Cultivating Community Resilience
YEAR: 2024
TYPE: Project Proposal
LOCATION: West Philadelphia, PA, USA
BUDGET: $100,000
TIMEFRAME: 1 Year
PARTNERS: BunnyHop, The Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, ImpactPHL, Mural Arts Program, Philadelphia Office of Sustainability, Philly Thrive, Rebuild Philadelphia, Rock to the Future, Sweet Juice, We Love Philly, and WXPN
_Introduction
Climate change poses unprecedented challenges to communities across the globe, and West Philadelphia is no exception. As we confront the looming environmental crisis, we must also recognize that we have an invaluable resource that often remains untapped—our collective history of resilience and resistance.
West Philadelphia, like many underserved communities, has a deeply rooted legacy of mutual aid to address challenges often overlooked if not outright caused by the very same institutions and governments entrusted to care for them. In the face of systems inequities, natural disasters, and ongoing gentrification, communities like ours have come together to meet each other’s needs. Yet these stories of struggle and triumph are often limited in their teaching and documentation. Our proposal seeks to address this gap, emphasizing the presence and importance of community power and self-determination in developing climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. By grounding ourselves in the past, we recognize our power in the present, build a culture of optimism and civic participation, and lay the ground for community-driven solutions to climate change.
Our proposed project, ‘Cultivating Creative Resilience’, aims to archive and creatively represent the lived experiences of community survival in a neighborhood at the intersection of environmental justice and cultural heritage.
_Project Description
Climate change is a global crisis, but its impacts are felt disproportionately by communities most burdened by systemic racism and extractive market forces. The neighborhood of West Philadelphia is a designated environmental justice zone and federally declared promise zone, underscoring the urgent need to equip communities with adequate resources to build climate resilience. Limited education and documentation of how communities have historically fought land battles, organized, commemorated achievements, and created coalitions in the fight for survival and equity have left us with a fractured collective memory. Yet the neighborhood boasts a rich community of artists, activists, and culture workers who have taken up space here perhaps due to that exact historical divestment that makes it an affordable place to live. Today, these cultural legacies are under attack by the erasure that gentrification so often carries out.
Through recovering these vulnerable histories, our project will not only build a culture of optimism and community empowerment, it will also provide a mechanism for community engagement that can support democratized solutions to ongoing and future local climate change mitigation strategies. Visual art, music, and storytelling will be our ally in this endeavor, harnessing the power of creative energy and joyful celebration to transcend boundaries and unite our community under a common purpose. Our project is not intended to be an isolated endeavor, but instead part of a broader initiative to build networks of climate resilience that span our neighborhoods, empowering residents to take control of their own environmental future by rooting themselves in their unique history as stewards of their own communities.
With that said, we recognize that the very act of celebrating an individual or community’s ‘resilience’ can allow us to ignore the sheer burden that it is to care for one’s own in the face of abandonment by governing institutions. Our proposal envisions a future where political and economic systems, as well as our built environments, are resilient so that residents do not have to be. Through the creation of a collective memory vault, our project will not only empower us by remembering our collective strength but also foster an environment of civic participation and create potential feedback pathways from communities to municipal, state, and federal governments.
We detail our proposal's core components below, demonstrating how our project aligns with the values and objectives set forth by the Monument Lab Re:Generation grant and brings to life a vision of a thriving and interconnected community; a project whose creative physical presence can fuel the collective power of our people.
Our project will unfold in four stages:
Discovery & Design
This initial – and ongoing – phase will leverage our founding team members’ expertise in the fields of grassroots organizing, local climate change impact assessment, and qualitative analysis, as well as deep ties to community artists and organizations. The team will lead a series of public listening sessions to better understand the community’s needs, concerns, and desires for this project. Feedback will be collected by a 10-person committee of local artist and residents, who will then collaborate to design a methodology for further collecting the oral histories community members who have survived natural disasters, climate impacts, and ecosystem failures in the past. We are keeping this methodology intentionally vague as it will be created as part of the project itself, but judges can refer founding team members previous projects to visualize an example of a public installation that will serve as a tool for community engagement and story archiving. See Street Speak. All committee members will be compensated for their labor and residents will receive incentives to participate in the initial listening sessions.
