Stories

Meet Alyce Brown, a CIRD community leader with a big vision for the small town of Entiat, WA. Working with local organizations and stakeholder groups, Brown plans to transform the town into a tourism destination that provides year-round recreational services to visitors and long-term prosperity to the region.

Meet Calvin Phelps, a CIRD cohort community leader who is renovating a former community jail into an arts-centered space. By preserving the jail, the soon-to-be Pike School of Art will give new life to the community’s rich culture and history.

A CIRD Learning Cohort Summit participant returns to her youthful stomping grounds ready to learn about rural design. What did she find out?

Nearly half of the 2019 CIRD cohort communities identified downtown development as their primary design challenge.

A strong and vibrant Main Street is quintessential to the core of small-town America. It also proved to be a priority for many of this year’s CIRD Learning Cohort. Learn more about why cohort participants feel so passionately about improving Main Street in their communities.

How do we connect food security with rural design? Katie Starr, Bill Emerson National Hunger Fellow at the Housing Assistance Council, shares her experiences weaving the two areas together as part of her fellowship work.

This piece is a reflection from CIRD team member Evelyn Immonen on her experience at the Rural Generation Summit 2019, and the opinions are her own.

These CIRD communities offer a plethora of helpful hints and creative ideas for hosting community-wide events that address diverse rural design issues.

Highway 83 runs from North Texas straight through to Canada. Valentine, Nebraska sits somewhere in the upper middle, the closest neighbor the Rosebud Lakota Sioux reservation, where Highway 83 morphs into Main Street. Valentine is lucky: the looming façade to façade reconstruction of Main Street is seen as a cause for celebration.

This year’s CIRD Workshop in Las Vegas, New Mexico, hosted by the Hermit’s Peak Watershed Alliance (HPWA) brought a new focus to active listening and drew upon the community's knowledge to plan the town’s future river park. By empowering independent voices, members of the town worked toward a foundation of communal trust and common purpose: what emerged was a shared love and value for the river.

Inspired by his time in the Southwest for the 2018 CIRD Workshop in Las Vegas, New Mexico, Resource Team Member James Rojas authored this piece, in which he uses examples from West Las Vegas to demonstrate the material significance of Hispano urban design and architecture and its importance in preservation and expression of local Hispano culture.

Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo have facilitated thousands of projects for artists and entrepreneurs. In exchange for donating, some perk or nod of recognition may come your way. You may have even contributed to a project without a promise of something in exchange, understanding that, while you’re supporting something you believe in, you will never get those dollars back.

With deliberate investments that nurture local initiatives – alongside the organization of economies of scale, local producers and small businesses – the Tuttle Rural Innovation Center (TRIC) is planting the seed for a healthier and more equitable food-based economy to take root in Central North Dakota and beyond.

Valentine Nebraska’s CIRD award is featured in the latest issue of Nebraska Farmer. Author Curt Arens discusses the significance of the award for the community, as residents see the upcoming redesign and construction of the I-83 as an opportunity to reimagine Main Street as a walkable, multi-modal destination.

April Greene interviews Jamie Hand, the Director of Research Strategies at ArtPlace and former Director of CIRD; Jen Hughes, the current Program Director of CIRD and the NEA’s Design and Creative Placemaking Director; and Cynthia Nikitin, Senior VP at Project for Public Spaces and current Director of CIRD.

Kristina Norman’s article for the Delta Democrat Times captures the CIRD team’s visit to Greenville, Mississippi. Norman describes the team’s initial impression, illuminating the issues that the CIRD workshop and resource team members will seek to address in Greenville’s move towards racial and economic equitability through the redevelopment of their historic downtown.

In anticipation of the Tribe’s imminent resettlement from their ancestral land along the coast of Louisiana, in January 2017 the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe (IdJC Tribe) gathered for a pivotal community workshop, with support from the Citizen’s Institute on Rural DesignTM(CIRD).

The Akwesasne Tourism Working Group hosted a capacity building workshop on November 17-19, 2016. We caught up with the workshop team to reflect on the project, their process, and the work that lies ahead for Akwesasne. Since the conclusion of the workshop, Akwesasne was awarded $2 million of federal funding through the the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Administration for Native Americans (ANA) Sustainable Employment and Economic Development Strategies Program (SEEDS).

The city of Thomasville, Georgia (population 18,700) hosted their Citizens' Institute on Rural Design™ workshop at the Thomasville Center for the Arts and Scholars Academy on October 27-29, 2016. The goal of the workshop was to develop preliminary design concepts to inform a master plan for MacIntyre Park that would address stormwater runoff challenges in the park, while transforming it into a recreation destination that encourages active lifestyles among the city’s residents. This workshop implemented a collaborative, community led approach to revitalizing the park with a strong history and cultural heritage in the community, and brought city-wide partners together to tackle the design challenge.

The Town of Limon (population 2,000) hosted their Citizens' Institute on Rural Design™ (CIRD) workshop February 27 to March 1, 2017. The CIRD capacity building workshop successfully engaged local residents, convened partners and funders early on in the visioning process, and used the initial excitement created by the workshop to take immediate short term action that can leverage longer term projects and funding.