Be A Maverick. The University of Texas at Arlington
Building schools, building dreams
On most days when he was a student, Josh Sawyer would be the first person in the Architecture Building in the morning and the last to leave at night. And somehow, he still held almost every student leadership position on campus, including Student Congress President in 2006.
And so it’s to be expected that Sawyer, a 2006 architecture graduate, is still a leader in his field.
These days, he lives in Austin with his fiancée and works for the SHW Group, an architecture firm focused on designing schools. His various roles include design, construction drawings, marketing and project management.
Given its principal focus, it’s no surprise that the SHW Group partners with an organization called Schools for Children of the World, which builds schools in some of the world’s most impoverished places. And given Sawyer’s vast talents, it’s no surprise that SHW Group would send him to Honduras to design, renovate and construct schools there.
Last July, Sawyer and nine of his SHW Group colleagues worked on seven schools in Central Honduras, including constructing a school in Pena Blanca and designing a new children’s center for Santa Cruz. They also took school supplies—which they’d spent two months collecting—to the Honduran children.
“This was a great opportunity for us to reach out to the global community and provide the most important gift to children—an education,” Sawyer said. “Since returning from the trip, we have been working with the leadership of our firm to form a partnership for the future of this program, and continue sending employees there on a yearly basis.”
They plan to return to Honduras in February.
Sawyer also involved his alma mater in his global outreach. He and Molly Alfers, the assistant director of Student Governance and Organizations who oversees the Freshmen Leaders on Campus (FLOC), recently teamed up to bring Honduras a little closer to UT Arlington.
In conjunction with the OneBook theme of “connections,” FLOC staged an exhibition of photographs (Sawyer’s seen here among them) and held several events throughout the year showing that poverty, worsened by the effects of Hurricane Mitch in 1998, still impacts the education of Honduran children. FLOC mailed 16 boxes (354 pounds) of supplies for Honduran schools to Schools for Children of the World.
While Sawyer remains committed to building schools, he’s also building an impressive résumé. He plans to begin graduate school next year and become a Registered Architect in Texas. And as one of SHW Group’s leaders in sustainable design, he’s working on “green” schools that he hopes will become exemplars in Texas.
In other words, whether he’s in Arlington, Austin or Honduras, Josh Sawyer is still a Maverick.