New Orleans’ St. Joseph Rebuild Center. Dan Pitera, the center's director, is one of many speaker's at this years Structures for Inclusion conference.
By Guest Author - Annie Lambla - March 4, 2011
Guest author Annie Lambla serves on the steering committee for Structures for Inclusion. She's a former research assistant at MPC, and is store manager at Hyde Park's Open Produce.
Inspiration Kitchens, in Chicago's Garfield Park neighborhood, is a holistic solution to hunger, homelessness and poverty in the form of a community kitchen and community center. It illustrates the value of good design and partnerships with residents dedicated to making change in their neighborhoods. Housed in a new LEED-certified building, it promises hope and stability for the people of Garfield Park, in west Chicago.
Like much of MPC’s work, the success of Inspiration Kitchens is based on the confidence that a neighborhood’s residents are the best investors in positive community growth. It’s true - no one cares more than you and your neighbors about what happens to the empty lot on the corner.
There are plenty of others who share the same concern for building healthy communities and sustainable growth with creativity and resilience; this year, March 25-27, the Design Corps Structures for Inclusion (SFI) 10+1 conference brings them to Chicago.
Structures for Inclusion is an annual conference focused on design for social good. Bringing together architects, designers, policy makers, and funders, along with planners and community organizations like MPC, this year’s conference focuses on how to make change happen, with and within our communities, connecting Chicago projects like Inspiration Kitchens to projects around the country and around the world.
The conference opens on March 25 with a keynote dialogue, open to the public and hosted by Enterprise Community Partners, with Patrick Tighe and Ric Abramon of the West Hollywood Community Housing Corporation about the concerns and hopes of a recent mixed use affordable housing project in Sierra Bonita. The weekend will include two days of dialogues - panels, workshops, and a lively “pecha kucha” style lunch event - about how to design in the public interest and make real, sustainable community change. The dozens of speakers include Dan Pitera, director of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center and New Orleans’ St. Joseph Rebuild Center; Brent Brown, of the Building Community Workshop and Congo Street Initiative in Dallas; John Folan, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Urban Design Build Studio and Cafe 524; and Emily Pilloton, founder of Studio H in Bertie County, North Carolina.
This year also marks the launch of the Social, Environmental, and Economic Design (SEED) competition, a certification process and network of design projects that exhibit exceptional community-based engagement and commitment to sustainability. Chicago boasts two impressive winners, featured in Saturday’s panels at SFI: Inspiration Kitchens, represented by Larry Kearns of Wheeler Kearns Architects, and Growing Home, represented by Rashmi Ramaswamy of SHED Studio.
Like MPC and Placemaking Chicago’s many technical assistance projects, SFI brings together designers and stakeholders for passionate, informed, and honest discussions of how architects and designers can exchange ideas with clients, collaborate with partners in communities, and draw upon the knowledge of local communities to do more, better.
To find out more about the conference, and to register, visit http://www.designcorps.org/sfi-conference/.