We bring creative engagement, placemaking, communications and planning to communities and organizations across North America.
Featured Project
CreateVT: Action Plan for Vermont’s Creative Sector
Vermont’s creative sector includes everyone and everything from brewers to ballet dancers, college professors to publishers, maker spaces to museums. Representing 9% of Vermont’s jobs and billions in annual economic product, the sector already packs a powerful punch. But places that invest deeply and strategically in the creative economy find huge payoffs in economic development, job growth, new residents and investments, community building and more. We teamed up with the Vermont Creative Network and Vermont Arts Council to engage thousands of stakeholders in creative ways during the pandemic, and turn their ideas into a vision and action plan for growing the sector.
Creative Placemaking + Pop-Ups
Fairlee Community Makeover
The Town of Fairlee, Vermont took on an ambitious community planning process funded by Vermont’s Better Connections program, looking at ways to revitalize the community through active transportation and public space improvements. When COVID-19 hit, they could no longer plan a major public pop-up event to test ideas—and they needed public space progress, fast. We designed a three-week Community Makeover event to solve both problems. Local volunteers came together to quickly imagine rapid changes like safe outdoor social stations and temporary bike sharrows, and then made it happen. They still experimented with long-term solutions, but enjoyed the benefits at the same time. Check out images and details in this story.
Winner of the 2017 Kaboom! Play everywhere challenge competition
Pop-Up Theater
What if our downtowns and streets and storefronts weren't just about getting where you need to go and doing what you need to do? What if they were also spaces for play and fun and creativity? We think they can be - that's why we created the pop-up theater. This small, portable theater can pop up in a laundromat, on a street corner, at a festival, or anywhere play is needed. This pilot project was one of 50 winners nationwide in the Play Everywhere Challenge. We developed a concept and free plans, and piloted the theater in a range of locations.
Bethel University
Bethel University is the only free community pop-up university of its kind. For one month each year, anyone can take - or teach - classes on any topic under the sun in tiny Bethel, Vermont. With more than 800 registrations in just its third year, "BU" has brought new life and momentum to a small town - and visitors from dozens of towns. We've collaborated with the Bethel Revitalization Initiative to create and grow this one-of-a-kind community development program.
Keene Arts & Culture Corridor
Downtown Keene, NH is planning a new Arts & Culture Corridor. This cutting edge space will offer a mixture of private development and facilities and creative public space, from outdoor performances spaces and public art to artist live-work housing. The Corridor can increase economic development, support the arts, attract new visitors, and provide public spaces in downtown. We’re working with Monadnock Economic Development Corporation and Stevens & Associates to help the community imagine it and design it.
Exchange Street Art & Community Greenway
Middlebury, VT's Exchange Street is a bustling junction, home to dozens of entrepreneurial business, local food producers, service providers and more. But you'd never know it to visit - they are isolated islands on a dangerous industrial strip. We led a team - finalists in the Art Place America competition - to create an arts-based engagement and design process that would transform Exchange Street into a safe, connected and vibrant place.
Winner of the 2017 Vermont Planners’ Association Project of the Year and the 2018 Preservation Trust of Vermont historic Preservation award
Bethel Better Block
Revitalizing a downtown usually takes many years, many plans, and many thousands of dollars. But what if you could do it in a weekend? We collaborated with the Bethel Revitalization Initiative, Team Better Block and AARP of Vermont to temporarily transform Bethel, VT's Main Street into a vibrant, walkable, livable space through Bethel Better Block. This community-driven project built enthusiasm, tested our permanent changes, and showed the community what real change can feel like. Less than three years later, there are a half dozen new businesses in the 1-block stretch, buildings sold and renovated, public art projects, street improvements and more.
Word on the Street (Public Art)
How do you honor a town’s poetic past while adding vibrancy to its sense of place? Engraving poems onto sidewalks is a great place to start. We’re creating Word on the Street — a new placemaking project in Middlebury, Vermont that will crowdsource poems from the community and set them into concrete sidewalks all over town. Funded by the Vermont Arts Council’s Animating Infrastructure program, this project also serves as a model public art initiative.
Connect Hyde Park
Hyde Park, Vermont has a lot going for it — a lovely historic village, great schools, and a lively new Rail Trail bringing visitors to the outskirts of town. But it’s hard to get from one place to another, and there’s little for people to do in the village itself. Hyde Park won a Better Connections grant to look at how to connect transportation and economic development improvements. We brought placemaking and community engagement to the table, working to engage youth on imaging a vibrant village, and developing pop-up projects (like a local history trail) to test long-term solutions.
Resources
DIY Community Cookbook
Sometimes the best things come in small packages. That’s true for community projects, where the most impactful actions can be very simple, quick, and inexpensive. We partnered with AARP Vermont to write a “cookbook” with how-to instructions, templates and practical tips for some of the most popular community placemaking projects, from wayfinding signs to parklets, guerrilla gardening to play streets. Read online or download for free.
Bethel Operator’s Manual
Buy a car or refrigerator and you get an operator’s manual three inches thick, telling you all about the best features and how to use them. Move to a town and you get… a tax bill? Borrowing on a concept from Middlesex, Vermont, we worked with the Town of Bethel, VT to design and develop a community operator’s manual — everything you need to know about living, working, playing and doing business in town.
