For the 10th Anniversary of the Design Museum of Chicago, our auxiliary board is reflecting on where design has been and where it can go in the future. We are hosting an event series exploring ten areas where design has the potential or the responsibility to make a future impact.
About This Event:
Join us to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Design Museum and discuss the impact of community-led design in the fight for food justice. Food growers and mobilizers are routinely identifying issues, designing solutions, applying them and iterating in real time in order to feed their communities. Whether it's through constructing physical spaces and forms to grow food, mapping processes to distribute food efficiently and effectively, or incorporating community and environmental feedback into the food they decide to grow, the evidence of design is everywhere.
In this conversation our focus will center on how those who grow our food are designing pathways towards food sovereignty, the barriers communities are facing when feeding themselves, and how conventional designers and the food practitioners can work together to expand food sovereignty and shift narratives around who are and are not recognized as designers.
About our partners:
Community Food Navigator
Launched in 2020, Community Food Navigator envisions a food system rooted in justice, in which the people who produce, distribute, and consume food also control its production, distribution, and governance.
Our mission is to expand food sovereignty—particularly in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities—by engaging Chicago-area food growers, producers, educators, and eaters; strengthening connections and collaboration; telling more truthful stories about the Chicago food ecosystem; and redistributing power.
We do this by elevating community-led solutions, building dialogue both digitally and through in-person gatherings, and by amplifying the voices of people doing this work on the ground.
Paula Acevedo, El Paseo Community Garden
Since 2009, El Paseo Community Garden has been fostering community and wellness for Pilsen residents through land stewardship, conservation, community-design, education, wellness, gardening, and more. El Paseo Community Garden is more than just a garden. It is an integral part of the Pilsen community, a historically working class Latinx community– and also a neighborhood known for its rich Mexican culture, activism, and strong sense of place. This one acre of community-managed space celebrates Pilsen's diversity, history and culture while connecting residents with nature and each other. El Paseo's mission is to empower through nature.
Pastor Reshorna Fitzpatrick, Stone Temple Baptist Church
5 years ago, the historic Stone Temple Baptist Church transformed a neglected city lot into a thriving organic vegetable and flower garden. The garden is stewarded by volunteers from the church and community, provides produce at no cost to North Lawndale neighbors, and is a piece of the congregation’s larger vision to create a peaceful and safe communal space. The garden has since become a central gathering, eating, celebration and education space, and is an extension of the incredible legacy of the church that was once the home base of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King during his time in Chicago.
Additional Panelist info coming soon!
Human Scale
Human Scale is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 2018 by a group of architecture students with the goal of using their skills to make a positive impact in their communities.
Our mission is to design and build functional, beautiful, and meaningful public spaces in historically disinvested neighborhoods across Chicago. As a result, our work seeks to improve mental and physical wellness, promote civic responsibility, highlight heritage, and culture, and foster strong inter-generational relationships within the communities we work in.
The Garden, Floating Museum
Floating Museum is an art collective that creates new models: exploring relationships between art, community, architecture, and public institutions. Using site-responsive art, design, and programming we explore the potential in these relationships, considering the infrastructure, history, and aesthetics of a space.
The Garden proposes a monumental remembering of specific plant's histories as a framework to contest contemporary globalism's speed, dislocation and endless churning. In recognizing the ways in which ‘free' trade, and monoculture of plants have shaped the diaspora's of the world while taking time to reflect on movement of plants and people, our project aims to build a conversational structure.
Specials thanks to our series sponsors UJAMAA Construction.
This series is dedicated to the incomparable Jon Veal, a founding member of DMoC’s Auxiliary Board who transformed Chicago.