How can inclusive design spur community connections and build stronger partnerships in the process?
During the COVID pandemic, the Van Alen Institute and the Urban Design Forum collaborated to launch Neighborhoods Now, a program shepherding resources, both funding and people, toward pandemic recovery and strengthening community partnerships across four boroughs in New York City.
One notable community partnership was with Think!Chinatown, an intergenerational non-profit based in Manhattan’s Chinatown that fosters community through neighborhood engagement, storytelling and the arts. Manhattan’s Chinatown was severely impacted by the pandemic, not only due to the health crisis but also a rise in anti-Asian hate. Through partnering with Neighborhoods Now, Think!Chinatown sought to unite the community, spark joy and connection amongst community members, and create a warm, welcoming space where residents could once again feel safe. From this partnership, the Chinatown Night Market was born.
Launched the following summer, the Night Markets not only created a welcoming, safe, and joyful space for community members, but they also brought partners from across the City together to rebuild trust and re-focus on community needs through the implementation of inclusive design.
In this new podcast, we learn how this partnership grew, how trust was rebuilt, and how this project kept Manhattan’s Chinatown community at its core. We talk with Andrew Brown (Van Alen Institute) and Yin Kong (Think!Chinatown), as they share the key elements that made this community partnership successful, and discuss how programs like Neighborhoods Now can create lasting positive change for communities.
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Please find a transcript of this talk further down this page.
Resources and Footnotes
More on Collective Impact
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Music
The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.
The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.
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Podcast Transcript
Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast, here to share resources to support social change makers working on cross-sector collaboration.
The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field-building initiative that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.
During the COVID pandemic, the Neighborhoods Now program was launched to help shepherd resources to support pandemic recovery and strengthen community partnerships across four boroughs in New York City.
One notable community partnership was with Think!Chinatown, an intergenerational non-profit based in Manhattan’s Chinatown, an area which was severely impacted by the pandemic, both due to the health crisis and also a rise in anti-Asian hate. Through partnering with Neighborhoods Now, Think!Chinatown was able to launch the Chinatown Night Market project, with a goal of creating a welcoming, safe, and vibrant community space.
What happened next was that not only did the new Night Markets create a joyful space for community members, but they also brought partners from across the City together to rebuild trust and re-focus on community needs through the implementation of inclusive design.
To learn how this partnership grew, we talk with Andrew Brown from the design nonprofit Van Alen Institute and Yin Kong from Think!Chinatown. They share the key elements that made this community partnership successful, and discuss how programs like Neighborhoods Now can create lasting positive change for communities.
Moderating this discussion is my Forum colleague Cindy Santos, who is senior associate at the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions. Let’s tune in.
Cindy Santos: I’m so excited today to be talking to two folks who are in my own backyard in New York City. When I think about New York City I just think about the vibrancy, everything from living in Crown Heights where I am to Prospect Lefferts Gardens, to Chinatown. Part of what really makes the city so vibrant is just all of the different ways that we can come together and really represent the culture and the people that we are. This project in particular is really special because it really brings together some interesting partners to create sources of joy. So I’d like to open up for you both to introduce yourself before we get into what I know will be a really rich conversation. So I’ll turn it over to Andrew Brown and Yin Kong.
Andrew Brown: Thanks, Cindy. I’m Andrew Brown, director of programs at Van Alen. Van Alen Institute. We’re a small urban-design nonprofit based in Brooklyn. Our mission is to create equitable cities through inclusive design. Increasingly, we do that by partnering with small community benefit organizations all around New York that have been at the frontlines of addressing issues like systemic racism, unjust planning policies and planning decisions, recovering from public and private disinvestment in their neighborhood, and just trying to think of catalytic projects and programs involving the built environment that can help the neighborhood rebound and heal. We do a lot of work closely with them helping them shape a vision for a project, helping them connect with the right designers to make that project happen and then we also offer some funding to get projects off the ground. That’s us in a nutshell.
