The mission sounds simple: plant dreams in “dream deserts.”

“A dream desert is a place where kids don’t have access to educational or extracurricular opportunities to the capacity that we’d like to see them,” said Kam Philips, the founder of the nonprofit organization Dream Outside the Box.

Dream Outside the Box’s purpose is for college students to go into “dream deserts” and encourage children to broaden their horizons

Phillips founded it in 2009 as an undergraduate at the University of Missouri. Since then this organization has spread to six college campuses, including TCU.​

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Philips saw the need for the Dream Outside the Box while volunteering and talking with children who did not see college or prestigious careers as options for the future.

“I asked kids, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you like to do for fun?’” Philips said. “And the things we were hearing weren’t the things I was exposed to when I was a kid.”

Philips said, “We’d hear ‘Throw rocks at cars,’ or repeatedly ‘rapper’ or ‘football player.’ And so we asked college students to come in and expose the kids to something different every week.”

Volunteers from a variety of different majors work with children on Wednesdays from 6 to 7 p.m. at Como Community Center to promote different career paths.

The children have experienced many different majors of study, including business, pre-health and athletic training, said Robert Hillery, the program coordinator for the TCU chapter, which started in 2013.

Allie Taschuk, a junior nutrition major, helped teach the children how to make guacamole. 

Taschuk said volunteering with Dream Outside the Box was different than other volunteer opportunities.

“I think the main thing that’s different, being so involved in TCU, is that we’re dealing with people that are our age [and] professors who are older than us,” Taschuk said. “And coming out here, we’re dealing with children.”

Philips said that Dream Outside the Box has been successful in its endeavors of broadening children’s dreams.

“Children who normally say they don’t know what they want to be, or they don’t know what they want to do, are saying that they want to be entrepreneurs and engineers,” Philips said. “And they identify with college as an option, college as a pathway, as a possibility. And that’s what we want them to see.”

Philips said she wants Dream Outside the Box to serve communities until there are no more “dream deserts.”

“My goal is for Dream Outside the Box to be in every ‘dream desert’ in the country until we don’t need Dream Outside the Box anymore,” Phillips said.

For more information on the TCU chapter of Dream Outside the Box, contact Maddie Reddick or Robert Hillery.