Vision
Enable meaningful engagement with urban space design to be embedded into the social fabric of communities through collaborative, responsive and accessible placemaking.
Mission
Sprout aims to:
Facilitate connections between landscape architects, planners & urban designers and community groups, including non-profit organizations to collaboratively design and activate community space projects
Support our professionals in gaining a better understanding of the community’s investment in shared spaces (i.e., time, forms of use, attachment etc.)
Promote the active participation and engagement of community in urban space design processes
Improve access of collaborators to resources that support the coordination of design-work
Foster an exchange platform to share ideas and envision our common landscape
What We do?
Communities
Sprout offers community members/groups and non-profit organizations the unique expertise of volunteer landscape architects, planners and urban designers to help kick-start community projects. Whether it is through capacity building or basic conceptual design, Sprout works towards accelerating community projects from an idea stage.
Volunteers
Sprout offers junior and senior practitioners (and students) of landscape architecture, urban design or planning the opportunity to be engaged directly with a community to shape a project, create mentoring relationships, and gain valuable work experience working on meaningful community projects.
Principles of community-led design
In order to effectively achieve its vision, Sprout adopts the following principles to guide its community-led design activities:
Collective visioning
The sense of attachment to a space can be strengthened when it meets community needs and reflects their shared hopes. As such, we support all collaborating groups to actively seek opportunities for diverse community members to share their aspirations for the space.
Local participation
There is no better expert of a place than the community that lives, plays and works in it. The local community has the ability to contribute significantly in shaping the design of the space to best reflect the collective vision. This requires engaging local voices throughout the design of a space.
Shared accountability
To give communities a sense of ownership over community spaces, responsibility must be shared between community members and designers. Acknowledging the climate of limited capital resources in which many of the community space design project ideas operate, we encourage all participating groups to explore commitments around time and values of community-led placemaking to bring to life the design of the space.