Summary:
This past year, our work expanded far beyond the bounds of what one school could hold. LightHouse Holyoke remains a flagship program, but our mission now includes arts access, creative workforce development, and multiple community-centered initiatives. LightWorks Collective is the new home for all of it—rooted in Holyoke, built on relationship, and shaped by a decade of growth.
In 2014, Josiah Litant and Catherine Gobron each put $500 into a bank account and started walking around Holyoke asking people what they needed from a learning center. LightHouse was born from those conversations—young people, families, educators, and neighbors telling us what wasn’t working and imagining something different with us. That first year, in a tiny space down the street, we built a program out of relationship, creativity, and a whole lot of trust.
Some of you reading this were among our Founding Friends and Angel Donors who helped us launch. Thank you, again, for believing in the potential impact of this work, and for investing in this dream.
Ten years later, we’re sitting inside a 40,000 sq. ft. facility with classrooms, performance venues, a commercial kitchen, and a maker space, having supported hundreds of young people to reshape their own lives. None of this was planned at the beginning. It grew because the community kept showing us where the gaps were—and we kept saying yes.
When we purchased and reopened this historic building, the former Gateway City Arts facility, we inherited more than square footage. Standing on the shoulders of what Lori Divine and Vitek Kruta built here, suddenly we had stages, kitchens, studios, workshops, gathering spaces, and yes… a liquor license registered under our wildly unhelpful original legal name “LightHouse Personalized Education for Teens.”
Our new facility creates new responsibility.
If we are a nonprofit committed to serving this community with every resource at our disposal, then what do we do when we suddenly have this many resources? How do we use a concert venue, a theater, a commercial kitchen, a maker space, and an entire arts campus in ways that open doors, build skills, strengthen identity, and bring people together? What does it look like to run a school and also steward a performing arts center and cultural hub for Holyoke and Hampden County?
We realized we needed a structure that could hold the full picture of our work—past, present, and emerging.
So in June of 2025 our Board of Directors voted to create LightWorks Collective, a new umbrella for everything we’ve grown into and everything we’re becoming.
LightWorks is now the home of multiple initiatives—including LightHouse Holyoke, which remains at the heart of our mission. But LightHouse is no longer the only program. Our commitment to this community has expanded, and our infrastructure has expanded with it. Our EIN is the same, but our overarching mission has grown. We've reopened the venues as De la Luz Soundstage and De la Luz Divine Theater, welcomed tenants and co-creators like Comfort Bagel and Arts Integration Studio, with more to come, shared our space with many of our nonprofit parters like Pa'lante Transformative Justice and Holyoke Food and Equity Collective, among many others, launched the De la Luz Technical Arts Institute, and we're focused on getting our 8,000 square foot community maker space up to code and publicly available asap.
LightHouse Holyoke continues to change what school can be, a mission that is more important than ever.
LightWorks Collective is expanding opportunity though education, access to the performing arts, and creative workforce development.
LightWorks allows us to name the truth. We are educators, yes. But we are now also cultural stewards, workforce builders, venue operators, community hosts, and creative collaborators.
We have tools in our hands—literally—and we intend to use them.
This name change doesn’t signal a departure from who we are. It puts language to the work we’ve already been doing and the future we’re stepping into together. Let us know if you'd like to get involved! We need board members, committee leaders, advisors, collaborators, teachers... Reach out!