2022 Design Grants Pitch Night

Each year, the Sasaki Foundation announces research topics that address current trends and inequities in design. In 2022, the Sasaki Foundation focused on Proactive Approaches to Climate Adaptation, New Models for Housing, Innovation in Transit and Access to Mobility Choices, Creative Community Building, and Innovation in Health and Wellbeing, under the theme of Shared Voices: Charting a Course for Community Action. This theme recognizes that multiple futures are at stake, and we can make a difference by acting now.

The 2022 Design Grant finalists are as follows:

DIY Lowell Inclusionary Urbanism

DIY Lowell supports every community member’s right to the city, and our goal is to fulfill that mission through programming and strategies that are grounded in concrete steps with measurable objectives. Community members submit tactical urbanism ideas, and we hold a vote and help volunteer project teams make those ideas happen. We also use design thinking exercises to guide young people through ideation and implementation of community projects. This proposal is to develop a special Inclusion Program to reach immigrants and non-English speakers to make the group more reflective of the community as a whole.

Youth-led Design: New Methodologies for Shaping the Built Environment

Young people are an integral part of our communities, and yet too often they are excluded from the conversations and decision-making processes that shape our built environment. Youth-led Design asks, what would our towns, neighborhoods, and cities look like if they were truly fueled by the talent, passion, and vision of the younger members of our community? Rather than youth-centered projects, or projects that merely engage the youth, we propose to develop a new model where the youth drive and take ownership of the entirety of the architectural and planning process, from concept through completion.

See You in the Future

Through community storytelling, public art, and place-based interventions, See You in the Future supports the care infrastructure around the intersection of Mass. and Cass. In collaboration with community members, we will share honest stories about the myriad of journeys that bring folks here. In gathering different groups in creative conversation, we will both nurture and tend to the caring future that is already rooted but often unseen. In our site-specific co-creative process, we will ask how this area’s public spaces can affirm the inherent worth of unhoused and recovery communities and work to repair histories of disinvestment and policing.

Sharing Community Tree Stories: The Power of Trees in Building Healthy Environments

This project will assist Speak for the Trees and three community partners–in East Boston, Dorchester, and Mattapan–in the development of a platform (or platforms) to share residents’ stories about trees in their lives. Ideally, this platform will incorporate various forms of media already available or currently in production at Speak for the Trees. These platforms will assist the organization in further capturing, sharing, and amplifying stories and walks being developed through a current EPA-supported project, Community Tree Stories: Exploring Healthy Environments in Three Boston EJ Neighborhoods.

Chinatown Energy Literacy Campaign

The project proposed by Climable, the Chinatown Community Land Trust, and Chinatown Power, Inc., will create a multi-lingual clean energy literacy campaign that is tailored to Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood and that complements ongoing work on a community-owned, clean energy microgrid. The project will also support the audio collection of community input on the topics of resilience, climate change, and a just transition to clean energy. The input gleaned will be made publicly-available via an interactive webpage that allows visitors to listen to interviews while exploring a map of Chinatown.

Groundwork Somerville’s New Urban Farm

Groundwork Somerville is proud to submit this proposal for a Design Grant from the Sasaki Foundation for the next critical phase of our strategic plan: a new farm, office, greenhouse, and marketspace for Groundwork Somerville. There are two viable options for our new space: one is above a city stormwater reservation tank and the other a vacant lot with an abandoned supermarket space. This project will be designed to provide a gathering space for the community to engage with the local food system, produce culturally relevant crops, and empower youth to become agents of social change.

Combating Green Gentrification: Exploring Green Roofs on Affordable Housing

Comunidades Enraizadas is a community land trust created by a group of primarily Latina immigrants in Chelsea, MA, supported by GreenRoots, a community-based organization dedicated to engaging and empowering residents to fight for environmental justice and public health. GreenRoots and Comunidades Enraizadas are committed to building community land sovereignty in the face of gentrification. As Comunidades Enraizadas works to acquire and build new properties that will remain affordable housing, we are exploring opportunities to build green roofs on affordable housing units to reduce urban heat island effects and improve access to green space in our low-income, Latinx environmental justice community.