Thursday, May 10, 2012
4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Center for Architecture, 1218 Arch Street

Join us for a presentation of great ideas for greening schoolyards, the result of an all-day design charrette exploring how we can create greener, more sustainable schoolyards in Philadelphia.

Transforming Urban Schoolyards will present design concepts for greening two Philadelphia public schools—Lea Elementary School in West Philadelphia and Kelly Elementary School in Germantown—and offer inspiring models for greening schoolyards throughout the city.

Green schoolyards are a key strategy in Green City, Clean Waters, Philadelphia’s innovative 25-year stormwater management plan. See how Greenfield Elementary School is contributing…

Get engaged and ready to green your neighborhood school—and be part of a public conversation about the impact of greening schoolyards throughout the city. Reception to follow.

Free and open to the public. RSVP

Co-hosted by the Community Design Collaborative,  AIA Philadelphia,  Philadelphia Water Department, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Friends of Weccacoe Playground has received $535,000 from the City of Philadelphia for stormwater management savvy renovations. Known as “Broken-Glass Park” in the ‘90s, Weccacoe Park benefited from basic improvements in 2001 and a decade of neighborhood involvement. Today the park is flush with families and friends, but its decade-old upgrades are worn and don’t contribute much to the city’s sustainability.

Friends of Weccacoe Playground, a committee of Queen Village Neighbors Association, and the Collaborative envisioned a “park-like playground” enhanced by a water spray area,  a back-to-nature obstacle course, and 20 new trees.  Green stormwater infrastructure, including a rain garden and a Natural Surface Zone , are part of planned renovations.

Says Walt Lowthian, head of the Friends group, “If it had not been for the [Collaborative], we’d still be at the wishing stage without a clear picture of the wish.”

Friends of Schuylkill River Park recently reported that the park received $110,000 in funding from the City of Philadelphia for its outdoor courtyard. The courtyard is the main entrance of this well-loved, well-used park and playground and a popular place for both organized and impromptu fun. The courtyard was a focus of a Collaborative project completed in 2011.

The funding will be used primarily to develop and document the design, says Sean O’Rourke, Vice President of the Friends group. When the project is realized, he notes, it “will bring the park-like atmosphere out to the curb.”  But the benefits of working with the Collaborative weren’t limited to the conceptual design, “[The Collaborative]… provided three-dimensional images that could be used to present and talk about [the park] to a range of community and public folks. And most importantly,  it provided a legitimacy that got all the initial stakeholders around the table for… a vision that included the entire community.”

Finally, George W. Nebinger Elementary School has been awarded $400,000 to green its schoolyard. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Partnership for Delaware Estuary presented a grant of $145,000 to the school on April 26. The balance of the project funding was provided through a joint initiative of the Brazilian Ministry and the City of Philadelphia to support urban sustainability. Said EPA’s Region III Administrator Shawn Garvin, “What the City of Philadelphia is doing is amazing… [EPA] wants to put projects on the ground that will educate the public.”

The school, located in South Philadelphia at 6^th and Carpenter Streets, currently offers its students a perfunctory play area of asphalt and chain link fencing. The funding will go towards a rain garden, permeable play surfaces, a green street demonstration project, and an environmental education program at the school.

KUDOS TO OUR NONPROFIT PARTNERS AND  VOLUNTEERS!

Weccacoe Playground: Conceptual Plan for Revitalization
Prepared for Friends of Weccacoe Playground and Queen Village Neighbors Association
Volunteer Team:
Austin + Mergold LLC: Jason Austin, Sally Reynolds, Kelly Tigera, Anne Dinh, Jessica Brown
Gardner/Fox Associates: Joanna Baker, Pat Baker

Schuylkill River Park: Conceptual Design for Gateway Improvements
Prepared for Friends of Schuylkill River Park
Volunteer Team:
Ari Miller, Jay DeFelicis, Allen Guenthner, Daniel Stanislaw, Clifford Schwinger
International Consultants, Inc. Lou Johnson

George W. Nebinger Elementary School: Conceptual Master Plan for Open Space
Prepared for George W. Nebinger Elementary School and the Bella Vista Town Watch
Volunteer Team:
Studio Gaea, LLC: Kimberlee Douglas,  Alexandra Zahn
Elwell Studio: Jason Elwell
Nicole Hostettler
Torcon, Inc.: Anthony Armento, Angela Cirino

Roll out with the Community Design Collaborative for our Sweet Sixteen Bowling Ball on Saturday, June 9 at Erie Lanes. Join us for an evening of bowling, fun, food, and prizes. Bring your A-game and most creative (and perhaps delightfully retro?) costumes and be a winner!

