Across two engaging sessions with our San Francisco and Oakland studios, Placemaking with Purpose brought together architects, interior designers, educators, and community leaders to explore a shared belief: every project is more than a building; it is a relationship with the people who live, learn, and gather there. Hosted with partners Bridgitte Alomes of Natural Pod and Ashanti Bryant with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the conversations asked a demanding question: what would it look like if every space genuinely honored the communities it serves?

A working model: Connect, Create, Amplify

Both events centered on a practical framework from Ashanti Bryant : Connect, Create, Amplify.

• Connect means starting before the charrette; over meals, in living rooms, churches, neighborhood hubs; so design work is rooted in lived experience, not just institutional goals.
• Create asks us to co-design with the people who will use the space every day, from traffic flow and hours of operation to how culture shows up in color, art, and programming.
• Amplify is about reflection and storytelling so that the process becomes a template others can adapt, and so communities can clearly see their fingerprints in the final place.

In Grand Rapids’ Boston Square neighborhood, this shift was the difference between rejection and buy-in. Early on, a fully formed plan was brought to residents without their input and met with resistance. Only when the team went back, listened deeply, and co-created an early learning hub with parents, grandparents, and longtime neighbors did trust begin to grow.

Place as a signal of respect

Throughout both gatherings, a theme kept surfacing: design is never neutral. Every choice signals who is expected, who is protected, and who was truly in mind.

In Boston Square, decades of redlining and environmental injustice had left residents with lead exposure, asthma, and deep skepticism toward major institutions. When wealthy players quietly purchased more than 40 acres and arrived with a complete vision, the community said no, not because they were “anti-development,” but because they had not been seen or heard.

Rebuilding trust required:

• Naming historic harms directly; including disinvestment and inequitable bond spending—before talking about “amenities.”
• Treating community leaders and elders (the Miss Shirleys and neighborhood historians) as core experts, not an afterthought.
• Bringing back revised concepts that clearly reflected what people had asked for, like full-service kitchens for shared meals and operating hours that matched real work lives.

In Oakland, local leaders pointed to the Fruitvale Transit Village as a powerful example of this stance. Instead of accepting a protective parking lot around a station, residents organized for a vibrant, mixed-use village that reflects Latino culture, small business, and transit equity, and is now a national model.

Community voice as design expertise

For many in the room, the most challenging and also energizing idea was that community knowledge is not “nice to have”; it is core design expertise.

One architect described retooling her entire process after running a true empathy-based interview series. By holding back on solutions and listening through layered questions, she found that roughly 80% of her design guidelines came directly from users’ stories, not from precedents or assumptions.

Participants from schools, cities, and universities raised very real constraints: compressed bond timelines, multilingual communities, limited engagement budgets. The conversation surfaced practical tactics that still honor voice within those realities.

• Identifying everyday influencers quickly and meeting them where they are, rather than waiting for formal town halls.
• Using virtual sessions and interpretation to reach families who cannot attend in person.
• Being transparent about budget and tradeoffs so communities are not surprised when every idea cannot be implemented.

Over and over, people came back to a simple test: when children, families, or staff walk into a space, do they feel like they matter here, and can they see themselves in the design?

Designing for dignity, wellbeing, and climate reality

Bridgette Alomes of Natural Pod invited the group to hold dignity as a design requirement, especially in learning environments where children spend an estimated 15,000 hours between kindergarten and grade 12, often more time than in their own homes. Her story, rooted in her own child’s lead exposure from furniture and toys, underscored that material health, acoustics, light, and air are equity issues as much as they are design details.

Participants also named the intersection of place and climate: communities where being outdoors can mean unsafe air, toxic soil, or real personal risk. In that context, “access to nature” must be paired with honest work on environmental justice, resilient building systems, and culturally grounded outdoor spaces that people truly want to use.

Across both locations, one idea landed strongly: adults’ wellbeing matters too. When educators, caregivers, and staff feel emotionally and physically depleted by their environments, children notice, and learning, healing, and civic life all suffer.

What’s next: Co-creating what comes after

For us at One Workplace, Placemaking with Purpose is not a one-off event; it’s a shared practice we want to keep building with like-minded partners across the Bay Area.

If you are:

• An architecture or interiors firm rethinking how you engage communities,
• An educator or district leader wrestling with bond-funded projects and real-world constraints,
• A community development or civic organization stewarding trusted neighborhood spaces,

…we’d love to explore what this framework could look like in your context—together.

Next steps: Reach out to our team to co-create a pilot placemaking effort, whether that’s an early learning hub, a community campus, a resilient neighborhood space, or a reimagined public facility. We’re eager to work alongside partners who believe, as we do, that every project is a chance to design with dignity, deepen trust, and build places where people truly belong.

And if you'd like to hear more from Ashanti Bryant directly, listen to ONEder Podcast episode #74 The Power of Placemaking and for more from Bridgitte Alomes in her own voice, listen to Empowering Education.