Front and Schiller Park
In Reading, Pennsylvania, a community leader pairs fun community activities with cleanup efforts to reactive an underutilized pocket park and engage residents in reclaiming their neighborhood.
Read MoreAlleyway Concerts
Every summer in Reading, Pennsylvania, Barrio Alegria engages community musicians and vocal artists to perform in their Alleyway Concerts series. Barrio Alegria (Barrio) is “a community engagement organization that uses the arts to create transformations in individuals to help them transform their communities.”
Read MoreThe Yes! House
In downtown Granite Falls, Minnesota, a vacant commercial space is becoming The Yes! House, a theater venue, regional hub for artists and creatives, youth recreation zone, and community gathering space to nurture conversations around social change.
Read MoreUnion Station Revival
A nonprofit organization focused on urban exploration, art, and preservation led the effort to beautify an abandoned rail station in Gary, Indiana, with the plan of converting the 4,000 square foot space into a cultural hub and economic driver for the city.
Read MoreRARE
Richfield, Minnesota is a small inner ring suburb in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. The former Lyndale Garden Center space, which closed in 2006 and become abandoned, was the focus of the redevelopment. The former retail space was located at the center of a lower-income community of color which experienced decades of disinvestment. In response…
Read MoreFreedom Square
Freedom Square features an art stage and hosts block-party style events, with free music and food, multicamera shoots, resource tables, and art activities for children. Media Alliance, a nonprofit focused on arts and cultural development in Troy, led two major components of the project: the installation of an art stage, and the development of The…
Read MoreThe King’s Canvas
The studio sits in the West Side of Montgomery, Alabama, in Washington Park, a neighborhood with a rich history of Black entrepreneurship and excellence that has experienced decades of disinvestment and widespread vacancy. After a sixteen-year hiatus from using his creativity, Kevin King, founder and executive director of The King’s Canvas, was gifted painting supplies,…
Read MoreMill Hill
The project is led by the Macon Arts Alliance, an umbrella agency for arts and creative organizations in Macon whose mission is to foster and support the advancement of arts and culture in Central Georgia. The Alliance runs a variety of programs but the East Macon Arts Village is unique in that it was their…
Read MoreLynn Lights
Lynn is a formerly industrial city on the Atlantic coast just north of Boston, and in the early 2000s it was suffering from economic and built environment challenges. Local leaders were working to address those issues and were interested in community feedback. As part of this work, the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency (MassDevelopment) held a…
Read MoreDear Tamaqua
Dear Tamaqua was a yearlong letter writing campaign and subsequent community events which sought to catalyze lasting change in a community which experienced widespread abandoned properties and negative perceptions.
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