Community Placemaking Grants: Civic Spaces

Americans' trust in the institutions that once anchored civic life is eroding: confidence in core institutions is hovering near an all-time low, averaging just 27%, according to tracking by Gallup. As partisan divides widen and civic faith fray, 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, two organizations—GrowHouse in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, NY, and Springfield Cultural Partnership in Springfield, MA—were awarded $60,000 each in direct funding and worked with PPS and CultureHouse, a nonprofit specializing in community pop-ups, to conduct community visioning through placemaking, then plan, design, build, and activate their spaces. Over the initiative's 18-month span, both spaces delivered a measurable impact on the communities they served. 

The initiative not only resulted in a complete transformation of vacant spaces, but demonstrated major strides in civic life for each community. For example, according to a survey at The Intersection, one of the pop-ups in Springfield, MA, 83% of visitors said they felt more aware of or more able to participate in civic matters after visiting the space. 

These impacts have also lasted beyond the grant. Another grantee, GrowHouse in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, was able to secure a one-year lease for their space after the pop-up. Meanwhile, The Intersection stayed open for four more weeks after the grant period as a local civic association kept the space active through drop-in community hours and programming, and interest from another regional cultural district in adapting the model pointed to the project’s influence far beyond its original community. 

Learn more about our Civic Spaces grantees below.

‍Thank You

Project for Public Spaces thanks our Social Impact Partner Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, whose support helps make this work possible.

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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.