About us

Life Shop is free for teens, and always will be.

Our mission is to empower teens to envision and pursue life aspirations — through essential life skills, mentorship, and a welcoming environment for self-discovery and achieving goals.

Come once and you’ll want to come back. Over a hundred classes, all free — build a car, cut a film, start a business, record a podcast, learn first aid, play a song. Then an activity, then Open Shop, and dinner every day. Bring a friend, or come on your own and leave with a few.

What we do

We run free classes on the stuff that actually decides how the next ten years go — and we run them somewhere you’ll actually want to be.

Auto shop. Public speaking. Money. Starting a business. First aid. How to make friends anywhere. Podcasting. Filmmaking. 3D printing. Landing the job. And the list goes on, and on, and on.

Then, once class is done, there is an activity — the basketball court and the open field are right there for pickleball, volleyball, frisbee golf, lawn games, nine square in the air, cornhole or RC car racing. After that the whole building opens up for Open Shop. And everybody eats, free, every day.

Browse the classes See what’s on

Just some of what you can take

Every one of these is free, and you choose the ones you want.

Auto Shop: Build Your Own Car
Public Speaking Like a Pro
Financial Adulting
Dream It, Do It: Start Your Own Business
First Aid: Save a Life
How to Make Friends Anytime, Anywhere
Podcasting: Record, Edit, Post
Master AI… Before It’s Too Late
Filmmaking, start to finish
3D Printing
Negotiation: How to Get What You Want
ACT / SAT Prep

…and the list goes on, and on, and on. See every class →

The full RC track laid out in the main room at Life Shop

How we play

Classes are only half of it. After class, the whole space opens up to you. We call it Open Shop:

Driving simulators
RC and slot car racing
A huge mobile skate park
Arcade and video gaming
A wall of board games
Billiards, ping pong and cornhole
Podcast recording and editing
Free food, every single day

Friday night is tournament night, every week — poker, ping pong, Mario Kart, bingo, trivia, minute to win it and cornhole, all free to enter.

Foundational skills

The six things everything here is built around

Interpersonal

The abilities that allow people to interact with others effectively.

Time management

The ability to plan and organize how to use your time to accomplish tasks and goals.

Goal setting

The abilities and strategies used to define desired outcomes, create actionable plans, and take steps to achieve those goals.

Self-awareness

The ability to tune into your own feelings, thoughts, and actions. When people are self-aware, they understand their strengths and challenges and know what helps them thrive.

Critical thinking

The mental processes used to analyze and evaluate information to make sound judgements. Critical thinkers can use these skills to solve problems, make decisions, and understand different perspectives.

Resilience

The abilities that enable individuals to adapt to and recover from adversity, stress, and challenges, fostering mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility.

Where we are

Life Shop is at the Boys & Girls Club of Utah County, in their Provo location:

131 N Olympic Boulevard
Provo, Utah 84606

We have our own entrance. Look for the side door on the south side of the Boys & Girls Club of Utah County with the Life Shop sign on it. Come straight in — we’d love to show you around.

Every Life Shop is built to feel like it belongs to the teens using it — welcoming, safe, and genuinely fun to walk into. Graffiti has been a big part of that from the very first location, and artists paint the walls during build-out. No two Life Shops get the same artwork, though. Each room is its own.

See the classes Get in touch

Two graffiti artists painting the Life Shop wall during build-out

The murals going up during build-out.

At the Boys & Girls Club of Utah County

Two names on the door, one place for teens.

Life Shop is at the Boys & Girls Club of Utah County in Provo. The classes, the ramps, the RC track and the free dinners are all in the one building, and all of it is free for the teenagers who walk in.

About the photos on this site. Most of them were taken at the first two Life Shops, in Lehi and at Provo Town Center Mall — the rooms that led to this one. The Provo clubhouse is brand new — the building has only just been finished — and the ramps, the RC track, the murals and the people all move with us. What you see is what we build, every time.

A big group of teens together in the Life Shop lounge, arms around each other

Two teens laughing over a board game at Life Shop

Artists part-way through painting the graffiti wall

The Life Shop ribbon cutting with a crowd of teens, families and city guests

Teens holding school supplies beside the Life Shop van

Beyond the building

We don’t only work inside our own four walls.

Life Shop runs school supply drives, sets up at high schools around the county, and turns up wherever teens already are. Plenty of the kids who walk through our door met us somewhere else first.

We’ve also been featured on Good Things Utah, talking about what a space built entirely for teenagers can do.

Mobile events

The whole park packs down and travels.

The skate ramps, the crazy carts and the RC track are all portable. We set the lot up outdoors — at schools, fundraisers, community days and speedways — and it runs exactly like it does at home: free to ride, helmets on, staff running it.

At a full event that means a ramp park, a tyre-lined cart circuit, an RC track with jumps, and a queue of kids that doesn’t stop.

A sponsor can fund one. That’s how it stays free for every teen who turns up, and it puts a business in front of a few hundred local families for a day.

Talk to us about an event See what it looks like

A panorama of a Life Shop outdoor event: ramp park, crazy cart circuit, food trucks and bounce houses

Where should Life Shop open next?

We want to make Life Shop accessible to teens everywhere, and we hope to make each location unique — so that while they all offer most of the same things, some are built around different attractions.

Tell us where you want to see a Life Shop and what you want it to have, and we’ll do everything we can to make it happen.

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