Frimpong’s organization, Cocoa360, houses a school for girls, a community health clinic, and a cocoa farm. He was familiar with the location where the organization was to be located, having grown up there, but still needed a plan for what the campus would look like, and someone to design the buildings that would go there. Garmon had recently partnered with a colleague from Penn Design, Donald Zellefrow, who had studied landscape architecture and also had an interest in civic engagement. As a practitioner of Human-Centered Design, Garmon kept the needs and habits of the community in mind while making building plans.
Taking into account the landscape and location of the village, in addition to the needs of the community, would prove to be important. Tarkwa Breman is both rural and remote, located on the Ankobra River. It was initially difficult to recruit teachers, Frimpong says, because of how remote the village is; he recalled their first recruit, who had been excited after reading about Cocoa360 online, showing up and asking where she could get cell service to make a phone call. “And I was like, ‘You’ve gotta climb the hill, the mountain,’” he says, laughing.
In the summer of 2017, Garmon and his team traveled to Tarkwa Breman to meet with community members and to see the space. As Frimpong puts it, Garmon was “cognizant of the value of community perspectives and input in construction design,” and valued the opinions of the people who would benefit from the buildings. The buildings were designed to be “culturally sensitive and locally conducive.” “Everyone in Tarkwa Breman has a stake in the campus,” Garmon adds. He wanted the core values of Cocoa360 to be “front and center” on campus, not pushed to the sidelines or background.
Garmon and Zellefrow had two main objectives when it came to Cocoa360. The first was concrete: they provided plans for the campus’s first building, a community library. The second was more abstract and expansive. Cocoa360 didn’t just need a series of buildings; it needed “a vision or understanding” of what its “spatial, architectural, [and]…landscape future” would look like, in Garmon’s words. “As a designer, it’s not for me to tell them what should be made, it’s the reverse,” Garmon says. “I want to understand what they need, and then we can turn that into best practices for design and campus building.”