Vermont Placemaking Meet-Ups
We teamed up with AARP Vermont to keep the placemaking conversations flowing in Vermont through pandemic recovery. We hosted a series of free, monthly placemaking meet-ups in 2021 - 2022 over Zoom to connect placemakers, share ideas and examples, help people brainstorm and troubleshoot, and celebrate placemaking in Vermont. Explore content and resources from the series.
Indigenous Community Planning Toolkit
If you want to pick up some creative, engaging ways to connect with your community, check out Nishnawbe Aski Development Fund’s Comprehensive Community Planning Toolkit. We co-wrote this in 2018 with the Nishnawbe Aski Development Fund, EcoPlan, and a team of Indigenous planners and artists in northern Ontario.
Tools, resources, freebies and more
We have lots more to share, from lists of great planning tools to inspiring examples, toolkits and how-to instructions for community projects. Head on over to the Good Stuff section of our site and see what’s new.
Planning, Visioning + Engagement
Vermont State Hazard Mitigation Plan
FEMA requires all states to have a Hazard Mitigation Plan — but those are often thick documents that sit on a shelf. We worked with the Vermont Division of Emergency Management and Homeland Security to make Vermont's next Hazard Mitigation Plan very different. We used a broad stakeholder engagement process to draw in hundreds of stakeholders, redefine what climate change means to Vermont, and work together across sectors to take action.
Richmond: Our Town, Our Future
Richmond, Vermont has it all - great schools, beautiful landscapes, convenient location and close community. But Richmond residents want to be proactive in protecting and enhancing their community, and they saw their town planning process as an opportunity. We helped the town gather more than 1,000 surveys, comments and interviews; create a broadly-supported community vision; and learn how to use that vision to make decisions about the future.
Animbiigoo Zaagi’igan Anishinaabek First Nation Strategic Plans
Ontario's AZA First Nation is widely dispersed and needed to find common ground. In collaboration with our partner organization EcoPlan International, we led an award-winning strategic planning process to engage the community and develop a village design for newly acquired land.
Our Woodstock, Our Future
Woodstock, Vermont has a thriving and beautiful village center, an engaged and committed community, dozens of non-profits and volunteer organizations, and funding for economic development and community projects. But Woodstock realized that it needed a common community vision in order to help all of those groups pull together and prioritize actions. We’re working with Woodstock on a visioning and action planning process that is helping different community groups listen to each other, find common ground, and identify what matters most.
Reimagine Laconia
Master plans can be a lot more than just documents that sit on a shelf. We worked with the city of Laconia, NH to ensure their planning process brought new people to the table and broke through old barriers. Their Heart & Soul Community Planning approach used everything from storytelling to pop-up parks, text polling to interactive forums. Together, the community ensured that Laconia's next plan is a plan for the people, by the people.
Gardiner Heart & Soul
Like many older New England Towns, Gardiner, ME needed a boost. It found that boost with a creative community development process and new local coordination. Through the Orton Family Foundation, we coached Gardiner through a community visioning and planning process that brought new energy to the city, helped coordinate the actions of local non-profits and city departments, and helped residents start working as a team.
Winner of the 2015 Canadian Institute of Planner’s Award for Planning Excellence for Aboriginal Community Planning + Development
Cowichan Tribes Transportation Plan
With our partner organization EcoPlan International, we worked with this community on Vancouver Island to develop new plans for improving mobility, transportation systems, streetscape and pedestrian facilities, priority actions and strategies for implementation.
Community-based Asset Mapping for St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Libraries, churches and many other community institutions are reinventing themselves today - finding new ways to connect with the larger community, partner with other groups, and make use of their facilities. We're working with this historic church in Vergennes, VT and Partners for Sacred Places to conduct a community asset mapping process, identifying what they church can offer the community and how it can best change with the times.
Social Marketing, Outreach + Network Building
Ridge to River Initiative
The towns of Vermont's Mad River Valley know that rivers don't care about municipal boundaries. They're collaborating as a watershed to increase awareness of stormwater and runoff issues and take action to improve their resilience. We helped them to develop a creative, high-impact communications and engagement plan for the Ridge to River Initiative, which will reach residents and change behavior. The focus is an integrated program called "Storm Smart" that will encourage property owners to address stormwater issues on their own land, saving money while protecting their property, watershed, and quality of life.
Community Resilience Organizations (CROs)
There’s no way to prevent disasters like Irene. But a new statewide pilot program – Community Resilience Organizations (CROs) – aims to make sure that Vermont towns are ready for whatever comes next. CROs brings together community leaders across multiple disciplines to plan and work together and build social capital. We helped to design the program and capacity building activities to help towns prepare for whatever challenges are ahead.
Resilient Vermont Network
The Resilient Vermont Network is a statewide collaboration of organizations and agencies in Vermont that are working to advance climate resilience. The Network is working to improve alignment, coordination, communication and strategic impact across a range of issues related to climate resilience. We helped to launch the Network in its first phase, and then helped backbone organization Norwich University create a plan for ongoing Network sustainability and leadership.
