NEA Design + Creative Placemaking: June 2024 #2

Greetings all,

Keeping it short and sweet this week with a reminder about upcoming Q&A sessions for Our Town, the upcoming National Council on the Arts public meeting, and exciting news about the Creative Placemaking Technical Assistance Program.

Stay cool!

Ben, Courtney, Maya, and Jesus

NEA News

Upcoming Our Town Application Support

Guidelines and application instructions for Our Town are now available online. If you are thinking about applying and missed our guidelines webinar, you can view the recording on the Applicant Resources page.

We are also offering live Q&A sessions on Zoom to answer applicant questions. Register on the Applicant Resources page:

June 25
July 10 – Budget focus, along with other questions
July 23
August 8 - only for applicants who completed Part 1 of the application submitted via grants.gov on or before August 1

National Council on the Arts

Meeting to Focus on Rural Arts and Design

Friday, June 28, 2024 at 11:30am ET

In person at Lincoln Center in Columbus, Ohio

Also available to watch online at arts.gov

The National Council on the Arts is hitting the road again this summer—this year traveling to Ohio. The 213th meeting of the National Council on the Arts will focus on “Arts in Rural Communities.” In a series of conversations, arts and design leaders will explore the contributions of arts and culture in rural areas through creating connections and strengthening the health and well-being of individuals and communities. Speakers at the public meeting on Friday include:

Omar Hakeem, TBD Studio
Tee Ford-Ahmed, Mt Zion Baptist Church Preservation Society
Ash Hanson, Department of Public Transformation
Sarina Otaibi, Department of Public Transformation
Anne O'Keefe-Jackson, Mni Sota Arts

The meeting also includes a site visit in Athens, Ohio, with members of the Mount Zion Black Cultural Center for a tour of local sites in this Southeastern region of the Ohio River Valley's Underground Railroad and to learn more about their participation in the NEA initiative Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design and efforts to restore the 120-year-old Mount Zion building into a vibrant community center.

Additional details on this and other Ohio events are available on the NEA’s newsroom.

New Website Launch for CPTA Program

We are excited to announce the launch of our new site for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Creative Placemaking Technical Assistance (CPTA) program.

This website celebrates the power of arts and culture in strengthening communities, and offers an abundance of resources for anyone working in creative placemaking or curious about it! These tools and insights were developed with our partners and updated over eight years by the CPTA team. Whether you’re looking to enhance engagement with residents and artists, navigate partnership dynamics, or plan cross-sector initiatives, we invite you to explore our site and join our community dedicated to community development and planning through arts, culture, and creativity!

Visit creativeplacemaking.us

Grants For Arts Projects

Deadline July 11

Grants for Arts Projects (GAP) is the NEA’s largest grant program for organizations, providing expansive funding opportunities to strengthen the nation’s arts and culture ecosystem across a wide range of artistic disciplines. Application deadline is July 6, 2024, for projects taking place beginning in June 2025.

Please note: Design DOES NOT receive applications at this deadline; the next opportunity to apply for Design projects is February 2025, for funding in 2026.

Call for Our Town Panelists

Are you interested in sharing your time and talents (and earning a modest honorarium) to support the creative placemaking community? If so, consider serving as a panelist for Our Town!

Application review will take place from late October into early December 2024. The commitment is roughly 40 hours of work over a six-week period. If you are interested in being considered, please complete the volunteer to be a panelist form and drop us a line at ot@arts.gov so we know to look for your submission. Thank you for considering!

Nerdy Design Thing We Are Following

Playground for All Children, Queens, NY - Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons, 2019

We loved this recent Urban Omnibus piece by architects Irina Verona and Jennifer Carpenter about designing playgrounds for all abilities. They share some of the history of a groundbreaking competition and playground projects in New York City in the 1970s, and explore why those ideas have not developed further or become standard practice. It’s a fascinating read on deeply embedded cultural views of play, childhood, and disability, which continue to be prevalent today.

The project aligns with Verona and Carpenter’s own work on designing public spaces with neurodiversity in mind. Working in partnership with WIP Collaborative through the Design Trust for Public Space, their Neurodiverse City project “seeks to learn from the experience and knowledge of neurodivergent self-advocates by building a broad-based coalition of partners, identifying ways to quantify and qualify neuroinclusive space, and proposing meaningful policy change in key areas where these ideas can be scaled and broadened.” The project has received Design support from the NEA through Grants for Arts Projects.