Community Placemaking Grants: Civic Spaces

In 2025, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation turned to Project for Public Spaces to partner in addressing the widening gap in civic infrastructure in underserved communities. Drawing on its expertise in placemaking, Project for Public Spaces created the Community Placemaking Grants: Civic Spaces program, which helps nonprofits build indoor pop-up spaces that foster civic life in urban and rural BIPOC and/or low-income communities across the United States. The program reflects placemaking's core strength: working directly with local stakeholders and giving them agency to shape the spaces that serve them. That agency builds social cohesion and  inspires leadership that helps neighborhoods take on local challenges together. 

The grant awarded $60,000 in direct funding to each organization and provided placemaking, planning, design, implementation, and capacity building assistance from Project for Public Spaces and CultureHouse. Over an 18-month period, the program saw immediate impact within the local communities that these spaces served. It not only resulted in a complete transformation of vacant spaces, but demonstrated momentous strides in civic life for each community:

Springfield Cultural Partnership in Springfield, Massachusetts, hosted 70 community-facilitated programs over the course of 90 days at their civic pop-up, The Intersection. Eighty-three percent of community members said they felt more aware of, or more able to participate in, civic matters, after visiting or participating in the programs. 

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GrowHouse NYC, our grantee in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, New York, continues to activate their civic space by expanding youth engagement through school partnerships, hosting events to deepen community roots, and convening neighborhood groups to organize around major emerging local issues on preserving culture and legacy, and more.

Both spaces implemented three months of programming and learned to manage their space while promoting long-term civic engagement in their community. By strengthening these community connections, each project developed a reach far beyond the physical space itself. The Community Placemaking Grants: Civic Spaces program represented an important step in helping bridge an unmet need for civic infrastructure in BIPOC and low-income communities and bring to light the vital role civic spaces play in strengthening community leadership and cohesion.

Learn more about the civic spaces below. 

Support Future Projects!

Project for Public Spaces’ Community Placemaking Grants enable US-based nonprofits and government agencies to address inequality of access to public places that serve community needs by working directly with local stakeholders to transform spaces or co-create new ones. We do this by providing direct funding, technical assistance, and capacity building facilitated by Project for Public Spaces. Learn more about how to become a Social Impact Partner today.