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Social Impact Partnerships

With the support of like-minded partners, Project for Public Spaces manages grant, technical assistance, and leadership programs that help local partners to transform their public spaces.

Corporations

We bring together employees, customers, and local residents to transform neglected public spaces into gathering places that truly serve the community.

Foundations

Society’s greatest challenges are addressed in public space. We have a long history of working with foundations to meet their objectives in addressing public health, economic development, and social resilience.

Individual Donors

We are dedicated to working with people who are just as passionate about public space as we are. We offer a range of strategies for individuals to create a lasting public space legacy in their community.

Meet our Partners

Since 1975, Project for Public Spaces has brought some of the most successful public places in the world to life with the help of dedicated partners.

More than 50 organizations have partnered with Project for Public Spaces to give back to their communities, to engage their employees and grantees, and to create the welcoming, lively, and meaningful public spaces that everyone deserves. Let us introduce you to some of our current partners.

Featured Partnership

Community Placemaking Grants: Civic Spaces

Overview
Americans' trust in the institutions that once anchored civic life is eroding: confidence in core institutions is hovering near an all-time low. As partisan divides widen and civic faith frays, BIPOC, low-income, and rural communities are often left with the fewest resources to rebuild the spaces where that trust and connection could be restored. This gap is why Project for Public Spaces launched Community Placemaking Grants: Civic Spaces, an initiative that helps nonprofits create indoor pop-up spaces that foster civic life. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, organizations are awarded funding to conduct community visioning through placemaking, then plan, design, build, and activate their spaces to invite neighbors into shared civic life.

Sample Project

Campus Martius Park, Detroit, MI

Once a lifeless traffic island, Campus Martius Park has become a world-famous example of a unique urban park. Through the Southwest Airlines Heart of the Community grant program, Project for Public Spaces collaborated with the Downtown Detroit Partnership, the City of Detroit, and the Detroit 300 Conservancy to help bring a taste of northern Michigan beaches to the middle of downtown Detroit.

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Report

Places in the Making

In 2013, a team of MIT researchers from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning led by planner and architect Susan Silberberg examined ten case studies of placemaking projects around the country, including several Heart of the Community projects. Their findings report, Places in the Making, reveal how the collective process of making cultivates community capacity and leadership that lasts far beyond any one public space improvement.

“Placemaking puts power back in the hands of the people,” writes Silberberg observes in the report's introduction. “The most successful placemaking initiatives transcend the ‘place’ to forefront the ‘making,’ and the benefits for community can be substantial and long-lasting.”

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