Yin Kong: I’m Yin Kong. I’m director of Think!Chinatown. We’re a place-based organization in Manhattan’s Chinatown. We work at the intersection of storytelling, arts, and neighborhood engagement. We do large public space activations, like Chinatown Block Parties, Chinatown Arts Festival, and Chinatown Night Markets, but a lot of our practice is behind the scenes in our storytelling practice. It’s really where we build the trust within the community, we learn all the pain points, we understand the different perspectives, and really build the community cohesion needed to come together when large issues come at us, often in Chinatown. So things that are usually out of our control, things like the world’s tallest mega jail being built on the west side of Chinatown, large city projects or forces of gentrification or recovery from the pandemic. We are able to do our work because of the groundwork beforehand, before crises of knowing our neighbors and knowing our communities and being a trusted entity within the neighborhood.
Cindy Santos: So now that we know about each of your individual organizations, talk to us about how you know each other. How did you come in contact with each other, what are you working on together?
Andrew Brown: Yeah, I can start. So we know Yin, by we I mean Van Alen through our COVID relief program, Neighborhoods Now. Started back in 2020 and did a—2021, 2022. We were working with community organizations around the city that have been hard hit by COVID and we put out a call to organizations saying if you’ve got ideas for projects that can help your neighborhood rebound from the worst effects of COVID, we’d love to help you connect with the resources to make those projects happen. I think the project was special because it wasn’t like a (inaudible) program. It didn’t prescribe on solution and push it out to every possible neighborhood. It really said, look we know COVID has hit every neighborhood in different ways and the recovery will take a different shape depending on what people are really dealing with on the ground. So we created a space and the resources for people to come to us with like their specific needs for a solution. And again, in our model we worked with them to kind of refine the project idea, connect with the right designers and then get some initial resources to develop a proof of concept. So it was with that program, that model, that we met Yin.
Yin Kong: Actually, that’s not how we met, Andrew.
Andrew Brown: No, what? Whoa, OK, I’m excited for this story. Interesting.
Yin Kong: I do want to tell the other story of how we did meet because I think it’s a really interesting way how we’ve come around. The first time we met was—was it 2016 or ’17, as part of the Chinatown Gateways Project, which was a large city proposal for a public space, Canal Street Triangle, and ultimately—I won’t get into the details, but ultimately, it was a failed project where there were inadequate community engagement practices and I came to know Van Alen because Van Alen was part of that project as the community engagement entity with the—I think to draw in the architects to make the competition, design competition.
It was a pivotal moment for Think!Chinatown because I could in real time failure after failure, communications between the city and our neighborhood in order to envision our public spaces appropriately. Because of that failure the proposed project so enraged the community that was shouted down and that project was never realized. So when I then—during the pandemic, I then came across in contact with Van Alen again through this COVID relief project. I was really hesitant honestly, about whether or not I would want to be a part of this program because of my previous experience and my knowledge of Van Alen, whether or not this is an entity that’s really interested in supporting from the community or as many experiences I have had with other well-meaning organizations. They have their own agenda and it’s not necessarily to listen carefully to the community. They may say that. There’s a lot of like key words and buzz words that people use, you know, community engagement, blah, blah, blah, but it’s not really innate in their practice.
But I know that there was new leadership at Van Alen and things I heard from our other community partner, AAFE, Asian Americans for Equality, who had been working with—you know, that I should check it out. So I was skeptical at first but I just want to bring this story here because we’re also working another project, a new exhibition I think Chinatown is working on right now with the Van Alen Design Sprints and we’ve come full circle. We’re now, we are again thinking about what Gateway to Chinatown would mean, but now from visioning from within the community and putting forth to the city our vision of what community and cultural representation mean. I’m in now this time with the full support of Van Alen so we’ve really come far away. I think it is because of this work that we’ve done, this post-pandemic work that we’ve been—recovery work that we’ve been doing with Van Alen to really, again, build that trust. When you work together you really build that trust and you’re able to accomplish so much with all of that.
So, going back to the story, about how we met over the post-pandemic or the pandemic recovery programs, Neighborhoods Now, it was such an important resource for us to have at that really difficult moment in our community. We were really struggling in Chinatown. I think people understand that Chinatown was first hit and hit the hardest during the pandemic, and on top of all of that, our community members were really afraid to come outside. They were scared for their physical safety. There were a lot of incidences of anti-Asian hate happening and people were so scared at that moment. We really wanted to be able to create a moment of joy for our community and have a place where people could come together and feel safe in their own neighborhood, in our own public spaces, and we were only able to have that happen with the support of the Neighborhoods Now project, bringing in all these great expertise, all these helping hands, designers and lighting engineers, and also financial support to make the seed of an idea reality and also to do it really fast. We did this project in a matter of like a couple months. It was an idea in February and we were presenting it throughout the summer. I think the first one was in May that year. It was super fast, but we needed to be. The time called for it and having this network was really helpful.
