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NDC Selected as Grantee of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Arts Innovation and Management Program

Photo Credit Matt Roth

This month, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced that the Neighborhood Design Center is a grantee recipient of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Arts Innovation and Management (AIM) program. The invitation-only program seeks to strengthen the organizational capacity and programming of small and mid-size cultural organizations within Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Denver, New Orleans, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. Through the $43 million multi-year initiative, Bloomberg Philanthropies will provide unrestricted general operating support as well as arts management training in areas that include fundraising, strategic planning, marketing and board development. 

AIM targets arts non-profits because of the vital role that they play in building communities, driving local economies and supporting artists. “The arts inspire people, provide jobs, and strengthen communities,” said Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies. “This program is aimed at helping some of the country’s most exciting cultural organizations reach new audiences and expand their impact.” 

Bloomberg Philanthropies will develop curricula and conduct seminars for the program in partnership with leading experts, including the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland, led by Institute Chairman Michael M. Kaiser and President Brett Egan. AIM organizations will engage in activities that strengthen their long-term health and goals, and will receive one-on-one consultations and implementation support for organization leaders and their boards. 

Since 2011, AIM has helped more than 500 small and mid-sized organizations in all creative disciplines, including theater, visual arts, music, film, literature and dance. Participating organizations reported significant improvements in board development, fundraising and overall income over the two-year program. 

Watch this video for an overview of the Arts Innovation and Management program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KJy8DgjRDg&feature=youtu.be. 

Media Contacts 

Bloomberg Philanthropies, Rebecca Carriero (212) 205-0182 or rebeccac@bloomberg.org 

NDC, Briony Hynson, (301) 830-5219 or bhynson@ndc-md.org

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New Trees Are Coming to Charles North

Since moving NDC’s Baltimore office to North Ave in 2015, we have been excited to dig in and be a part of our new community. We’ve been working with the North Avenue Stakeholder Group for the past year, assessing strengths and opportunities, developing goals, and finding resources. It’s been a real-time example of how community partners, funders, and City agencies can work together to realize change on the ground. 

This summer, we were awarded a Spruce Up grant, which is generously funded by Johns Hopkins University and Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, to plant 25 street trees in the Charles North Community. Through a block audit, our staff assessed the existing trees and streetscapes in the neighborhood to create a street tree master plan, generously supported by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, that responded to the existing tree canopy as well as the local architecture and civic spaces. The community association first reviewed the plan at their July meeting and again at their most recent September meeting. The City’s Forestry Division assessed locations for new tree pits and is in the process of opening the feasible ones.  

Based on our plan, the Baltimore Tree Trust will acquire and install 25 trees, and City Forestry will install the additional trees. Including a few dead trees which can be replaced right now, there will be a total of 44 new trees planted around the 18 blocks that comprise the Charles North community. It’s an exciting development and one that reflects a range of exciting activity happening along the North Avenue corridor. From the TIGER Grant-supported North Avenue Rising project which will expand the area’s transportation infrastructure to the streetscape improvements happening through the Front Door project, positive changes are happening. 

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NDC Travels to…New Orleans!

The Where You At Jazz Band playing at the New Orleans Jazz Museum

From the 16th to the 19th of September, the Sheraton Hotel of New Orleans was home to biking advocates, city planners, designers, community leaders, writers, artists and more—people of all walks of life who care about great public spaces. Presented by Project for Public Spaces and Bike Easy, this convening was the 20th annual WalkBikePlaces Conference. Neighborhood Design Center is proud to have not only attended this international idea exchange, but to have presented our work at two sessions.

The opening Keynote address was given by Tunde Wey, a chef and activist who uses food to challenge people to think about inequity (known for provocative pop-ups such as ‘SAARTJ,’ where diners paid prices in ratio to their demographic’s average income in New Orleans; whites paid $30 while African Americans paid $12). His work set the tone for the rest of the conference: equity is the priority. From all we learned hosting the ACD conference in June, this convening echoed those Reverberations, pushing us to learn more.

Executive Director Jennifer Goold discusses NDC’s Place Matters program with interested conference attendees.

Monday afternoon was the poster session. Over drinks, conference attendees explored poster presentations—one of which was NDC’s! The poster explores our Place Matters program, its basic framework, and how we’re measuring its impact over time.

On Tuesday, Jennifer Goold presented on our Place Matters program in greater depth. Alongside two of our partners, Karim Amin (University of Baltimore) and Nick Mitchel (Noisy Tenants), she shared case studies exploring how Place Matters can build better connected and draw investment to communities. We presented to a packed room and the team received support and questions from an engaged audience.

