Urban Ashes Redefines How K-12 Campuses Grow, Learn, and Thrive

Innovative workshop reimagines school campuses as living systems that teach sustainability by design.

HENDERSON, Nev., Nov. 4, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Across the country, schools are losing trees faster than they're learning from them. Fallen trees shouldn't mean lost opportunities. Urban Ashes founder Paul Hickman, alongside a special guest, is leading a workshop to show how schools can learn from every tree, even the fallen ones.

As part of Arbor Day's Partners in Community Forestry Conference, the session "Designing a Circular Campus: Turning Trees into Teaching Tools" invites participants to reimagine how K–12 campuses can turn fallen trees into hands-on learning opportunities, building materials, carbon storage, and community value. Through a collaborative design experience, attendees will help shape a new model of school development, one where every removed tree becomes an opportunity for education, climate impact, and circular design.

Turning Trees Into Teaching Tools

The two-hour workshop, Nature's Classroom: Integrating Nature into Learning Spaces, moves far beyond traditional presentations. Led by Hickman, participants will explore how to intercept trees before the chipper, transform them into classroom materials and outdoor structures, and integrate those stories into student learning and community engagement.

Special guest Jason Bing, Director of Capital Projects for Ann Arbor Public Schools, will share how these circular design principles are being implemented in Ann Arbor schools today.

Ann Arbor's Pathways and Logan campuses demonstrate how trees removed for development become tools for teaching and sustainability. Their stories will anchor the workshop, offering participants a living reference point as they create, present and walk away with their own circular campus solutions. 

"Urban Ashes' work has been critical in helping us turn what was once tree waste into tools for education and climate action," Bing said.

Workshop Details

Title: Designing a Circular Campus: Turning Trees into Teaching Tools
Date:Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025
Time: 1:30–3:30 p.m.
Location: The M Resort, Henderson, Nev.
ISA CEUs: 2 CA, Bm, CUFP

This session is part of the Arbor Day's Partners in Community Forestry Conference (#PCF2025) and requires pre-registration.

The workshop is designed for facilities planners, sustainability officers, architects, landscape architects, arborists, tree care professionals, and city staff interested in rethinking how schools interact with their natural environments. Whether managing buildings, designing spaces, or guiding sustainability policy, participants will discover how fallen trees can become carbon-storing teaching tools, and how circular systems can transform campuses into living laboratories.

About Hickman and Urban Ashes

Paul Hickman is the founder and CEO of Urban Ashes, a Michigan-based consultancy leading national efforts to build circular economies around urban wood recovery. A designer and entrepreneur with more than 30 years in sustainable materials and urban wood utilization, Hickman co-founded the original Urban Wood Project in southeast Michigan in response to the emerald ash borer.

Over the past six years, Hickman has evolved Urban Ashes from a urban wood product manufacturer into a systems design and consulting firm focused on wood recovery, market development and circular economy solutions. Today, Urban Ashes helps cities, schools, businesses, and organizations turn fallen trees into local jobs, local materials, and long-lived wood goods that deliver measurable climate benefits.

More Information

Conference registration and details: https://www.arborday.org/conferences-events/pcf

Join Urban Ashes and Ann Arbor Public Schools to see how design, sustainability, and education can come full circle, turning fallen trees into new lessons, new spaces, and new possibilities for the next generation.

Media Contact:
Paul Hickman
Urban Ashes
pmh@urbanashes.com
+1 734-546-9657
www.urbanashes.com

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SOURCE Urban Ashes