How Design Shapes Our Communities

The BSA Foundation builds a better Boston by engaging communities, inspiring vision, and provoking positive change. It’s the charitable sister organization of the Boston Society of Architects/AIA and its volunteers harness the power of design to create better communities. Watch the videos below and discover how. Come to a Meet the BSA Foundation meeting to learn more. Meet the Foundation events are held on the second and fourth Wednesday of each month. Register and learn more at architects.org/foundation/about.

Meet the BSA Foundation
BSA Foundation Chair Mike Davis FAIA talks about the Foundation.

Engaging communities: Woolson Street Community Garden
Volunteer designers work with residents to build a community garden on the site of tragedy.

Woolson Street Community Garden was a vacant lot that was the site of one of Boston’s deadliest murder sprees. Today, through the work of the BSA Foundation-funded CDRC, along with neighborhood activists, other nonprofits, residents, and the City of Boston, there is a working vegetable garden that symbolizes the entire community’s quest for peace and healing.

Inspiring Vision: Imagine Boston 2030 Youth Brainstorm
Teens brainstorm ideas to make Boston an even greater city.

The City of Boston recently partnered with the BSA and the BSA Foundation to bring design professionals together with over 100 teens at Berklee College of Music as a soft kickoff to the Imagine Boston 2030 initiative. Teens from neighborhoods across the city mixed in small groups with architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and engineers to talk about how they use the city now, and asked what they would like to see changed.

Provoking Positive Change: East Boston learns to live with water
Design students and East Boston residents take action against coastal and climate change.

The BSA Foundation, along  with the Boston Architectural College’s (BAC’s) six Ada Louise “Huxtable Fellows” students, worked with the Neighborhood of Affordable Housing on the issues of sea-level rise and climate change in East Boston. Visit architects.org for more information.