8+ Awesome Orgs to support this Giving Tuesday!
Every year, State of Place shares a few non-profits we want to shine the spotlight on for Giving Tuesday! These organizations are driving forces in the industry, promoting livable, equitable, and sustainable places we can all access and love. Visit their websites to learn more about the amazing work they do for our communities and please consider donating if you can!
Project for Public Spaces
For over 40 years, the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) has been creating community-powered and community-centered spaces using placemaking approaches. By partnering with CSR departments in various foundations and corporations, PPS has provided funding, technical assistance, and capacity building to redefine the way we build and use public space in more than 3,500 communities. Donating to them this Giving Tuesday will help preserve and promote the unique physical, cultural, and social identities within our communities in order to better serve the people in them. Plus, bonus, State of Place is an official partner of PPS, with lots of exciting plans in the works to collaborate in 2021 and beyond! So giving to PPS is like a two-fer! ;)
PlacemakingX
The ideas at the heart of PlacemakingX were incubated at Project for Public Spaces throughout decades of collaboration with community activists and change agents. In 2013, Project for Public Spaces launched the Placemaking Leadership Council to strengthen placemaking as an international network. Since then, Placemaking X has seen an explosion of regional networks, organizations, and events in countries around the world, establishing placemaking as a growing and catalytic movement. PlacemakingX is currently formed by 100+ leaders and 1,000+ advocates from 70+ countries around the world - indeed, one of our marketing interns, Candice, is one of their official advocates, as is our Founder/CEO, Mariela! Your donation will help accelerate and amplify the cause of public space and placemaking for global impact.
BlackSpace Urbanist Collective, Inc.
BlackSpace is a nonprofit focused on the empowerment and importance of Black-centered city planning and design. With over 200 Black artists, architects, and urban planners & designers, they are a driving force in ensuring our cities reflect equitable practices and development when shaping their communities. BlackSpace challenges those in the industry and in positions of power to unlearn traditional values and rethink Manifesto-based practices. Please consider a donation to them this Giving Tuesday to support their efforts in protecting and creating Black spaces. Read more about how non-black citymakers can help advance equity here.
Smart Growth America
Smart Growth America (SGA) is a non-profit working to redevelop the way we approach community growth. SGA works with professionals across all industries involved with city-making to ensure their plans are not only feasible, but economically and socially viable, equitable, and prosperous. By partnering with elected officials, real estate developers & investors, economic development agencies, transportation departments, the federal government, and researchers, Smart Growth America has the network and resources to drive lasting, impactful change around the nation. While Mariela, our Founder/CEO has been a vocal advocate of SGA, having worked closely with its current CEO, Calvin Gladney for nearly 15 years, this year, State of Place had the pleasure and honor of officially partnering with SGA on a project for Downtown Grand Rapids, Inc, in which we collaborated to collect urban design data for the entire city using State of Place’s new automated visual machine-learning powered data collection and to recalibrate our forecasting models tying urban design to value, all with the aim to promote smart city making. This Giving Tuesday, we hope you consider donating to SGA so they can continue their critical work (and in turn, so we can hopefully partner with them again in 2021!).
Center for Neighborhood Technology
The Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) is a non-profit pushing sustainable initiatives regarding transportation, water, climate, and public policy at the forefront of urban development. Serving as coaches and advisors to city leaders, CNT provides crucial research and data to government officials during the planning processes, ensuring their efforts promote sustainable economic development and urban resilience. CNT works to expand and improve public transit and bike systems, as well as advocate for pedestrian centered spaces in order to encourage walkable urban spaces. They tackle water management by introducing innovative policies that protect communities vulnerable to extreme weather events. Partnering with transit-oriented development and cargo-oriented development, CNT restructures the way cities are built, focusing on promoting development around transit stations and stabilizing industrial neighborhoods. As with others in this Giving Tuesday who’s who list, we at State of Place at professionally benefitted from CNT’s open data, having integrated it into a current project we are conducting with San Jose State University, via the Mineta Transportation Institute for CalTrans, in which we are collecting urban design data (again using our automated visual machine learning based data collection!) throughout Northern and Southern California and tying that to VMT (vehicle miles traveled). So any donations to them will help them support providing access to this important data! We hope you consider donating to CNT this Giving Tuesday.
Living on Earth
Living on Earth is a weekly, hour-long, and award-winning environmental news program distributed by Public Radio Exchange. Hosted by Steve Curwood, the program features interviews and commentary on a broad range of ecological issues, exploring how humans interact with their landscape. Please consider donating this Giving Tuesday and help Living on Earth continue to bring you dependable environmental news and analysis with depth, balance, and clarity!
Pandemic Parenting
Now this one is personal, and likely will strike a cord with a majority of you citymakers who also happen to be parents out there! In the midst of the Covid19 pandemic, it was clear that parents were bearing an especially heavy burden - enter Pandemic Parenting. Recognizing that as parents themselves, Dr. Lindsay Malloy (who happens to be one of our Founder/CEO, Mariela’s best friends - and fellow UCI alum) and Dr. Amanda Zelechoski launched a non-profit (because being parents during a pandemic - and academics to boot - wasn’t enough to tackle! ;)) to provide free bi-weekly webinars that tapped into their expertise as child developmental psychologists covering a broad range of topics and issues about parenting in the midst of a pandemic. In their webinars, they, along with esteemed guests, share science-based research and discuss topics such as whether you should send your child to school, how to deal with grief from COVID-19, or what can you do to cope with “mom guilt.” They aim to help ease the minds of today’s parents and give them the resources they need to care for their children and themselves! We hope you will consider donating to this worthy - and useful - cause!
Urban League of Philadelphia
Since 1917, the Urban League of Philadelphia (ULP) has been committed to “bend the arc of history.” As an affiliate of the National Urban League - one of the nation’s oldest and largest community-based movements dedicated to empowering underserved urban communities - ULP believes that our shared dreams are stronger than what divides us. Economic independence and social mobility require meaningful collaboration between people, communities, civic organizations, corporations, and public officials. We hope you will consider supporting this transformative nonprofit advocating for civil rights. For our part, we are honored that our work with the City of Philadelphia has the potential to inform and bolster the already good fight the Urban League is charging ahead!
BONUS EFFORT: PHEAL
Last but not least, we wanted to highlight the efforts of a newly formed initiative, PHEAL, or Planning for Health Equity, Advocacy, and Leadership, of which our Founder/CEO is a contributor and Steering Committee member. The PHEAL collaborative, comprised of 77 planning, health, and equity professionals, established three guiding principles with the aim of informing a policy platform that would reaffirm the imperative need for public health and design professionals to work together to foster an environment of synergy with the purpose of empowering and elevating the voices of historically overburdened communities with health inequities in the time of COVID-19. While PHEAL is not a formal organization as of yet, you can “donate” simply by getting involved - and there are a variety of (non-monetary) ways to do that! So check it out today.