Cindy Santos: There’s so many threads that we can follow as we’re talking. One of them that came up for me was I think it’s really interesting that when you talk about rebounding from the pandemic, a lot of folks kind of immediately go to material needs, right? And it seems like what you’re talking about and the work that you did with Night Market was a little bit different. How is that different? Why did you think that this could help the community rebound?
Yin Kong: I always say that the best resources, or the most valuable resources, are human resources. It’s so true in community work because the whole point is to bring people together. It’s people feeling a sense of belonging and space when they contribute and feeling empowered that they can make a change and also feeling a sense of ownership, like that they should also partake in caretaking for a space or a place. But the reason why we thought the Night Market was a good way to, was a good element for recovery, was one, again, about the public sense of safety, especially at night. People were afraid to come out so it was a way to activate a place at night. Another was that we wanted our local vendors to have a new opportunity to sell, particularly our cultural, like our folk artisans, people who do like paper cut art or sugar painting art, dough figurines. They were really lacking in opportunities to sell and they were really struggling during that time, so we wanted to support our artists as well, and just bring everyone together at a time where people were afraid to be out and about in the city because of how they looked. It was really important to remember and celebrate our culture loudly with a lot of pride.
Cindy Santos: You know, I’m realizing that because I live in New York that I understand what a night market and that we actually haven’t said what the Night Market is, so if we can backtrack a little bit so that folks—I think we’ve talked about Van Alen as a partner and I do want to go back to that. We talked about why you think Night Market is such an important part of recovery, and really to be able to reclaim and be really proud of your cultural heritage, and if we can now talk about what is the Night Market?
Yin Kong: Yeah, Night Market is just such an exciting concept. It’s an exciting activity that when you say the word Night Market, people get super excited because it is very central to a lot of Asian cultures. It’s a place where people really come together. It’s buzzing. There’s a lot of energy, lot of small and micro businesses showcasing, you know, what they’ve got. Also, cultural performances as well. It’s really this idea of—there’s a saying in Chinese, “renao,” which is like hot and noisy where you’re basically generated—this is super exciting and loud. And that’s what it is. It’s like making—it’s not just selling stuff. It’s really about that feeling of being out and about and enjoying things and tasting things and meeting your neighbors. So it’s—so maybe that’s the explanation of like the feelings, maybe, but technically, you know, we have vendors. They have their little tables where they have skewers or different little dishes, little desserts, kind of small things that you buy and then you have a few—you have like, you’re holding one, you’re eating another one, your friend’s like feeding you another one. It’s a lot of little bites at the same time and we have these like plastic blue stools, Chinatown stools, that are out and about and they’re kind of in a formation where you have makeshift stage and we have great performers perform for you while you eat. We have a great DJ so there’s a man doing Cantopop and there’s lanterns on this wall that we’ve hung up on the side to like, you know, bring it some liveliness. I don’t know. Maybe someone from the outside. I feel like I’m too inside. I can’t like describe it.
Cindy Santos: No, I think that really explains it well, and Andrew, I do want to go to you because in hearing Yin talk about some of the former partnerships that the organization and the community have had that really haven’t been successful, it seems like (a), you showed as a good partner, (b), there were a lot of hands to make this happen, so I’m just curious, can you talk to us about why, why do you think that, how do you show up as a partner? Why do you think it’s been a successful partnership, and what are those hands, how do you bring all those hands together?
Andrew Brown: Yeah, I think the key to a successful partnership is I mean you’re hearing from Yin’s description and from her voice and her hand gestures. The vision really started with her and her team. So it started with someone who had a deep connection with the community. I think that’s critical for these sorts of projects to be successful. Going back to what Yin was saying earlier about that failed project—I can’t remember. Yin named it but it was Gateways to Chinatown. The project really started with the Department of Transportation in New York, which controls a traffic triangle that has a structure on it. It’s like an information kiosk. That’s meant to serve people who are visitors to Chinatown, but it’s kind of decorated with a lot of say stereotypically images that you would associate with Asian American cultures. There’s like red dragons and jade lanterns and things. The idea was to take that down and replace it with a new gateway so to speak, that would be representative of the neighborhood and maybe changing demographics and so on and so forth.
