Independence Seaport Museum’s boat shop, Workshop on the Water, is dedicated to the skills and traditions of wooden boat building and sailing in the Delaware Valley and the New Jersey shore. Visitors to the Seaport Museum can interact with the boat builders as they work on various projects.

Urban BoatWorks teaches middle and high school youth how to build wooden canoes, kayaks, and paddleboards. Our young boatwrights are introduced to the basics of boatbuilding, such as stitch-and-glue and cedar strip construction, as well as maritime history, the geometry of boat design, physics of buoyancy and aerodynamics, and some history and ecology of Camden’s local waterways.  As part of our school year boat shop internship, youth learn financial literacy.

We offer boat builds to any school, homeschooler, scouts, or other groups interested in building. Contact us at urbanboatworks@urbanpromiseusa.org to schedule a build or come for a tour of our historic and beautiful boatshop.

Glen Foerd partners with Philadelphia schools and local arts and cultural institutions to offer middle- and high-school students structured boat-building programs. Waterborne is a program in Engaged Learning, an educational approach rooted in the cultural arts and designed to demonstrate the crucial importance of the arts in supporting successful student educational outcomes.