The Kansas City Museum believes that Creative Placemaking is an effective and sustainable strategy for neighborhood development and for providing access and equity to parks and open spaces. To learn more about creative placemaking, visit The Trust for Public Land to download The Field Guide for Creative Placemaking and Parks.
In 2018, the City Parks Alliance and the Trust for Public Land chose Kansas City and the National Parks of Boston through a competitive national process to host creative placemaking workshops. The workshops were the result of a unique collaboration between the City Park Alliance’s PARKXCHANGE City Workshop program and Trust for Public Land’s Creative Placemaking Program.
Kansas City was chosen because of the creative placemaking work being done by the Kansas City Museum and Parks Department starting in 2017. According to the City Parks Alliance, “Kansas City’s application stood out because they demonstrated a clear understanding of how creative placemaking strategies could be used to build collaboration across city agencies and improve civic engagement in the public planning process. They also articulated a clear strategy for applying creative placemaking strategies to improve quality of life for low-income and diverse residents throughout the city’s historic and diverse northeast corridor.”
The $50,000 cost for each workshop was funded in part by a National Endowment for the Arts grant, City Parks Alliance, Trust for Public Land, and $12,000 from each of the host cities. The workshops were led by professional facilitators and drew on the experience of leaders around the country through a unique curriculum that included interactive, peer-to-peer learning, where teams of local participants explored new approaches to cross-sector partnerships, community engagement, and collaborative governance through creative placemaking strategies and tools.
In 2019, the Kansas City workshops included Matthew Clarke, Director of Creative Placemaking at The Trust For Public Land; Klara Elliott-Ortega, Chief of Arts and Culture for the City of Boston; Bryan Lee, Principal and Design Director of Colloqate and a national Design Justice Advocate, and Visual Artist Amanda Lovelee.
In 2020, the Kansas City Museum Foundation became the recipient of a 10 Minute Walk grant from the Trust for Public Land. The Trust for Public Land is funding eight nonprofits across seven major metropolitan areas. These grants will help bolster local efforts to ensure that 100% of people in U.S. cities have access to parks or green space within a 10-minute walk of home by 2050. This marks the second round of funding for this “partnership fund,” which supports grassroots efforts in cities committed to this 100% goal. To date, 10 Minute Walk has awarded more than $2.1 million to nonprofits and city leaders in close to 50 cities across the country working to improve parks and green space.
Funding to the Kansas City Museum Foundation will support the Kansas City Museum and the Parks Department to lead outreach efforts in and around three parks in the City’s Historic Northeast Neighborhoods. The funding will support including equity in the City’s Comprehensive Plan and the Park Department’s Strategic Plans.
Creative Placemaking logo designed by Rachel Eilts.