Author Archives: Emily

ladies in the landscape

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In the Mississippi Delta, widespread use of pesticides and herbicides makes maintaining healthy waterways a particular concern. In order to combat polluted run-off from the Baptist Town Cottage site, the Greenwood-Leflore-Carroll Economic Development Foundation (GLCEDF) applied to Enterprise Community Partners for a “neighborhood scale green” grant to support construction of a storm water management demonstration garden. We were awarded a $2,000 grant for this project, and partnered with Brantley Snipes Landscape Design to combine the GLCEDF’s knowledge of barriers to workforce entry, with Brantley’s knowledge of storm-water gardens.

The result is both process and product. Brantley designed and purchased all materials for the garden, the EDF advertised the training program, and over the course of three days Brantley provided training in landscape installation and maintenance techniques to a group of eight women who are currently seeking employment. The result is the functioning storm-water management garden pictured below.

By weaving together social, environmental, and economic factors, this small grant is having impacts at a variety of scales. The natural filtration provided by the garden improves the quality of water as it enters our waterways, decreases the use of concrete or pipes, and will be a beautiful natural space between the new homes in Baptist Town. For the women involved in the program, not only were they compensated for their participation, they are being connected to potential employers who are seeking people with the skills they obtained through this program.

The last step in the project is a brochure that will document our process and our storm-water garden. We look forward to sharing this information with other development projects in the Mississippi Delta, and hope that this pilot project grows into something bigger.

Building upon my last post, this project underscores the interwoven nature of social and environmental goals and outcomes. When we collaborate in unexpected ways is when we best leverage our knowledge and our resources.

good for the environment, good for you

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Last month the US Green Building Council announced three new social equity pilot credits as a part of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification. According to the USGBC website, “Over 15% of Americans live in poverty. One of our most effective tools to address inequities in the building world is through LEED. The three pilot credits are:

  1. The social equity in the project team pilot credit outlines strategies to positively affect the people connected directly with the building.
  2. The social equity in the community pilot credit rewards project teams for identifying and responding to inequities faced by people of the local community.
  3. The social equity in the supply chain pilot credit encourages project teams to use materials from suppliers or manufacturers that ensure basic human rights for their workers.”

From within the social impact design world this is an exciting development. While LEED has an international presence and can be linked to multi-million dollar industries and millions of dollars saved on energy costs, architecture that addresses social and economic inequities is a field that is still being defined. Despite this, it is clear that social impact design is a field of collaboration and to be built into the LEED process will mean opportunities for just that, more partners and bigger goals.

Congratulations to the team who made this happen: Emma Hughes, USGBC staff; Susan Kaplan, Co-chair; Joel Ann Todd, Co-chair; Heather Rosenberg; Raphael Sperry; Shawn Hesse; Brad Guy; Lance Hosey; Sara O’Mara; Alfonso Ponce and Max Zahniser.

fellowships are for the field

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The training of architects has always been rigorous, but public interest design requires all of the essential architectural skills plus financing, policy, community engagement and organizing skills….Fellowships provide an alternative career path, arming these individuals with skills, resources, and network to lead the future of public interest design practice.

– Katie Swenson, Vice President of Design at Enterprise Community Partners

In a blog post on October 22nd, Katie Swenson summarized some of the ways in which fellowships are important in the development of thought leaders, a benefit that contributes to the field as much as the individual. Read all of Katie’s blog post on Impact Design Hub.

I’m also glad to see that Greenwood, MS provided a great backdrop for Katie’s picture!

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cottage construction

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The Cottage Project is under construction! In only a few weeks, eight homes have been placed on newly constructed foundations. Three additional foundations are currently underway, while Richard and I work to get the first eight move-in ready.

can customization be affordable?

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Thomas Fisher, Dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota and an important critical mind within the field of architecture, was recently a guest on Enoch Sear’s the Business of Architecture. Per the norm with Fisher, his insights into architectural practice are framed within a broader economic picture that brings an interesting perspective. During the discussion, Fisher cites economist Jeremy Rifkin’s writing about a movement from “a mass production, mass consumption economy of the 20th century in to what he calls a mass customization economy of the 21st century.” As a concept, “mass customization” seems antithetical, but real world examples are everywhere. Smart phones are probably the most prevalent example. Each phone is mass produced and has certain similarities, but the exterior, screen display, apps, and functionality are controlled by the end user (and at this point, we wouldn’t have it any other way).

Closer to home, the Baptist Town Cottage Project has provided some opportunities to practice mass customization through a modular, affordable housing effort. Though each size floor plan is identical to the next, various interior finishes and exterior colors allow home owners a level of individualization. Additionally, each home owner was paired with a team of architects and designers during the Enterprise Rose Fellow Alumni retreat last spring. The teams spent an afternoon together, each creating a custom carpentry detail that will be built and installed as the slats between foundation piers and the railings around stairs and porches. Today, we are excited with the project progress as eight foundations are currently under construction and the Greenwood-Leflore Fuller Center for Housing was recently awarded a $10,303 grant from the GE Volunteers Foundation to construct our “mass customized” designs.

For more about this concept, listen to Sears and Fisher’s entire discussion.

rock, paper, people

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(concrete, permits, homeowners)

Developing affordable housing is not easy. It’s a complex, political process that requires a team to realize at any scale. After years of effort from multiple project partners, the Baptist Town Cottage Project is making strides. With permits in hand, concrete is being poured for the first foundations today!

