Designing Place-Based Convenings to Build Community Power

The built environment plays a powerful role in shaping social, economic, and public health outcomes.

Yet, the decisions that shape our places unfold across fragmented systems with varying priorities, challenges, and constraints. In these conditions, convening, co-learning, and aligning around shared goals have a unique potential to advance equitable, healthy, and thriving places. 

How do we host spaces where community leaders, designers, artists, policymakers, and funders build the relationships that make place-based change possible? 

One answer lies in recognizing that community design is a socially connective practice. At its core, it builds networks, buy-in, and aligns communities to shared goals. This kind of work is inherently cross-disciplinary, and often trans-disciplinary, bringing together perspectives that don’t always operate in the same spaces but are deeply interconnected in practice.

At NDC, we’ve been exploring this idea through convenings that intentionally bring together cross-sector audiences in dialogue, learning, and exchange. 

This approach builds what psychologists call collective efficacy: a group’s shared belief in its ability to organize, take action, and achieve meaningful outcomes together.

First introduced by Albert Bandura, collective efficacy reflects confidence in the power of coordinated, collective effort rather than individual capabilities. In the context of place-based work, it becomes a critical foundation for long-term impact, shaping how communities sustain and advance change over time.

Recent examples – including hosting International Placemaking Week in 2024 and launching The Vision is Yours: A Regional Placemaking & Placekeeping Conference in 2025 – demonstrate our growing efforts to create opportunities for aligned practitioners to co-learn and share tactics, while advancing a more whole and aligned sector.

Collaboration Matters 

We believe that the more inclusive and community-driven the process, the better the design. And the same goes for designing convenings. 

Marcus Monroe, Chief of Staff to the Chair of the Prince George’s County Planning Board (M-NCPPC) and a member of the 2025 & 2026 The Vision Is Yours Steering Committees, brings a deep focus on building more aligned corridors across Prince George’s County. 

Marcus continues: “Creating spaces where local leaders, community organizations, regional stakeholders, funders, and policy makers can exchange ideas and build relationships is essential to advancing solutions that reflect regional goals and local realities.” 

While collaborating with leaders and practitioners on the steering committee provides a forum for stakeholders to inform the conference themes, accepted proposals, and approach, collaborating with local partners to implement a community design project in conjunction with the conference also allows us to partner at the tactical level.  

At the Bunker Hill Mural project, this approach took shape through a hands-on build day that brought together residents, artists, and volunteers to co-create a public art installation rooted in neighborhood identity. Community members were involved in both the design process and physically creating the mural, creating an opportunity for connection, ownership, and shared pride.

We’re engaging ecosystem partners in sector-building work, while also making a tangible impact in real time. 

Place Matters

Holding events in community spaces—like libraries, parks, community arts centers or even on the street—often requires more bespoke approaches to conference planning and logistics, but provides an invaluable connection to local places and the people who shape them.

By highlighting locally stewarded venues and businesses, we build meaningful partnerships and connections and contribute to local economies. 

That principle shaped every decision during Placemaking Week in Baltimore, which NDC co-organized in partnership with Project for Public Spaces (PPS). PPS’s Director of Events, Juliet Kahne, worked closely with NDC to ensure that the event embodied the same values it promoted–using the city itself as a classroom.

Kahne has seen this approach work across cities around the world, but she noted that Baltimore’s version was especially rooted in its neighborhoods.

Partnering with NDC allowed PPS to collaborate with local hosts who brought deep community relationships and firsthand insight into Baltimore’s neighborhoods.

In one example, NDC organized a series of neighborhood walks leading up to the closing event, which included guided visits to locally managed public spaces and projects the organization had supported. Kahne recalled that those walks left a lasting impression, allowing participants to see the city block by block.

“I think that blew everyone’s minds, because they just hadn’t done anything like that at an event before,” said Kahne. “Just getting to walk around and experience a neighborhood without driving, really seeing how it changes from one place to another, and getting to see these small, local public space sites was very, very special.”

Choosing community-anchored venues also helps honor local identity while intentionally directing business to local economies.

Place as Practice

In 2025, NDC collaborated with Todd Ferry, an architect and leader in public-interest design, to organize a workshop at The Vision is Yours: A Regional Placemaking Conference that provided real-time capacity-building support to three emerging placemaking projects.

Reflecting on that experience, he shared that a well-designed session can do more than produce tangible outcomes; it can create a difference-making experience in its own right: 

“A workshop session is an introductory starting point, and hopefully folks who meet each other in those sessions can continue the conversations throughout the event… But the process needs to be empowering in and of itself, and then hopefully, and often, you have outcomes, such as new groups forming around this thing… there are different ways that the actual process can be beneficial regardless of the outcomes.”

Rachel London, who leads partnerships at DC-based nonprofit FreshFarm, which helps create food access throughout the Mid-Atlantic, participated in the workshop to explore how food systems intersect with place-based community work. The conversations she had there helped reshape her understanding of her own network and its potential reach.

“It was really clarifying to me to see that there’s this massive network of people that connect Fresh Farm, but maybe don’t know each other,” London said. “Being in that space helped bring people into the mission and reminded me that our work has always been tied to place.”

For London, those conversations opened doors that have continued to inform the organization’s work long after the event sessions ended:

“I met physical neighbors to our food hub who have similar space needs as we do,” she explained. “It really expanded the possibilities for thinking through funding and partnerships in the current landscape. I don’t know if those connections would have happened otherwise.”

That also means that organizers must be generous with expertise, sharing what they know while making space for others to do the same. Surveys, open calls, and post-event feedback can help organizers understand what’s resonating and what’s missing, turning each convening into an ongoing cycle of learning and refinement.

Bridging Theory and Practice 

The networks of people who steward and advocate for place-based interventions are essential, yet aligning partners across jurisdictions and sectors can be deeply challenging.

As Nate Storring, Executive Director of Project for Public Spaces, pointed out, this is where trusted organizations can help bridge those divides:

“As a trusted service provider within Maryland’s civic and community sectors, NDC has a unique opportunity to represent this group’s concerns within the public sector.”

Join the Conversation

Join us at the 2026 International Placemaking Week this June in Detroit, where NDC Director Jen Goold and Development Manager Nicole Ringel will present and connect with others advancing place-based collaboration.

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