But the point is you don’t need to know the details. You just need to know that it started with the city agency and a desire to change this place, to create something that would be representative of the neighborhood that the agency serves but certainly like no one associated with the project is really from there. So I think lots of projects start that way and I think maybe there are ways to run them where the community feels more involved and they have a bigger stake in both the process and what comes out of it, but I think it was very difficult in that project to come to that sort of outcome just because I have felt there’s so much estrangement between the community and the agency to begin with, that to start with this 150,000-plus project, was kind of the wrong way to go about it. I think also the definition of success being let’s make a new structure at this place as opposed to let’s rehabilitate and repair relationships and bonds that the agency has with the neighborhood first before we do anything, kind of set it up in the wrong position to begin with.
And I think to reflect on the role of an organization like Van Alen, a design organization that really plays the role of matchmaker between—In that case, it was an agency that wanted to make a change on the ground and the community that would be the recipient of that change. I think it’s easy for organizations like ours to say, well, we’re just a bridge, we’re the go-between. We just take the ambition that was produced in X agency and we find some designers to give it a shape, and that’s kind of the end of it, and we might host like a community engagement workshop here and there, but we’re fundamentally detached from everything that’s going on. We’re just a facilitator, nothing more. I think fast-forwarding back to 2020 and COVID, and I think, Yin, did we start with you in 2020 or 2021? Either way. Yeah, yeah.
Yin Kong: 2021
Andrew Brown: During the pandemic that was supposed to last two weeks and ended up probably two-plus years, we connected and I think the structure of that program from the partners to Van Alen’s role to city involvement if and when they came in was totally different. One, like I said before, the vision for the change started with the community and with Yin, and I think it also wasn’t just Yin’s Night Market, and I think you can kind of get a sense of it from her description. It’s not just some food trucks and some tents up for food vendors to sell snacks. There’s a lot of culture in it, cultural programming, and a lot of rich, sort of locally specific notes that when you walk through that space, you’re seeing something that could only be there which right away I think doesn’t just make a better experience for the community that’s relying on this as a space for them to share what they’ve been doing or for residents who are looking for an opportunity to connect with local businesses or just have a fun night out. It’s a great space for people to feel like they see themselves reflected in what’s happening. It feels like they own that space, and that’s a very difficult, challenging thing to do in a city this big and this diverse, to let people walk around block by block and feel like they have some sort of imprint or mark on it that’s their own. It’s a really challenging thing to do but I think working with folks like Yin and projects like these create those sorts of experiences.
And then from there I think the role of Van Alen becomes I think much more robust and effective in that we’re not just trying to find a random set of designers that can in theory execute a place-making project but really finding folks who want to connect in the spirit of mutual support and mutual aid, to hear this really powerful vision from a local leader. So, yes, we want to put ourselves behind that like blood, sweat, and tears and make that vision happen, a very unique, community-specific vision happen.
I think as a result of that too, Van Alen gets to not just connect folks with resources that are available but we’re seeding relationships between designers and community organizations so that this one project is just the beginning of something which I think is really helpful for folks in Yin’s position where like her vision for the Night Market, it’s a big one but it’s really just scratching the surface of what she wants to do. I mean I don’t want to speak for you, Yin, but I know Yin is extremely ambitious and I know that Chinatown specifically, Manhattan Chinatown, holds a lot of opportunities for transformational landscape in a way that makes the neighborhood more equitable, serves folks who have been left behind in previous rounds of investment, previous projects.
So being able to have a tight team of people that you connect with, that you go to again and again for help and support I think is really meaningful. And for Van Alen we consider that to be a definition of success for these projects. We always care about the quality of the fiscal transformation that happens, the quality of the project but those relationships that carry forward, that’s the goal. That’s huge.
