NEA Awards bcW Our Town Grant

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announces 80 Our Town grant awards totaling $4.995 million and reaching 44 states and the District of Columbia. bcWORKSHOP will receive $50,000 for Activating Vacancy, a collaborative effort to engage residents in the positive development of Dallas’s Historic Tenth Street District. Through Our Town, the NEA supports creative placemaking projects that help transform communities into lively, beautiful, and sustainable places with the arts at their core. The grantee projects will improve quality of life, encourage creative activity, create community identity and a sense of place, and help revitalize local economies. All Our Town grant awards were made to partnerships that consisted of a minimum of a nonprofit organization and a local government entity.

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Dating back to the post-Civil War era, the Tenth Street District of Dallas, Texas, is the city’s most intact Freedman’s Town—between 1865 and 1867, a group of former slaves were deeded ten acres of land each. Today the area has a high level of vacancy and many deteriorating buildings.

The local not-for-profit buildingcommunityWORKSHOP (bcWORKSHOP), together with Dallas CityDesign Studio and Preservation Dallas, is creating the project Activating Vacancy to engage Tenth Street District residents and artists to design a series of temporary design installations that illustrate a potential framework for future development, including priorities for preservation of the unique historic structures. The project will result in six temporary art installations and a comprehensive framework document for the future of the area. The project will also enhance the cultural heritage of the Tenth Street Historic District, benefiting the neighborhood's 440 residents, 80 percent of which are considered low to moderate-income.

"Cities and towns are transformed when you bring the arts – both literally and figuratively – into the center of them,” said NEA Chairman Landesman. "From Teller, Alaska to Miami, Florida, communities are pursuing creative placemaking, making their neighborhoods more vibrant and robust by investing in the performing, visual, and literary arts. I am proud to be partnering with these 80 communities and their respective arts, civic, and elected leaders."

The NEA received 317 applications for Our Town that were assigned to one of three application review panels based on their project type; arts engagement, cultural planning and design, or non-metro and tribal communities. Activating Vacancy received a cultural planning and design grant award. With only 80 grants emerging from the 317 applications, or a success rate of 25 percent, competition was strong, a testament to the artistic excellence and merit of Activating Vacancy.

ACD 2012 Reflections

The Association for Community Design held their annual conference from June 8 to 12 in Salt Lake City. Maggie Winter and myself attended the entire conference while Brent flew in on Friday to speak on a panel. The conference was a small gathering of leaders in the field of Public Interest Design from around the country.

photo courtesy of Association for Community Design

photo courtesy of Association for Community Design

The term Public Interest Design is a relatively new one. This was acknowledged in the first panel on Friday by David Perkes of the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio. The conference followed his exploration into the realities of this field. Perkes advised that we can talk all we like, but what are our actions saying? He placed an emphasis on discovering the real impact and implications of the work being done. However, using those impacts to seek acceptance and recognition of value from the mainstream profession seems to be the preoccupation of the moment. Awards, fellowships, and prizes are seeking to add to and establish that credibility.  There also seems to be a shift toward public interest designers feeling an obligation to improve their ability to be a resource for each other and non-profits with similar intentions, as well as providing resources to the public.

A panel with Anne-Marie Lubenau (of the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence) and Dan Pitera (of Detroit Collaborative Design Center) summed up the topics of conversation throughout the conference with the questions they asked of the Rudy Bruner Award:

WHAT: What would we like to learn from each other?

HOW: How effective are the means of providing that information?

WHO: Who should know about it?

Public Interest Design is growing. It is seeking to become an example of practice beyond its current influence. Of course we want to make our type of practice a shining beacon of social justice for the architecture profession. These questions garnered a lot of debate as well as consensus, but I still feel as though people were holding back. Or, maybe we are still not asking the right questions.

Resources:

Power Plus

Research shows that 40 percent of all U.S. energy is consumed by buildings and 30 percent of that energy is wasted. Power Plus is bcW's energy education initiative addressing many of the underlying social, economic, and environmental factors that influence energy use. The initiative focuses the energy conversation within the scale of the home and employs high-tech and hands-on design tools that enable residents to make informed energy choices in the operation of their home in order to live a more sustainable lifestyle.

The high-tech side of the program utilizes an energy monitoring system called The Energy Detective (TED) to measure individual circuits and display real-time electricity cost within the home. Kill-a-Watt meters measure additional plug loads, creating a data-rich inventory of the home environment. bcWORKSHOP prepares detailed, graphic monthly reports of this data visualizing the home's energy use supplementing traditional utility bills.

The hands-on side involves a game-board style toolkit facilitating conversations about saving energy and money. The toolkit guides residents through a three month, seven meeting (4 weekly, then 2 bi-weekly, and 1 final month) discovery process with a bcWORKSHOP Energy Advisor. Visual tools including an annual graph of past power usage and the home's projected baseline performance serve as a guide for residents to inform decisionmaking, evaluate performance and achieve power usage goals. Using the toolkit, residents graph the weekly cost of appliances/activities separately, identifying the most costly behaviors. Additionally, a set of cards illustrate the cost per hour for each appliance and provides recommendations for saving money through either increased efficiency or conservation.

The high-tech and hands-on tools are deployed together encouraging dialogue and providing data. This coupled with energy saving actions and a feedback mechanism measuring action effectiveness helps residents make more informed choices. In this way, Power Plus demystifies the cost of electricity.