Karim Amin, a partner working with NDC in West Baltimore, talks about his work leading the University of Baltimore fellows program.

The Crescent City, for all its reputation as a sinner’s paradise, really is a joy for bikers and walkers, too. The flat streets, combined with an increasingly present bike signage/lanes, the functional bike share program, and the relatively relaxed traffic (is it the heat that makes us all slow down?) makes riding easy. And what a joy it was on Tuesday evening, when conference attendees joined Get Up N Ride NOLA on their weekly ride of the city streets. It was a great last night in the Big Easy, and reminded us to enjoy our own city by bike (or bike party!) more often.

Repost of the crowd of lighted bikers before our ride with Get Up N Ride NOLA on Tuesday night.

The closing panel of the conference, “A Different New Orleans Story” with strong words from Hermione Malone, Tom Wooten, and Sue Mobley.

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Vote to Preserve the Historic Arch Social Club

Since 2015, NDC has been collaborating with the Arch Social Club, Baltimore’s oldest African American men’s club, to support the Cub’s efforts to preserve and restore the historic theater that they call home.

Through Place Matters, NDC’s capacity building project, we have worked alongside the Arch leadership, primarily Board President Van Anderson, to partner with the local CDC, the Druid Heights Community Development Corporation, to access two rounds of State of Maryland community development funds totaling about $125,000 to repair the roof and complete an historic structures report and estimates for full, phased, restoration.

Most recently, NDC, with support of Baltimore Main Streets and Pennsylvania Avenue Main Streets, applied for a Partners in Preservation grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. We’re now one of twenty finalists for a portion of $2 million in funding. The grant, if won, will fund recreation of the historic marquee and light the facade. Winners are selected by popular vote, which means you can help by visiting VoteYourMainstreet.org until October 26th.

Read the full story of NDC’s work with Arch here and don’t forget to vote!

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NDC Travels to…New York City!

In June, NDC’s Baltimore Community Design Works Program Manager Laura Wheaton attended the AIA 2018 Conference on Architecture. She shares her experience below. 

The AIA 2018 Conference on Architecture was three weeks after I returned to NDC from maternity leave with my second daughter, Clare. I didn’t want to leave her for more than a night, and scanned the conference schedule for the two-day combination that would maximize learning and networking. I was sold when I realized I could attend the Equity by Design Committee’s fourth hackathon on pre-conference day and stay through Sir David Adjaye’s keynote the next evening before sprinting back home on a late train. 

I’d never participated in a hackathon before, and the four hour timeline—with only two hours of work time—seemed intimidating. In practice, it was freeing. If we came up with a rubbish idea, so what? Not being obligated to carry anything forward beyond that afternoon liberated my group to dream. The result was an idea that we’d all love to see realized and have been emailing and conference calling about since the conference ended. 

Among the six members of our team, architecture was the only common denominator. Architecture and that we were all nice people, of course. Together, we represented a wide range of experiences, backgrounds, types of employment, and employers. It was these differences that lead us to our idea: that compensation, which typically revolves around salary and sometimes a discussion of benefits, is currently too rigid a construct to adapt to all of our individual circumstances and goals. 

How might compensation be viewed more holistically? How might it be more easily understood and communicated during usually private negotiations between employee and firm? If easily communicated, how might public conversations about compensation evolve? Might that improve equity in the architecture profession? Our approach, based on the ubiquity and legibility of nutrition labels, was “Compensation Facts.” 

You can learn more about our idea, including the revised prototype (Who knew the nutrition fact lineweights and font specifications were available online?) at the Equity by Design blog. We’re architects, not lawyers, so we have little understanding of the human resources implications. It’s still just a dream. We are, however, looking into it, and my hope is that baby Clare enters the workforce with a system much more accessible, understandable, and equitable than what’s currently in place today. 

Many thanks to the Equity by Design Committee and the Syracuse University Fisher Center for being supportive of breastfeeding mothers and providing a place for me to pump! I got to first meet Rosa Sheng, an architect I admire, while washing my pump at the office kitchenette. Because that’s how #archimoms roll. 

Make Way for Robots!