Ying Kong: A hundred percent about those—it’s about the human resources. It’s about this connection and bringing people into the fold. That’s what community organizing is. We’re working on our fourth year of the Night Market now. We’re out of the incubation phase of the Neighborhoods Now project but a lot of these designers and engineers are still signed on. They’re still committed to this project. They even evolved to even supporting us design our new space that we’re about to open, Chinatown Studios, so they are now within the orbit, within the family for Think!Chinatown, and we’re able to take their energy and direct them in a way that supports the Chinatown community, and it’s been really great.
I also want to point out another really great partnership that’s actually intra community or inter? Which one is it? But AAFE, Asian Americans for Equality, they’re the ones that brought us in to this project. We had been friendly but we never had worked before, worked together before, and through this Neighborhoods Now project we were finally able to execute this idea that we had talked about before. So the Night Market was an idea that Think and AAFE had talked about before together but we just never had the means to execute. But AAFE, they’re turning 50 this year. They’re a huge organization. They do community real estate development—sorry, community housing development and just a huge nonprofit versus us, Think!Chinatown. We’re this little, itty bitty, mighty team but having the support of a large organization is actually really—it’s a rare situation in Chinatown. A lot of the times, you know, with where the—I don’t know how much I want to get into this but like with the—when you’re fighting for resources, oftentimes groups in kind of the same realm don’t work together. They compete for resources rather than work together so I think this is a really great case where an established organization took us under their wing and supported us through this process and brought us into the fold to create this Night Market.
Because of that we’ve gone on to partner on way bigger projects. One, they’re our landlords now for Chinatown Studio but also now we’re dreaming together of the Asian American Arts Research Center which we’re developing and fleshing as well. All this came from the Neighborhoods Now project, and because of the power of people coming together and building that trust through a relatively smaller project, you know, the Night Market is a big project but we can get into things beyond just the festival of, you know, once a month throughout the summer to longer, permanent, lasting changes.
Cindy Santos: You’ve mentioned trust a couple of times, both you, Andrew, and as I’m thinking about building that trust, how did you actually create the conditions for community to feel that they could vision together, that their dream could come to fruition? How did they know that they could trust you to help them—to help that happen?
Yin Kong: It was one of the first—I think it was the first time I’ve ever been a part of a project where they said, hey, do you—would you like the support? It’s like human resources and we’ll find a bunch of really smart people to help you, and here’s some money. You don’t have to write an application. You don’t have to, you know, tell us exactly step by step everything you’re doing and tell us like the metrics, how you’ll measure the success. We trust you as a community organization to know the needs of your community at this crisis moment. Just do it and we’ll come along the way and support as we can. That had never happened to me before so from that approach I knew there was really a different outlook. I was very much looking to the community organizations to lead this project rather than us trying to fulfill a grant requirement or trying to finagle our way into some sort of grant so that we could support ourselves to do the work that we actually wanted to do which is something that’s very common in the nonprofit world. So for me that was the moment I really knew this was going to be a different project.
Andrew Brown: Yeah, on our side on top of creating that freedom for the community organizations to define what they wanted and what they needed from our resources was bringing in the right designers, like people who were willing to kind of take the back seat to the vision and the dreaming of folks who, again, like they walk through the neighborhood just like everybody else and they can see what the problem areas are but they’re not built environment professionals.
So you’re working with them, you’re taking their lead at the same time that you’re also helping to guide and steer a little bit in the setting of expectations in terms of like what can be done on what timeframe with what budget so to speak. So finding designers who were comfortable working in that way, kind of like in a co- way where you’re constantly iterating again and again and again to get to the right goals was key. One thing I will say as a bit of a challenge going forward and continuing to create this space where all partners involved work in this very high trust is that COVID is over.
I think the reality of the pandemic created a set of circumstances where trusting these community organizations and civic leaders on the ground seems like a necessity. It was just like we know communities have been hard hit by COVID. We know that. We see the news stories but we do not know enough about the reality on the ground to say that we could direct on our own, right, like what a project needs to be especially when the timelines were going to be so short. You needed to get something done in six months, 12 months, so it created a shift in the balance of power that just naturally went toward the civic leaders.