Proceeds from the Bowling Ball support the Collaborative and its volunteer efforts to strengthen neighborhoods through design.  Sponsor a lane for your team of five and opportunities for logo recognition and commemorative tees. Learn more about sponsor levels and benefits here.

You’ll be in great company! Join the fabulous firms and folks who have already signed on as Bowling Ball sponsors:

TEN PIN
Voith and Mactavish Architects

TOP SPIN
AIA Philadelphia
Atkin Olshin Schade Architects
Alice Berman
Bruce E. Brooks & Associates
CDA & I Architecture and Interiors, Ltd.
Michael and Amy Cohen
DIGSAU Architecture/Urbanism
Interface Studio Architects, LLC
KSK Architects Planners Historians, Inc.
Liberty Property Trust
Mainstay Engineering
O’Donnell & Naccarato, Inc.
OLIN
Pennoni Associates, Inc.
The Reinvestment Fund
Viridian Landscape Studio
Wallace Roberts & Todd
Zimmerman Studio LLC

COMMUNITY BOWLERS’ CLUB
Dale Corporation
Michael J. Paul
Darrick Mix
Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations

16^th Annual Bowling Ball
Saturday, June 9
Registration and Mixer 6-7 PM
Bowling 7-10 PM

ERIE LANES
1310 Erie Avenue
Just one block from the Erie-Torresdale Subway Station and minutes from Center City

Register!

Complex inside and out: Matt Braun in the exhibition space at the heart of a campus that includes several rowhomes, a parking lot, a 19th century church sanctuary, a former funeral home, and a even an old orphanage.

How do you take an eclectic collection of old, historic buildings and adapt them to meet the needs of emerging artists in the 21^st century?  That’s a question Matt Braun, executive director of the Fleisher Art Memorial, asks every day.

We caught up with Matt Braun last month to talk about the Collaborative’s latest pro bono design project with Fleisher—a Request for Proposals for a master plan. View our video interview below the jump.

The mission of the Fleisher Art Memorial is to make art accessible to everyone, regardless of economic means, background, or artistic experience. To do that, Fleisher offers free and affordable art classes to children, teens, and adults.

Like many of the artists it serves, Fleisher Art Memorial is a study in resourcefulness. The community-based art center collaborated on a conceptual design for a children’s art garden with the Collaborative and made it happen with a $25,000 gift from a board member and lots of sweat equity. Then Fleisher participated in our design process to support community-led efforts to improve adjacent Palumbo Park.

The Collaborative worked with Fleisher’s leadership to create an RFP with clear, well-organized overview of the facility and the organization’s strategic goals, which set the stage for solid proposals and community engagement. We’re looking forward to the master plan, which was ultimately awarded to Atkin Olshin Schade Architects.

The master plan will provide Fleisher with a blueprint to meld its eclectic collection of buildings—several rowhomes, a  church sanctuary, a former funeral home, and an old orphanage— into a sustainable campus that’s welcoming, expands the arts curriculum, and “drives the way we want to be as a community arts organization in the 21^st century.”

Join us for Transforming Urban Schoolyards on Thursday, May 10, 2012 at the Center for Architecture, 1218 Arch Street. Co-hosted by the Community Design Collaborative, AIA Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia Water Department, this design charrette will explore how we can create greener, more sustainable schoolyards in Philadelphia.

Transforming Urban Schoolyards will focus on two Philadelphia public schools: Lea Elementary School in West Philadelphia and Kelly Elementary School in Germantown. In the process of brainstorming ideas for Lea and Kelly Schools, the charrette will generate design models for greening schoolyards throughout the city.

There are two ways to participate!

Design Charrette
8:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
$50/$40 for AIA Members and Collaborative volunteers who have previously donated design services. Register.
Design professionals are invited to collaborate with students, parents, and teachers from Lea and Kelly Schools and representatives from public agencies. Charrette participants will present their design concepts for greening schoolyards to the public and a panel of experts in education, community development, and sustainability.

The Transforming Urban Schoolyards Design Charrette provides breakfast, lunch, an evening reception, and 8 CEH (Continuing Education Hours) to participating design professionals.

Public Presentation
4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public. RSVP.
Working to green your schoolyard or neighborhood? Join us for a public presentation of the ideas generated through the Transforming Urban Schoolyards Design Charrette.

A panel of experts in education, community development, and sustainability will respond to the ideas generated by charrette participants. The presentation will wrap up with a lively audience Q & A session. Reception to follow.

Craig Ablin is a member of Wissahickon Neighbors Civic Association and passionate champion for Wissahickon Neighbors Park. Craig met up with us recently at the park, which hugs the hillside of this Northwest Philly neighborhood.