‘There is something very welcoming and inclusive about an oval-shaped space. It’s not totally equal, like a circle, so could have small groupings or one larger group. Its more flexible, very comprehensible, accessible.’  -Marita Roos, NDC Programs Director

 

AWS T+T Glenridge_perspec

 

 

The newest Treating & Teaching outdoor classroom at Glenridge Elementary School in Landover Hills will provide a simple oval space to facilitate gathering and learning, protected by shade sails and surrounded by groupings of native plants. A challenging robotics course traverses the classroom space, with mounds, boulders and rock obstacles for the school’s award-winning robot inventors to circumvent. 
This fall, Glenridge students and teachers will spend time in the outdoor classroom planting even more native landscaping with plants from the Arbor Day Every Day and Clean Up Green Up programs… not to mention racing their robotics projects in this enriching learning space!
Facilitated by Anacostia Watershed Society, Treating & Teaching is an innovative collaboration involving public school educators, curriculum planners and environmental designers that provides professional development for faculty and outdoor classroom design and installation at select schools. NDC landscape designers Marita Roos and Laura Kendrick collaborated with Glenridge Elementary School faculty and staff and the Anacostia Watershed Society to create their outdoor classroom space.
This project was made possible by the CBT Stormwater Stewardship Grant, through Prince George’s County Department of the Environment.

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Teens Collaborate Across Cities

 

NDC’s Johnny Macon assists a student in prototype design.

On Saturday June 9th, 2018, teens from Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Baltimore came together at Open Works to collaborate on a design intervention in the Greenmount West neighborhood. Convened by Neighborhood Design Center as part of the 2018 ACD Conference, this workshop was developed by Edrie Ortega and Jason Neal of J. Neal Design to challenge visiting teens and local children to create conceptual designs of neighborhood improvement ideas. The students had never met, but had each learned skills in the design field through their respective programs. Students from Philadelphia had expertise in both community design and fabrication as members of TinyWPA, an organization that works to empower community design leaders through “training in design, collaboration, leadership, fabrication, and entrepreneurship.” The National Building Museum’s teen program has taught students how to both work in a team and how to develop strong conceptual designs; skills that partner well with the applied fabrication knowledge of the teens at Open Works.

The day began with pizza at the proposed project site (Wonderground park at the corner of Lanvale and Barclay). Children ran and played, the teens got to know one another and explored the site, and leaders engaged in conversation. Soon enough lunch time was over and it was time to get to work. The goal of the project: to gain insight through collaboration and knowledge exchange while ideating improvements to the local park. Wonderground, the site identified for the project, is well known to the local neighborhood kids. These kids (with Noisy Tenants) became the project’s ‘clients’ and each pitched their ideas to the older teens, identifying the three focus categories of play, performance, and transportation.

The teens and children then moved to Open Works and broke into groups to create projects together exploring these issues. With the teens bringing their practical knowledge to help clarify and make real the children’s visions and the children bringing their local expert knowledge of the space, post-it notes, pens, sketch paper, and cardboard were flying in no time. Jason Neal facilitated the workshop, pushing the teams to populate a central board with ideas and to begin creating prototypes. By putting ideas on a rotatable central column, the work of each breakout group was easily shared with everyone.

Students work to build a cardboard prototype of a safe and playable bus stop.

The students’ output was strong: a playable bus stop to both improve safety and service and create a place for children, a stage design for local performances and movie nights, and a sculpture that could be used to sit, play, or bike on. Through this collaboration, each city was able to learn about similar work in other places and gain new insight into the design process. This final prototypes from this process will allow the kids from Noisy Tenants to better express their ideas to the local community association. In this way, the designs created become an asset to the local children and community, and may be further explored or actualized. Neighborhood Design Center was glad to partake in this inter-city collaboration, and hopes to continue and engage with these amazing groups. 

An interactive sculpture designed for play. (Image Courtesy J. Neal Design).

a multi-use stage to accommodate performance on site.

Playable features on a bus stop prototype.

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After the 2018 ACD Conference, Feeling the Reverberations

 

Dr. Sutton delivers her keynote address to a packed house and kicks off the 2018 ACD Conference.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a month since Reverberations: Roots and Relevance of Community Design. Here at NDC, we are still in awe of those few days: the new friendships and collaborations sparked, the radical ideas communicated, and a collective vision for the future of community design shared. More than 300 people from across the country came to Baltimore to be part of the weekend, attending over 60 sessions across 3 days, from our pre-conference environmental justice tour led by Destiny Watford, United Workers, and others to Antionette Carroll’s closing keynote. Thanks to each and every one of you who joined us—we’re so moved by your presence and participation.

If you were there on the opening morning, you heard the brilliant, resounding words of Dr. Sharon E. Sutton. Dr. Sutton, the educator, musician, activist, and 12th African American woman to be an accredited architect, eloquently traced both the history of community design and Baltimore’s Neighborhood Design Center, highlighting the activist roots of both. But she also spoke bluntly about her concerns for the present moment: “Median black household wealth is less than 10% of median white household wealth—the average black family will never catch up without extraordinary remediation. Racial polarization due to years of segregation is tearing the country apart.” She implored the community design field to respond: “Today’s community planners and designers must help salvage the human community by nurturing compassion across difference; by infusing people with a sense of being able to write a new and inclusive story of the future.”

