trying to make sense of everything she was seeing. Then came what she describes as a kind of “Jerry Maguire moment”: she wrote it all down. She mapped the needs, named the patterns, and began to imagine something bigger: an effort to help community organizations strengthen the quality of their programs together.
And as she started to research, she found EXPLO.
She called. EXPLO President Moira Kelly picked up.
“I don't even know how that's possible. But the universe conspired, and Moira answered. We must have had a two-hour conversation!”
And that first conversation became the beginning of a long collaboration - one that would help shape SummerCollab and extend EXPLO’s impact far beyond its own campuses and classrooms.
Bringing EXPLO’s “secret sauce” into the community
What Lindroth found in EXPLO was not just expertise, but a way of thinking.
She remembers long conversations with Kelly that helped frame the work more clearly: not just how to solve immediate problems, but how to lead a network, build stronger systems, and keep sight of what innovation could look like on the horizon. Over time, those conversations turned into an active collaboration. EXPLO welcomed SummerCollab’s community leaders to Massachusetts, opened up its team, and shared its thinking generously.
Leaders from organizations including the YMCA and Boys & Girls Clubs spent time with EXPLO’s senior team, digging into everything from interviewing and hiring to training, management, and culture-building. What may have seemed like familiar operational tasks were elevated into something more intentional and more powerful.
For Lindroth, that was one of EXPLO’s great gifts: the ability to take things people thought they already knew how to do, and show them a whole other level of excellence.
“It was the best professional development experience that many of our leaders have ever had,” she says.
And it was not one-and-done. Year after year, Kelly and the EXPLO team stayed involved - visiting sites, helping leaders reflect on what needed to change, and introducing new ideas that could be adapted for SummerCollab’s network of community centers serving thousands of low-income children.
“All of EXPLO was made available to SummerCollab leaders,” says Lindroth.
A different vision of what learning can feel like
What stood out most to Lindroth was EXPLO’s deep understanding of young people. She describes EXPLO as a “world leader in engagement,” but for her, that does not just mean keeping students busy or entertained. It means something more fundamental: respecting their intelligence.
That respect changes everything.
In many learning environments, Lindroth says, “success is just putting your head down and getting through it. You're literally teaching young people self-repression. But EXPLO gets engagement. They care about how to bring people into a world and a universe that's interesting and inspiring.”
The EXPLO model is grounded in curiosity, challenge, wonder, and real intellectual trust.
These ideas came alive in the curriculum SummerCollab adapted with EXPLO’s support. Lindroth remembers the materials, the gadgets, the hands-on experiments, the sense of challenge and discovery built into the experience. Students were not just receiving information. They were building, testing, asking questions, and following their curiosity.
EXPLO, she says, knows how to create “little universes that children can walk into.”
That phrase captures something essential about EXPLO’s approach. The spark is not only in the lesson itself. It is in the environment around it, the culture of the room, the way adults speak to students, and in the permission to wonder.
“You can start to teach children the kinds of questions they can ask, and where questions can go,” shares Lindroth.
It is also in the craft. Lindroth explains the magic of EXPLO like this: “It’s kind of like someone who knows how to create a good movie.” The materials matter, the structure matters, the dramatic effect matters, the thoughtfulness matters, especially in a world where so much learning can feel flat, rushed, or disposable.
“In a world of cheap stuff, EXPLO is quality,” Lindroth explains.
From one program to a network
With EXPLO’s guidance, the network developed shared training systems and shared curriculum across community sites. Lindroth recalls creating a middle school academy structure to be used across the network and training local educators on EXPLO curriculum. They even had “EXPLO teachers” - educators trained to bring that model of inquiry-based, hands-on learning into their own settings.
The impact, she says, was transformative.
One memory stands out in particular: watching Kristina Woznicki, then at the Walnut Street YMCA and now SummerCollab’s executive director, return from one of those learning experiences energized and newly emboldened. With support, guidance, and a sense of permission, she reimagined what the program could be.
“Kristina came back and she just revolutionized the Walnut Street YMCA,” says Lindroth.
And the changes were not limited to one site.
”“I cannot express to you the depth of transformation that occurred in every single one of these community centers because of this work,” Lindroth says.
That is where SummerCollab became more than a partnership story. It became a story about systems change.
The collaboration helped shape the thinking of the leaders who guide Wilmington’s youth development sector. It influenced the way organizations trained staff, built culture, designed learning, and imagined what was possible for the children in their care. Its effects moved through programs, professionals, and communities.
That kind of impact is hard to measure neatly. But Lindroth sees it clearly.
The EXPLO “secret sauce,” she says, is now embedded in the DNA of leaders across that ecosystem.
Generations of spark
As EXPLO celebrates 50 years, Lindroth sees its legacy not only in the students it has served directly, but in the ideas it has carried into new places.
SummerCollab reached more than 2,000 children and 500 youth development professionals. But the deeper story, in her view, is the ripple effect: leaders shaped by EXPLO go on to shape programs, teams, systems, and thousands more young people. A spark that begins in one environment can keep traveling.
“There is an impact that is citywide. It’s kind of incalculable,” says Lindroth. “It’s system-level sparkage.”
That is what makes EXPLO’s 50th anniversary so exciting.
EXPLO’s impact is not confined to one summer, one campus, or one generation of students. It moves outward - through educators, through community leaders, through organizations, and through the young people whose sense of possibility expands because someone built a more thoughtful world for them to step into.
And for Lindroth, that story is still unfolding.
Up next: Microschools
Ten years later, she is again in conversation with Kelly and the EXPLO team, this time around a new venture MicroSchool Generation: an emerging movement of innovative school leaders and educators designing microschool structures that meet the needs of students struggling with disconnection and emotional challenges; and those inspired to offer children groundbreaking deeper learning experiences no longer bound by compromises inherent in our traditional classrooms and bell schedules.
“If I’m trying to build a structure that creates the opportunity for curiosity and freedom and engagement and liberation for children… who do I want embedded in that DNA? EXPLO. They are the best thought partners ever. And there could be thousands of microschools that emerge,” Lindroth says.
That may be the clearest expression of EXPLO at 50.
Not just an organization with longevity, but one whose spark continues to ignite new ideas, new systems, and new futures.