Something that I feel is happening as a nonprofit professional is that the power is shifting back. Slowly but surely as no longer COVID recovery generally is a desired outcome, we’re going back to more familiar things like small business recovery, climate change, resilience, subject matter areas where the big funders whether they’re big foundations or academic institutions really feel like they know what the definition of success should be and how projects should be structured, and so they’re sending out applications just trying to test community organizations to be like can you meet the threshold that we know is necessary for a partnership to be successful, for a project to move forward.
That’s the challenge that I see is like growing more and more. I just encourage all organizations that want to work like ours to just resist that. I think Van Alen has a bit more freedom in that we have an endowment so we have some money that we can put up on our own to play a funder, a first-round funder, a seed funder, to get a project going to like a proof of concept so we take that first chance, and then once a project is built out a bit, we can go to bigger funders and say help us scale this up. So we’re the first ones in, we take that risk initially that helps us get through some of this but still it’s a big shift from what we saw in COVID for sure or during COVID rather.
Yin Kong: Yeah, I’m feeling that too, Andrew, where the funders are trying to define—they have their own agenda that they want us to follow. Every time I have a chance to speak somewhere on a panel, I always bring up Neighborhoods Now and the model of funding there because it was revolutionary and I really do hope that people follow Van Alen and EDF’s footsteps in this funding strategy or not just funding or support, it was 360 support, and just how that was so impactful so quickly, I really hope other funders really listen and take note and think carefully about how they want to change but I am hopeful.
I do feel like there has been quite a shift in the nonprofit funding world since 2020. I think even though there’s maybe one step back, we’re still moving in a way that is more community centric and I hope it’s continues that way. But on the point about the designers, I just wanted to highlight some really fun—or some of the elements for the design were really unsexy. The biggest design element we had I’ll tell you was a pole clamp. It was this little doohickey that had to be 3D printed that connected on to this thing so that the vendor signs could connect easily and well to a foldout table.
So it’s not like a sexy thing that like a designer can be like, ooh, look at me. I designed this, you know, but it was something that was needed so having designers—this was DDP and partners, they were able to make things happen with such humility. Designing with such humility to make it happen, make this big community event happen, and that’s the type of designers that are really helpful in these sort of projects.
Andrew Brown: Yeah, I think that’s right. I could second that. Star-chitectureis not really what’s needed in these projects. It’s really a sensitive approach to urban design and placemaking I think, and like an ability to create comfortable, beautiful, vibrant spaces with a small budget is really what helps best.
Yin Kong: Small budget, a hundred percent.
Andrew Brown: Yeah, Yin wants to say no budget.
Yin Kong: Realistic budget.
Andrew Brown: We’re not going to say no budget. We’re going to say small budget but it’s amazing the sense of place that you can create when you create—when you lay out just enough design touches for people to want to gather in the space because I think the most powerful placemaking element sometimes is just the presence of other people. So if you can just create enough of a sense that this is a place where we gather, this is a place where we celebrate, that becomes the thing that is most eye catching, it’s the craft. Like when you go down to Chinatown nights or Chinatown Night Market, there are beautiful things that have been done with lighting and with decoration and signage that really makes it feel like a really beautiful space but it’s that craft, you know, like the folks coming and going, ascending the stairs to the plaza down to the street below, and the people riding bikes through, right? It’s just seeing so many different people engaged in so many different activities all at once in the middle of the night next to the Manhattan bridge, that’s the thing that makes you want to come back again and again. So designers who know how to do that are a prized commodity in this work for sure.
Yin Kong: And able to scrap it together too and just also roll up their sleeves and just get into the thick of it and solve the problems on the ground, just so many random problems you come up against because it’s on site. It’s not a white box. We’re doing this, you know, on Forsyth Plaza and there’s a day market there so like we’re setting up as the day market is breaking down and there’s all sorts of things that we have to react quickly to so it’s great to have our designers not just draw something on paper and pass it off, they’re there on the ground with us sweating and just, you know, in it with us to make it happen, problem solving. They know what our priorities are. After we clean up and everything is back, you know, at like two a.m. we’re all having beers. We’re lifelong friends because we’ve done this together and that’s really the best moments for me at Night Market, it’s actually when it’s over and we’re having our two a.m. beers together and just really enjoying each other’s company.