Throughout the course of the weekend, we heard the beginnings of this new, inclusive story. From poet Michelle Antoinette Nelson’s reimagining of Whitney M. Young’s groundbreaking 1968 AIA speech in which she challenged us to “design on the horizon,” to Designing the We’s April de Simone’s reminder that, as an industry and a country, “we have to heal, and we must build empathy,” words of hope resonated throughout the event. They were intercut with sharp reminders of the challenges we face: during the Racial Justice and Design panel, Justin Garrett Moore of the NYC Public Design Commission shared his long family history of work in urban design and the fact that “black and brown people’s and women’s history of building, designing and planning this country has been erased.” During the Design as Protest workshop, Bryan C. Lee cautioned, “For every injustice in this world, there is an architecture designed to facilitate and perpetuate it.”

Designers and thought leaders joined us from across the country to share their successes, foibles, and best practices. Detroit Collaborative Design Center workshopped their tactics for engaging students at Denby High School and Bleeding Heart Design  convened a conversation about new futures for designers of color. Annie Ledbury and Garrett Jacobs shared their equitable placemaking  work in Oakland. ACD Board member Nikia Hill moderated a conversation with national funders from Enterprise Community Partners, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Surdna Foundation that focused on priorities and models for supporting community design work. We heard from local superwoman Barbara Brown Wilson about her new book Resilience for All and examined equity issues in the suburbs with Dan Reed, Willow Lung-Amam, and Tanvi Misra.

Michelle Antoinette delivers her interpretation of Whitney M. Young’s historic 1968 speech to the AIA.

Of course, as Creative Reaction Lab’s Antionette Carroll reminded us, “If oppression, inequities, and inequalities are designed, they can be undesigned.” And to that end, we heard incredible ideas for undesigning inequity. On Friday, we heard from Davin Hong about design as activism and from members of Baltimore City’s i-Team about strategies for recruiting better police officers. We learned from community leaders about efforts to build community land trusts and, during the Complete the Streets panel, how policy changes can pave the way for more inclusive public spaces. On Saturday, Marisela Gomez and Lenora Knowles shared a vision for cooperative ownership in East Baltimore and efforts in Philadelphia to design communities in collaboration with immigrant populations. At Open Works, youth from Baltimore, DC, and Philly worked together to actively ideate, design, and prototype better public spaces. This is just a small selection of the rich content that emerged over the weekend. We hope you take some time to watch and read more about the conference.

Students collaborate on the design for a safe bus stop during the Wondergound Teen Workshop.

In her closing remarks, Antionette Carol reminded us, as a community, to “align your impact with your intentions; think about the role that you’re playing and the team that you’re working with—because you can’t do it alone.” In the days since the conference ended, we’ve been overwhelmed by the positive feedback, especially the stories you’ve shared of connections made. There’s so much good work to do, and we can’t do it alone. We hope after Reverberations that you feel, as we do at NDC, better prepared to join forces and design on the horizon.

Our volunteers made the weekend happen—we’re so grateful to each of them.

Special, warm thanks to our dedicated conference volunteers and to our generous sponsors: Surdna Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners, Kaiser Permanente, ACD, Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, Morgan State University, MICA, Morris and Ritchie Associates, NDC Board, and the Aaron Straus and Lillie Straus Foundation.

— The Entire NDC Family

 

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Bostwick House Historic Preservation

NDC Volunteers Lili Mundroff  and William Cawood have been busy at historic Bostwick House in Bladensburg, Maryland. This volunteer project is hands-on, and has included crawling under the historic home’s porches and peeping the views of the Anacostia. Our team is developing recommendations to support historic preservation goals, to be implemented by Historicorps, a nonprofit that provides volunteers of all skill levels with a hands-on experience preserving historic structures on public lands across America.

NDC honored by ASLA Maryland

In April, NDC received the Spencer Ellis award from MD-ASLA in recognition of our 50 years of community design services. The award was given at the chapters annual gala, and was received by Programs Director Marita Roos.  We’re honored to have been selected for this honor, and grateful to ASLA for many decades of support by its members committed to excellence in community design work throughout the state of Maryland.  The event took place on the evening of 4/11 at Cylburn Arboretum in Baltimore.

Photo courtesy Christine Gillette

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