City Parks Alliance and The Trust for Public Land to Host Creative Placemaking City Workshops in Boston, MA and Kansas City, MO

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Washington, DC – City Parks Alliance and The Trust for Public Land announce Kansas City and the National Parks of Boston have been chosen through a competitive national process to host creative placemaking city workshops later this year. The workshops are the result of a unique collaboration between the City Park Alliance’s city workshop program and Trust for Public Land’s Creative Placemaking Program. The $50,000 cost for each workshop is funded in part by a National Endowment for the Arts grant, City Parks Alliance, Trust for Public Land, and $12,000 from each of the host cities. The workshops will be led by professional facilitators and draw on the experience of leaders around the country through a unique curriculum that includes interactive, peer-to-peer learning, where teams of local participants will explore new approaches to cross-sector partnerships, community engagement, and collaborative governance through creative placemaking strategies and tools.

“Although we had excellent applications from a number of cities around the country, Kansas City and the National Parks of Boston were selected because they clearly demonstrated how the workshop would be transformative for their work and enable them to use creative placemaking strategies to help support effective and sustainable partnerships in low-income communities,” said Catherine Nagel, executive director for City Parks Alliance.

The submissions were evaluated, in part, for their ability to demonstrate a committed, diverse, and appropriate group or partners in the community; a clearly articulated problem statement and an understanding of how creative placemaking might be able to address that problem; and how the workshop would be transformative for the community.

“Everyone deserves a great park within a 10-minute walk of home,” said Matthew Clarke, Director of Creative Placemaking at The Trust For Public Land. “A major part of what makes a park truly great is when people have a strong, personal bond to the place and the community members in it, and creative peacemaking does just that. We’ll work with Boston and Kansas City to refine best practices and support their bottom-up, participatory approaches to building community.”

Kansas City’s application stood out because they demonstrated a clear understanding of how creative placemaking strategies could be used to build collaboration across city agencies and improve civic engagement in the public planning process. They also articulated a clear strategy for applying creative placemaking strategies to improve the quality of life for low-income and diverse residents throughout the city’s historic and diverse northeast corridor. Learn more about the Creative Concourse Park Project in Kansas City.

The National Parks of Boston were chosen because of a clear vision for using the creative placemaking workshops and strategies learned to engage and connect the diverse community of Charlestown with the historic, cultural, and natural resources in the nearby Navy Yard, with a focus on improving the health and sustainability of the community. See the National Park Service Urban Agenda and the Boston Creates Culture Plan.

In 2017, City Parks Alliance and The Trust for Public Land published The Field Guide for Parks and Creative Placemaking to help agencies, advocacy groups, and other stakeholders leverage the power of creative placemaking for parks and open spaces.

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City Parks Alliance is the nation’s leading advocacy group for urban parks and open spaces. As the only independent, nationwide membership organization solely dedicated to urban parks, City Parks Alliance leads and serves a growing network of civic and community leaders, government agencies, parks and recreation authorities, funders and others committed to the creation, revitalization and stewardship of parks and green spaces that contribute to more vibrant and equitable cities. cityparksalliance.org.

The Trust for Public Land creates parks and protects land for people, ensuring healthy, livable communities for generations to come. Millions of people live near a Trust for Public Land park, garden, or natural area, and millions more visit these sites every year. To support The Trust for Public Land and share why nature matters to you, visit www.tpl.org.

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