NCCP and Creative Placemaking Communities

Dear colleagues,

Recently, those of you who get The National Consortium for Creative Placemaking newsletter will see a message from our team talking about how and why NCCP is sunsetting this summer. It also briefly mentions Creative Placemaking Communities, a new initiative that I and other members of the Certificate community, are developing. 

I wanted to give you a little more depth and context for these actions, and to inspire you about the future of our work in creative placemaking.

You will read that NCCP was a COVID casualty. Yes, the snowball effect of canceled and postponed events, promised program funding that was understandably redirected by our supporters to other matters, the stalling out when we had to lay off and furlough staff, and ongoing uncertainty caused by COVID led the NCCP leadership to close NCCP's doors. But in light of the most traumatic and existentialist age of our lives, I felt that we needed to make a big change in what we do with creative placemaking.

NCCP, I think, did the right things at the right time. We began in 2012, at the infancy of the creative placemaking movement. Since that time, we have focused on introducing the work to thousands of people and gathering networks of people who now see themselves as creative placemakers. When I created the prototype of the Certificate program in 2011, Community Coaching in 2012, the creative placemaking webinars in 2013, and the Creative Placemaking Leadership Summits in 2014, there were very few organizations doing what we did. (And I still believe that still no one does quite what the Certificate program and Summits do.) 

But times have changed dramatically since 2012, and so must we. There are plenty of organizations that are now introducing people to creative placemaking.  So we can focus on activating communities of creative placemakers to leverage the fulcrums of political, industrial, cultural and economic systems to address wicked problems such as systemic oppression; climate change; the blind perpetuation of inequity in cultural ecosystems; and the intersection of challenges from globalization, suburbanization, knowledge economies, and the splintering of the urban-rural networks. In other words, we will influence the people who make things stop and go in communities, or influence the influencers, to steward deep and lasting impacts.  We're going to use our broad and sophisticated knowledge of human systems to raise a mirror to leaders, and use creative placemaking as a looking glass to help them see and create better futures. 

I've actually been doing this quietly and essentially part-time for more than a decade. Now it will be my full-time job.

To see where we're going, please go to https://cpcommunities.learnworlds.com  I hope we're going your way. If we are, I hope you'll go with Creative Placemaking Communities.

Leo

PS: The Certificate community is made up of students, graduates, instructors and staff associated with the Certificate in Creative Placemaking program (and its prototypes) that I created and led at Rutgers, Ohio State and NHIA/New England College. The Certificate program will now be housed and managed entirely within Creative Placemaking Communities. We will be inviting organizations, institutions of higher education, and individual educators to partner with us on this and other programs. If you're interested, please contact me.