Michael Clapper

The way Matt Riggan tells it, the Sustainability Workshop started over Vietnamese. Riggan had gotten together for dinner with three friends from his days working at West Philadelphia High School – Michael Clapper, Aiden Downer, and Simon Hauger. Over the years, they’d stayed in touch, getting together for conversations that, often as not, turned to what was wrong with the education system. This time was different. This time they had gathered to brainstorm alternatives. What would they do if they could build a high school from the ground up? And how, they asked themselves, could they pull it off? Nine years and a lot of hard work later, the official opening of the Sustainability Workshop at the Philadelphia Naval Yard marked what Riggan and company describe as the first step in answering that question.