Story Collection & Live Public Art Installations
Public installations such as StreetSpeak mentioned above will activate community engagement, recovering forgotten histories, and illuminate historic resilience to climate change. The participatory collection of public ideas is a fundamental aspect of our project, ensuring community involvement at every step. With permission, collected stories will be reviewed, honored, and interpreted, by a group of dedicated community artists. Project team members and residents will perform a qualitative analysis of the collected stories to pull out themes, lessons, and ideas that can inform public arts projects and policy makers alike.
Culminating Celebration
Community artists will bring these stories to life through various mediums such as song, sculpture, painting, and live performance. A one-day celebration on a contested or vacant lot in the neighborhood will bring community together, showcase the artists works, and illuminate the strength of our creative resources to drive engagement and self-determination. Local organizations offering climate-change mitigation and adaptation services will be invited to showcase their support services to community residents.
Project Review & Reporting
Digital capture of the project will be preserved online. Project successes and failures will be identified and reported along with resulting community-source recommendations for local climate resilience interventions. A strategic framework for implementing similar projects in other cities will be created to provide a scalable model for engaging residents and municipalities in community-centered solutions to impending climate impacts.
_Conclusion
If we do not deeply understand individual and collective needs, wants, vulnerabilities, and strengths, how will we design an effective path towards future liberation? "Cultivating Creative Resilience" is a project that not only honors the rich history of West Philadelphia’s culture of mutual aid and resilience, but also empowers and unites (rather than terrifies) communities in the face of imminent environmental crises. Through community engagement, participatory art, and a commitment to amplifying voices often silenced, we aim to create a lasting impact on the neighborhood. While this project is centered within West Philadelphia, we feel that a deep dive into the collective histories and identities of its residents can provide lasting impacts that can serve as a model for similar initiatives elsewhere.
In the short term, our project aims to create understanding and belonging amongst its residents as well as to connect artists more deeply to their communities by providing paid opportunities to tell the stories of their neighbors. In the medium turn, the project will enhance community empowerment, increase civic participation and advocate for community-based solutions to climate change mitigation. In the long term, the project will serve as a model for people-powered solution making and foster collaboration between residents and the governments and institutions that are entrusted to care for them.
The success of this project is bolstered by the strong relationships founding team members have built with West Philadelphia’s artists and resident communities as well as local service-oriented nonprofits and community organizations throughout Philadelphia. These such organizations include Sweet Juice, BunnyHop, Rock to the Future, We Love Philly, ImpactPHL, The Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, WXPN, the Mural Arts Program, and the City of Philadelphia Office of Sustainability.
_Work Samples
Dogpatch Public Realm Plan
Innerbelt National Forest
Street Speak
Sweet Juice Fest
_Meet the Team
Melina Harris
Impact Analyst and Capital Access Coordinator
Mel (she/they) is an Impact Analyst and Capital Access Coordinator at the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, where they work to increase diversity in the supply chains of Philly’s regional hospitals and universities. They are passionate about democratizing access to capital and fascinated by emerging models for community investment and equitable wealth development.
Mel currently resides in West Philadelphia and loves playing, dancing to, and supporting live music. You can check out their music here! As a founding-member of the Sweet Juice Collective, Mel hopes to synergize their passion for live music and community power by bringing the Sweet Juice mission to life.
Meesh Zucker
Supervisory Community Planner and Urban Designer
Meesh (she/her) works as a Supervisory Community Planner at FEMA in Philadelphia. Together with federal partners, states, and local communities, my team develops climate resilience plans and strategic policies to equitably mitigate the impacts of natural disasters for all residents. She also serves as a Board Member At-Large for the Northern Liberties Neighbors Association.
Prior to FEMA, Meesh worked as an urban planner at Superpedestrian and graduated from MIT with a Masters degree in City Planning. Her research at MIT primarily focused on the spatialization of resident and community narratives to reveal the city's historic role in the displacement and erasure of certain social identities.
Combined she has over ten years of professional experience working as a project manager, urban designer, and landscape architect, both in the United States and internationally in Copenhagen.