Perhaps more important than these visible steps, the project team hosted Fred Johnson of the New Orleans Neighborhood Development Foundation last week. Fred is a home ownership counseling expert who taught a class to future cottage owners on the “rights, privileges, and responsibilities” of home ownership. After many months of hard work, Fred’s enthusiasm and perspective reminded us all how excited we are about this opportunity for eleven families to move toward increased economic stability.  Many thanks to Enterprise Gulf Coast for sending us just the expert we needed.

no, thank you, de’vante

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I recently met De’Vante Wiley (featured in the audio below) while hosting a group of high school volunteers participating in the Summer Youth Institute, an experiential learning program that explores Mississippi society, history, and diversity. De’Vante began working to improve his community at a young age, organizing a community garden in Baptist Town when he was sixteen. I was glad to see that Southern Foodways Alliance ran into him also, wrote about him in this blog post, and provided the link to the excellent interview they did.

A couple of weeks after I met De’Vante  he stopped by the community center. Just as he succinctly speaks about some of the most challenging social aspects of life in rural Mississippi, he also transcended one of the most challenging aspects of community work and said, “On behalf of the Baptist Town community, thank you for the work you’re doing.” From an outsider perspective, public interest work is warm and fuzzy, but the reality is that it is political, never complete, and addresses realities too complex to equal unanimous support from any large group.

Still, public interest designers conduct meetings, surveys, studies, games, and events to try to take into account the needs and aspirations of their client communities. Through this process to find the best possible architectural response, negative feedback is sometimes the only voice that is heard, while those pleased with an initiative stay silent. Positive feedback such as De’Vante’s “thank you” feels good on a personal level, but more importantly, indicates to social impact designers when a project is on the right track.

2014 Citizens Institute on Rural Design Awards Announced

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The Carl Small Town Center has been selected as one of four applicants awarded a technical assistance workshop by the Citizens Institute on Rural Design. Congratulations to John Poros and Leah Kemp for all their hard work! Less than a year after the opening of the 46 mile long Tanglefoot Trail, we are excited for CIRD to come to Houston, MS, and maybe visit nearby New Houlka as well, where we are wrapping up our Spring CREATE class project.

The full announcement, including descriptions of all four of the selected applicants, is available on CIRD’s website.

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a fresh coat of trust

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Over thirty people attended a meeting at the new Baptist Town Community Center on Monday night, by far the most that have participated in this type of meeting since I began working in Baptist Town last year. Even better, a lot was accomplished at the meeting with the selection of an advisory board for the center, collecting ideas and volunteer commitments from residents, and celebrating a fresh coat of paint on the building’s exterior with games and snacks. It felt like an important moment in the course of this neighborhood revitalization effort.

Often when “community engagement” is discussed, the concept is sugar-coated. It is described as meetings where information flows freely and individuals rally around a common cause. The reality of this type of engagement is often far from such a utopia. Issues are rarely cut and dry, and it is difficult to develop a clear understanding of community member’s needs and hopes. Further, many engagement activities fail to attract more than a few participants. When community members do arrive, factions sometimes develop or certain individuals are antagonistic to the point of inhibiting discussion. I have experienced this many times in a variety of locations, so what made last nights meeting different? Trust.

When I arrived in Baptist Town much had been promised and resources were aligned to deliver on these promises, but there was no one in place to oversee actual implementation. We were able to complete infrastructure, park, and signage projects in 2013, and this went a long way toward building trust within the neighborhood, but it’s been months since these projects were completed.

Last week, a group of painters from Resurrection Catholic Church in Wayne, Ill. teamed up with Sherwin Williams to repaint the building we had newly purchased for the community center. From a faded and scratched blue to a brilliant red (selected by community members through a voting process), the building has new life. I think that the trust we build by making good on promises is the primary factor in garnering both the participation and the communal spirit of meetings like the one we held last night. This is encouraging as we prepare to break ground for five of the Cottages (at last), but also a reminder that for the communities we engage with as social impact designers, regular, visible signs of our work are necessary, no matter how small or what form they take. Otherwise it’s perceived as just a lot of talk.

design futures should be in your future

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Hosted by a collaborative of university based architecture programs, the second annual Design Futures Student Leadership Forum conference was hosted at Tulane University last week. Over sixty students from ten universities were given a unique view of the field, meeting public interest design leaders and hearing about their projects, but further, participating in workshops that asked questions that welcomed the next generation of public interest designers to be a part the discourse that leads, defines and sometimes plagues this field.

Sessions included topics such as funding sources, ethics, power structures and skills utilized in social impact design. By inviting thought leaders and asking them to create sessions that were workshops more than lectures, what resulted was powerful stuff. Students got a look at one of Katie Swenson’s Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellowship draft budgets, a power mapping exercise Christine Gaspar and the CUP (Center for Urban Pedagogy) staff had used to understand the agendas of involved parties related to unregistered hotels in New York City (pictured below), and insights from Theresa Hwang on ethical decision making related to the work of Skid Row Housing Trust, among others.

John Peterson, of Public Architecture, led a session that was designed for students, but was equally interesting to early career attendees. The workshop guided participants through a series of exercises that worked backward, from long range career goals, to options that can be pursued today to develop the skills that will make achieving those goals possible. As a panelist, along with Tulane City Center’s Emilie Taylor and UT Austin’s Nicole Joslin, I shared that though my time in architecture firms was important to my professional development, my time as a waitress taught me to talk with unhappy customers and to “know when a fire is a fire”, a skill that helps me keep projects moving forward even as challenges arise.

Though Design Futures was created as a conference for students, the format positioned presenters to discuss their work in a critical and reflective way that engaged attendees of all ages. Next year’s Design Futures at the University of Kansas is on my list of conferences not to be missed in 2015.

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