“I moved here six years ago.’ Craig said, “My wife’s from Scotland originally and I’m from Chicago. We were living in New Orleans. We were actually Hurricane Katrina evacuees… the nice thing about New Orleans is it’s a pretty tight community.” Craig saw the potential for Wissahickon Neighbors Park to create a stronger sense of community in his newly-adopted neighborhood.

The park had fallen into neglect and “there were only two user groups,” Craig recalled, “the basketball courts drew kids in their teens and twenties and the play equipment drew families with young children. There was no reason why other people would come in… part of changing the park was to broaden its users.”

Craig began advocating for the park, pushing for renovations and getting everyone to pitch in with the park’s upkeep. Today, the park looks clean and cared-for. But, Craig tells us, it wasn’t until the Collaborative created a pro bono “big-picture” plan for the park that major renovations became a reality.

Now the park is poised to involve everyone: The entrance will be reinvented as the neighborhood’s communal porch—a pleasant place to for some fresh-air sitting, reading, texting, etc. And the already-active basketball and play areas will become even more versatile!

Taking the first step towards a master plan to renovate: Collaborative volunteers will assess the current condition of homes in the Friends Housing Cooperative.

The Community Design Collaborative is pleased to announce its latest grants of preliminary design services. The Collaborative’s spring crop of service grants will build stronger neighborhoods through design—and lead to high-quality affordable housing, engaged youth, vibrant commercial corridors, and healthy families.

The Friends Housing Cooperative, in partnership with WCRP, will receive design services to guide renovations of its historic and affordable cooperative housing in East Poplar and Northern Liberties.

The Landsowne Boys and Girls Club was awarded a grant to investigate the replacement of a deteriorated park pavilion that is instrumental to operating its recreational and sports programs.

Manayunk Development Corporation will work with a volunteer design team to explore design strategies for the canal-side facades of several Main Street Manayunk businesses.

Puentes Salud (Bridges of Health) will receive design assistance to transform a vacant commercial space into an innovative community health and wellness center serving South Philadelphia’s Latino immigrant population.

Revelation Outreach Community Center, Inc. will work with a volunteer team on a conceptual design to envision a sustainable, mixed-use development in the Mantua neighorhood.

Know a nonprofit that needs us? The Collaborative’s service grants can answer important questions: What’s our vision? What do we need? What will it look like? What will it cost? With a Collaborative report in hand, nonprofits are well positioned to answer these questions, establish partnerships, obtain funding, and gain community support for their projects. Apply!

So far, Infill Philadelphia has addressed affordable housing, commercial corridors, food access, and industrial sites.

Last year, the Collaborative engaged the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning to conduct an full evaluation of Infill Philadelphia, a Collaborative initiative exploring design strategies for infill development in older urban neighborhoods.

OMG interviewed nonprofits, intermediary partners, design professionals, and funders who were engaged in the Infill Philadelphia. They developed a full picture of the successes and challenges of the initiative to help us understand where it’s been and where it should go.

You can get into the nitty-gritty of Infill Philadelphia’s development and evolution, just as we did. Read OMG’s article on Infill Philadelphia in the latest issue of the Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal: Promoting the Importance of Quality Design in the Community Development Field.

Steveanna Wynn with SHARE 's Volunteer Director Eloise McBride. As leaders of large food distribution and volunteer programs, they've learned how to deal with the unexpected. "We don't have 'problems' here. We have 'challenges'."

Steveanna Wynn, Executive Director of SHARE Food Programs and a Collaborative client, sat down with us recently to talk about SHARE’s mission, secrets to sustaining a nonprofit, the food-focused future of SHARE’s Hunting Park facility, and how the Collaborative helped her nonprofit. We invite you to sit in!

The Collaborative first met Steveanna in spring of 2011 when we organized a design charrette for SHARE. The nonprofit had just purchased the former aircraft parts factory where it has distributed food to nonprofit organizations from Brooklyn to the Eastern Shore for more than a dozen years. Now it’s working to transform the site into a healthy food and urban agriculture hub.

Running a Nonprofit: “It’s never a problem, it’s a challenge”

The Design Charrette: “All of a sudden, it was like… POOF!”

Steveanna concluded,“The amount of time that [the volunteers] spent in this building going through the basement, going through the upstairs, walking through every space, taking pictures, writing things down, getting things to scale… it was like we were the thing… like we were the most important piece of this.” Steveanna adds, “We could not have had a better group of folks that totally got who we were, totally got what we did, totally got why we did it… they were phenomenal… it was a great experience.”

The first in a “Meet Our Clients” mini-series. Interviews conducted by Collaborative intern Kara Silberthau and edited by Linda Dottor.