Andrew Brown: Yeah, I’ll quickly add to that. I think a key element of a successful partnership and I think a key part of promoting this movement of community-led design is for everybody involved to understand that we need to build long, deep partnerships and relationships. This is critical on both like saying this is a movement and just getting like single projects done. If the idea, if the designers come into a project and think that, you know, we’re just going to have like a couple check-ins to rubberstamp our—my idea for what should go into a place, then this just isn’t going to work out. You need to want to be the people on the ground stringing up the lights, excited to see the crowds come in, having beers with Yin at like two a.m. when it’s all done, and then eager to talk about what the next thing is going to be, whether it’s the next iteration of that single project or a totally different project in the neighborhood, you got to really want to bond with your community partner, with your fellow designers, even with the matchmakers like us who are bringing people together, right? You have to be committed for the long haul.
Yin Kong: It’s a family for sure.
Andrew Brown: It’s a family affair, that’s true.
Cindy Santos: Yeah, this is such an important point and while you were talking, part of what I was thinking about is that this also applies to the funders. I really like what you brought in about funders just having their own agendas, right? And I think a piece of it when I think about a small organization like yours and when you talked about scarcity of resources, funders are often willing to fund something very project specific while also not funding the organizations infrastructure to make it happen, and to be able to sustain the project. I think creating this scarcity of resources rather than really thinking how might we strengthen this ecosystem of folks that are working together so that we can sustain something like this is so important. I’m curious as you’re thinking about the sustainability of this, what does an organization like yours need to continue to do this work and be sustained in the work? Andrew, how does that resonate with you? How does that make your ears ping because it sounds like I’m speaking your language?
Andrew Brown: Yeah, I mean something that we aim to be more intentional about when we structure budgets in projects is to distinguish between the production costs and the costs of staff, program staffing as a partner, and just be clear in everything that you say and all the material that produce it, those are two different things. They are related but you should be thinking of them separately. Don’t just give like a community organization a bucket of money that’s meant to go out to the street for a project, and then dare them to cover their staffing costs and making that happen because the work to do this, especially for small organizations, it’s owners and like time is money in business, and that time needs to be honored and it needs to be compensated for sure. So we do that in our partnerships. We distinguish between those two things. We make sure that according to our partners’ need that we’re sufficiently funding both of those things. I think we are looking more to funders who are also going to do that, and whenever we talk to funders about getting support, we call that out, right? It’s like you’re not just compensating Van Alen staff time or the time of the artist doing the work, it’s the labor of the community organization to keep things organized and stay on as facilitator, to maintainwork, to like talk to community officials and neighbors and build that buy-in. All that takes time. All that costs money. All that needs to be supported.
Yin Kong: Yeah, it’s important to support the team. I mean I think, Chinatown, our team is everything. We are all Chinese American women who live in Chinatown or very closely connected to Chinatown, and all speak at least one dialect of Chinese. I think it’s really important that we’re—the team is supported because without—they have a very, very specific skillset. It’s not an interchangeable team. For instance, like what Andrew was talking about before, why our Night Market feels so site specific is because of our team handholding mom and pop Chinatown vendors through their paperwork so that they can get their temporary food handling service permits or figuring out how to make their signs because they may not speak English or know how to navigate the city system to get their permits because there are a lot of food festival types across the city. I think that’s proliferating but ours is so different because we’re still centering—we’re specifically centering our community vendors, and we also are able to keep their interests first. We barely charge them a vendor fee. It’s so, so minimal. I’m lucky we have sponsorship from Citizens Bank that helps us keep the vendor costs so minimal but we’re really—because of the team’s support we’re able to handhold these vendors and artisans through the process of becoming a vendor at these types of events. So without having the strength of a team like this, we can’t do community work.
Cindy Santos: I really appreciate everything you’ve said about not just building trust with the community but building trust with each other, what it looks like to have this long-term vision that is supported, and really how you create space for folks to dream together. As we’re closing out, I wonder if you have anything else that you want to share with the audience. What would you like to close with?
