2025 Design Grants Pitch Night

The Hideo Sasaki Foundation’s 2025 Design Grants Pitch Night was amazing! Thanks to the incredible finalist teams who shared their ideas promoting a more equitable future, to our impressive jury, and to the 85+ people who joined us in person and online. Finalists pitch their ideas for projects that address creative community building, new models for housing, innovation in transit and access to mobility choices, innovation in health and wellbeing, proactive approaches to climate adaptation, and new uses for AI in design.

The 2025 Design Grant finalists are as follows:

Roxbury Food Truck Park

CommonWealth Kitchen is excited to partner with the City of Boston, Madison Park Development Corporation, and the community to launch the Roxbury Food Truck Park. Roxbury, one of Boston’s historically underserved communities, has limited access to diverse and affordable food options. This initiative will transform underutilized public space along Malcolm X Boulevard to establish a food truck park, increasing access to healthy, culturally inclusive foods while creating economic opportunities for local entrepreneurs.

Trans Liberation Coalition

The team aims to address the gaps in transgender support in Boston by exploring underserved neighborhoods they have identified as lacking transgender-specific resources or events. They will engage with the community through activities centered around art-based classes or community meals. They will analyze results and create a report for the City of Boston Mayor’s Office and local organizations. Alongside this, the team will create startup guides to help interested people host their own trans-oriented events, and host a co-created art website in the form of a digital garden.

Culinary Commons

Culinary Commons is an initiative focused on establishing public kitchens as essential community infrastructure to foster food justice and social cohesion in urban areas like Boston. These sites serve as more than just cooking spaces; they are platforms for social change, enabling individuals to connect with their culinary heritage and build community ties. By addressing the lack of accessible venues for food-related gatherings, the team aims to create spaces where people can share meals, engage in culinary activities, and organize for food justice.

Designing Dignity: Accessibility Interventions in the Cambridge Homeless Meal Program Community

This project proposes a design intervention to enhance accessibility and dignity within the Loaves and Fishes Meal Program, Cambridge’s largest homeless community dinner serving 100+ diverse guests. The initiative focuses on creating an inclusive environment by identifying and addressing barriers that limit access for individuals with physical, cognitive, or emotional challenges. Proposed interventions include improvements to accessibility, wayfinding, serving flow, and material choices—tailored to the specific needs of the community. The outcome will be a design solution that supports safety, inclusivity, and dignity, fostering a sense of belonging for all who use the space.

The Artisanal Hub

The Artisanal Hub in Mission Hill and Roxbury is a proposal for a community pavilion, constructed entirely from locally sourced reused materials, as a vibrant symbol of sustainability and creativity. Designed to engage and inspire, it serves as an open platform for artists and makers to showcase the artistic potential of repurposed resources. The pavilion invites the public to experience how reclaimed items can be transformed into beauty and function. It fosters collaboration, dialogue, and education, highlighting the value of circular design. This dynamic space will both reflect the Mission Hill and Roxbury community’s environmental values and celebrate its rich tapestry of creative voices.

Roxbury Cooling Yards

The Roxbury Cooling Yards program is a climate resilience initiative designed to equip residents with essential resources and materials to mitigate the health risks associated with extreme heat, while fostering social cohesion in their preferred outdoor community spaces. The program prioritizes communities where residents with heightened heat vulnerability live—such as elderly and disabled residents living within urban heat islands—by providing accessible, user-friendly cooling equipment. These tools enable safe, communal gathering and enhance preparedness during periods of elevated temperatures, supporting both individual well-being and climate resilience through localized heat mitigation strategies.

SHADE

SHADE is temporary, teen-led public art in public parks for public health. Over the next year, the team hopes to transition from a grant-funded organization to a teen-led earned income non-profit by further developing, open-sourcing, and leasing their product, SHADE. SHADE is a safe, affordable, temporary outdoor building system. Their mission is to empower regional teen teams and communities, like theirs, to address the teen mental health crisis by creating new destinations in public parks for teens to hang out, find friends, and make new ones in real life.

Hudson Street Stoop

Hudson Street Stoop is ACDC’s flagship, community-driven placekeeping program that convenes residents and local artists to co-create an interactive public art installation that is reflective of the community’s culture, history, and diverse experiences. This program seeks to rekindle the “stoop” culture that once defined the tight-knit social fabric of Chinatown before the construction of the highway in the 1960s divided the neighborhood and displaced hundreds of immigrant families.