Green schoolyards have gained international attention as an innovative way to enhance learning and play. Locally, the City of Philadelphia has embraced green schoolyards as a way to manage stormwater and create more open space for neighborhoods.

The Collaborative’s first preliminary design projects for campus parks in the mid-2000s led to the success of Greening Greenfield— and inspired other school groups to pursue similar projects. Here’s a sampling of recent Collaborative green schoolyard projects:

Meredith Elementary School/
Queen Village Neighbors Association

Meredith’s chain link fence and concrete surfaces do not reflect its commitment to innovative education and the community. School and neighborhood leaders want a schoolyard that offers environmental education in a “backyard” setting and fosters community pride. A big feature of the conceptual design is a bioswale planted between the playground and parking lot—complete with a boardwalk that allows for natural play.

Powelton Village Civic Association/
Friends and Alumni of Powel School

The parents and alumni of Powel School want to engage students at every level—emotionally, socially, physically, and cognitively—while creating a more sustainable site. The Collaborative outlined a strategy for greening the schoolyard in phases, starting with habitat garden, vegetable garden, and outdoor classroom to make Powel School an even stronger neighborhood asset.

 George W. Nebinger Elementary School/
Bella Vista Town Watch

“De-paving” part of Nebinger’s playground could create a green haven in a crowded neighborhood, providing an edible garden, a playground with a lawn and tumbling hill, a rain garden, and an outdoor classroom. The conceptual plan carves out a “secret garden” protected by a vegetative screen—a quiet area for everyone, including children with autism and other special needs, to play.

Bache Martin Elementary School/
Fairmount CDC

A conceptual  master plan connects the two buildings that make up the campus and adds green elements like flow-through planters and rain gardens that collect stormwater  and enliven streets and sidewalks. A key element in transforming the campus will be a “shared street” with curb bumpouts, plantings, and a colorful crosswalk pattern.

John H. Taggart Elementary School/
Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia

A diverse elementary school with a large population of Southeast Asian students, Taggart School is focusing its efforts on a 25’ by 120’ enclosed play area for its pre-K to first grade students. Play spaces with safety surfacing and quieter areas shaded by trellises, linked by a walkway of porous paving, will create a greener place for Taggart’s youngest students to play and explore.

Connecting Cities—and  People—to Nature
Green schoolyards have a big role to play in building a more sustainable city. Volunteer and urban planner Nicole Hostettler summarized just why green schoolyards are so important to Philadelphia in our Nebinger Elementary School report:

Green City, Clean Waters, the city’s stormwater master plan, eschews the conventional approach—building more and bigger underground catchment basins to manage stormwater— to focus on  “green infrastructure” on the ground’s surface that will allow water to soak in more slowly and naturally. The plan is the first of its kind nationally.

According to the plan, schools make up 2% of the impervious cover in combined sewer drainage areas, big portions of the city where green infrastructure matters the most. Schools can be redesigned to make an impact, the plan says, with, “an array of stormwater measures which can be implemented on school properties, such as rain gardens, green roofs, porous pavement, trees, rain barrels, and cisterns.

Green schoolyards can change minds too. In his book, Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv popularized the term, “Nature Deficit Disorder.” As children spend less time outdoors, he argues, behavioral and health problems are on the rise. One solution is to utilize schoolyards to enrich childhood experiences with nature. And, as neighborhood anchors, school sites are uniquely positioned to connect adults with nature and sustainable lifestyles.

 See all of our green schoolyards projects for public schools: Collaborative_green schoolyards_ projects

Many thanks to the volunteers who donated their time and talent to the green schoolyard projects featured here!

Meredith Elementary School
Amy Yaskowski
Charles Oropallo
Terra Studio: Tim Kerner
Neil Yersak
Duffield Associates: Dan Meier
Donald Logan

Powel School
NAM Planning & Design, LLC: Nancy Minich, Melissa Boffa, Rachel Feigenbutz
Nicole Keegan
Jason Sandman
Firmarchitecture: Carey Yonce, Rebecca Vierya
Duffield Associates, Inc.: Tom Halliwell
Owners Rep, Inc.: Jim Curry, Robert Green

Nebinger Elementary School
Studio Gaia, LLC: Kimberlee Douglas, Alexandra Zahn
Elwell Studio: Jason Elwell
Nicole Hostettler
Torcon, Inc.: Anthony Armento, Angela Cirino

Bache-Martin Elementary School
OLIN: Richard Roark, Ben Lawrence, Brian McVeigh
Meliora Environmental Design LLC: Michele Adams, Altje Hoekstra
International Consultants, Inc.: Michael Funk
Erin Roark
Christine Milller Cruiess

Taggart Elementary School
Birdsall Services Group: Gerald DeFelicis, Robert Toomer
manifest AD: Jeb Bookman