Apollo Stories

The need

In New York City’s Harlem neighbourhood, Apollo Theater is a jewel of its rich cultural heritage and a landmark of Black American history. It is also a community that strives to inspire new generations. This mission and passion were the foundation of their education strategy, a series of programs aimed towards “…enhancing the life of the community through learning and engagement.”

The Apollo Stories program had a clear vision: “…a digital learning and resource hub designed to engage educators and high-school students with thought-provoking lessons that would ignite meaningful conversations on race, justice, culture, and identity.” 

First, they needed to discover how it could work. “We were working with teachers, who are used to holding lesson plans in their hands and being able to decide what would work for their students”, said Benton Greene, Apollo Stories Program Manager. “In this project, we were trying to get them to translate that to a digital space: going to a website and pulling lessons from it, and choosing what modules and media they want to use.

“The initial goal was to get teachers to know the site, and to trust it. From the design standpoint, we wanted something that both created trust and was faithful to the Apollo brand. We were putting a lot of attention into security, precisely to protect the Apollo name.”  

On the CoLab side, we understood the brief to be an engaging, interactive learning environment where students could ponder important topics, ask critical questions, and express their thoughts through various creative media.

The existing Apollo Stories platform looked outdated and needed a redesign that made it both attractive and easy to use, providing educators clarity on the best lesson for their needs, along with lesson plans and next steps. 
Another key point was to organize the content around foundational content, such as Between the World and Me, a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates that inspired the lessons for the inaugural project.

The discovery collaboration

At the outset, CoLab’s approach was to disengage the Apollo Stories team’s vision from the technology of the existing website. We wanted to make sure that technical constraints didn’t limit their drive and imagination. 

“In our partnership with Colab,” said Benton, “we quickly learnt that, from a design perspective, it wasn’t just taking existing lessons and putting them on the site. That didn’t translate; it was too flat and didn’t engage. CoLab helped us nuance our storytelling and enhanced what we were trying to do.” 

To optimize resources, we suggested using LearnDash, a leading learning management system (LMS), to organize all courses, lessons and assets. We also recommended using Elementor, a WordPress content management system that would be easy for their content creators to learn. 

Although the technology of the relaunch site provided flexibility and autonomy for the Apollo team, CoLab also emphasized creating a scalable platform that could evolve over time. This would permit Apollo Stories to continue incorporating interactive and collaborative features into subsequent versions of the site, such as lesson plan remixing, where educators could adapt and modify the lessons.

“We were thinking ‘pie in the sky’; we wanted all these functionalities to happen at launch,” said Benton. “During discovery, we understood it was unrealistic to focus on it all. We saw we needed to define the structure, segment by segment, down to the different components; then we could decide what could be done in the first phase and what could happen in later phases.” 

This included implementing a new design and user experience that was more navigable and user-friendly. To this end, CoLab and Apollo Stories dedicated the first part of the project to a deep discovery and user experience design, trying to capture the vision and ideas and translating them into how it could work. 

These conversations and workshops were fruitful for prioritizing what was required for a successful launch, and what could be addressed in the next iteration. 

Because the Apollo Stories team was a cauldron of explosive creativity and diversity, the CoLab team were continually inspired by the discovery collaboration.

What we built

To avoid the roadblocks that come with trying to adjust existing tech, CoLab proposed to rebuild Apollo Stories from scratch, creating a visually appealing and functional website that housed all the lessons and interactive features.

By integrating design, multimedia elements, lesson plans, and interactive features, we were striving to provoke and engage both educators and students, to go deep into the powerful topics covered in each lesson and content. Leveraging Elementor and LearnDash, we created a lesson management system that was both easy to maintain and update, while being reliable and scalable to support a large number of users all over the USA.

To design, create and test, we worked closely with the folks at Apollo to ensure the design reflected the Apollo Theatre’s brand and mission, translating it into a practical, usable product. “Ralph is an artist,” said Benton, referring to CoLab’s design lead, who worked with Benton from the discovery phase through implementation.

Additionally, we collaborated with the client to iterate and refine the design based on feedback from their internal team, teachers, and other stakeholders.

The platform was also built with security and identity handling, to protect users and the Apollo brand.

The result

“We learned that a lot of traditional asynchronous education, especially during the pandemic, was not successful. The students were disengaged; there was not enough assessment,” said Benton. “So here with Apollo Stories, we are doing something pretty counter to that, where the educator is in partnership with the student, they are actually building together and having conversations.” 

As of 2025, the project is in its second phase, still receiving feedback from teachers and committed to its goal of providing adaptable blueprints for enriching conversations and sparking thought in new generations.