Yin Kong: I would like to talk about the future of the site of the Night Market which is Forsyth Plaza. Every Night Market we bring in all electricity and all the lighting to make it happen because the site currently is insufficient, and also Porta Potties because the site doesn’t have these facilities. Through activating the spaces we’ve been able to bring attention to the city, to DOT, that the community needs these upgrades for the infrastructure for this public space. So this is the opposite of the story we told at the top of the hour where it was city telling us what we needed to do. Now we’re proving to the city that we need these things and we need them to step up and upgrade our public spaces, our public closets, to accommodate for not only, you know, community events like the Night Market but everyday day market activities. It’s a very vibrant place during the day as well. So that’s what we hope we can do as an organization in the community, being able to—as we are bilingual or multilingual, we’re able to kind of be a bridge between what we see within our communities but also advocating to the city agencies and defining our needs to them, and then hold them accountable to addressing those needs. I’ve seen there’s been initial steps and DOT seems on board so let’s hope that we can continue this process. I guess that really is the dream, right? That we can have autonomy from within the community to envision our public spaces better, to envision our communities better, and I really hope that we can continue doing so with great partners like Van Alen.
Andrew Brown: That was kind to say. I just want to echo what Yin is saying about our vision for the future. I think what we’ve seen because we have the benefit of working across different neighborhoods and different organizations, we see that folks like Yin are definitely not the exception to the rule. There are plenty of great leaders with great ideas for helping their neighborhoods heal and recover, become stronger, more prosperous places. They just need the support. They need ready access to the right resources, and people who understand what it means to meet them where they are and support them in their visions and help them make it a reality. So from DOT to parks to buildings to libraries, all the city agencies, you really hope that they can step up in that spirit of support for those organizations who in many cases, they’ve been carrying the city on their back for a long time, right? They are the glue that holds many of these neighborhoods together and they do it with very little support, sometimes with agencies kind of working against, and so we can just shift that balance of power so that they’re in the front seat driving and the agency is in the back helping them out, not just the government but the social sector, the private sector. If we can all rally behind them, I think we’d get stronger neighborhoods and a better city for sure.
Cindy Santos: So I’m sure that we’re going to have listeners that want to hear more about your work, and so I’m curious where can folks learn about your work?
Andrew Brown: You can go to www.vanalen.org. You can learn about the projects that we’re doing with Yin at Think!Chinatown and Asian Americans for Equality and all the other community organizations. Also, if you are a community organization or a leader of an org that wants to do a placemaking project or just a project that helps you get control of your built environment, we’ve got a number of programs now to help connect people with designers and the right resources to make that happen. So just find us online. Me personally, abrown@vanalen, send me an email, send me a note. Happy to take a phone call and tell you more about what we’re doing and how we can help out if you’ve got the vision. Yin, how can the good folks find you?
Yin Kong: Glad you asked. Wow. Obviously thinkchinatown.org/ or at thinkchinatown but I think most excited is the upcoming fruits of the latest collaboration between Van Alen and Think!Chinatown which will be our new exhibition when our new space opens. Chinatown Studio is looking to open in the next few weeks, and our first exhibition is called—let me see if I get this right—Making or Faking Chinatown representing people, place, and culture. It’s an exhibition about creative placekeeping, creative placemaking, and really helping our community to have difficult conversations on this upcoming large city-led project called Chinatown Connections. So we are again in the throes of some interesting opportunities for large-scale development in Chinatown. We’re testing again what the processes are of community engagement between the city and the community but this time I feel like we, with the help of partners like Van Alen, are more within the driver’s seat, really being able to define things, lead the conversation, be in constant communication with the city ahead of time, ahead of the visioning process. I’m really, really hoping that the process will be different this time. There’s already a lot of things that feel different about this process but let’s see. Fingers crossed. The adventure continues.
Cindy Santos: Well, thank you so much for being in conversation with us today. I am actually really excited to be in space with you at the Night Market or the exhibition. This has been such a wonderful conversation and hope to see you soon.
Yin Kong: Thanks for having us.
Andrew Brown: Thank you so much.
(Outro) And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you are interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes for this episode. And if you’re enjoying all that we share at the Collective Impact Forum podcast, we encourage you to rate us on your preferred podcast platform, and share your favorite episodes with colleagues.
We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot tribes. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the past, present, and futures of these tribes.
The Intro music for this episode was composed by Rafael Krux and our outro music is composed by Kevin Macleod.
This is Tracy Timmons-Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum, and your podcast producer. I want to say thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, let’s keep working towards collective impact.
