Design as Community Infrastructure.
A one-year, community-embedded creative residency supporting neighbors, grassroots groups, small businesses, cultural workers, and organizers through accessible design, visual storytelling, and collaborative public art.
the vision
What if every neighborhood had an embedded artist and designer — not to beautify from afar, but to co-create from within?
This residency imagines exactly that:
a one-year, community-rooted creative partnership that makes visual communication radically accessible.
Through sliding scale and barter-based collaboration, this artist works to:
Amplify community voices
Strengthen local identity
Document cultural memory
Build a shared visual language of power and belonging
This is creative infrastructure for self-determined futures.
WHAT THIS IS
The Northside Designer & Artist-in-Residence is a neighborhood-rooted creative role centered on design justice — making visual communication and identity-building accessible to the communities that need it most.
This residency formalizes work already happening here:
art as community scaffolding
design as mutual aid
visual storytelling as collective power
designing brands for small businesses, co-creating murals, documenting neighborhood history, and helping community groups tell their own stories.
This is creative infrastructure — built from within, not added from outside.
WHY IT MATTERS
Design shapes how neighborhoods are seen, understood, resourced, and remembered.
When communities have access to strong visual communication:
Local efforts gain credibility and momentum
Small businesses strengthen identity and belonging
Organizing efforts build power and clarity
Neighbors see themselves reflected in place
This residency ensures that Northside’s story
is told by the people who live it.
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Northside, Cincinnati isn’t short on talent, vision, or momentum.
What we’re short on are the shared tools that allow that momentum to scale.Design isn’t decoration.
Design is message, memory, movement.It’s how a neighborhood says:
We are here.
We are alive.
We build our own future.Creative labor is often treated like a luxury service—something only institutions or corporations can access. But the work of shaping public imagination, building identity, rallying support, and telling our stories is not optional. It’s survival work. It’s community power work.
This residency ensures that the visual language of the neighborhood stays in the hands of the neighborhood.
Not outsourced.
Not corporate.
Not sanitized.A full-time artist embedded in the community means:
The posters, the flyers, the campaigns, the murals, the visual narratives—
they speak in our voice.And that voice is powerful.
This is not about “discounting design.”
This is about removing the gate.
This is about a neighborhood choosing to resource its own cultural engine on its own terms—cash, barter, trade, reciprocity.
Value that honors dignity, not hierarchy.Money is tight everywhere.
But meaning is not.
Willpower is not.
Creativity is not.This residency says:
We don’t wait for systems to save us.
We build what we need.
Together.
Right now.
the full scope
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✦ ONE YEAR RESIDENCY
This residency focuses on five core areas of creative community support:
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✦ Design & Communication
Support 12+ community organizations, grassroots initiatives, cultural workers, small businesses or collective projects with custom design, branding, communication and/or storytelling.
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✦ Workshops & Open Studio Sessions
Host 6 community workshops on visual communication, narrative power, and design literacy
Empower people to create their own stories through open studio sessions
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✦ Launch of Northside Visual Archive
Develop the Northside Visual Archive—a living library of the neighborhood’s evolving culture, dreams, struggles, humor, and resistance. A digital humanities project documenting the neighborhood’s visual language, memory, and cultural power.
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✦ Murals & Public Storytelling Installations
Co-create collaborative public art and visual storytelling projects developed with neighbors and local cultural workers that affirm identity, history, and belonging.
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✦ On-Call Creative Support
Rapid, responsive design services for urgent campaigns, events, or community mobilizations.
Community-based creative labor delivered across print, digital, and environmental design.
This is not a service model.
This is shared creative power.
the budget
Pilot Year, 12 Months
Artist Stipend (12 months): $51,000
Studio Space: $9,000
Materials & Supplies: $2,500
Community Event Support: $1,500
Contingency: $1,000
Fiscal Sponsorship (7%): $4,550
Total Project Need: $69,550
Every dollar fuels creative labor, materials, and shared capacity.
The total first-year investment needed to activate this model is $69,550—covering the artist’s full-time stipend, studio space, community collaboration, materials, and fiscal sponsorship infrastructure.
This is not a charity project.
This is not a beautification project.
This is creative infrastructure for community power.
It is a working demonstration of what becomes possible when a neighborhood chooses to resource its imagination and build the future from the ground up—together.
support this residency
This residency will be funded through community partnerships, individual contributions through crowdfunding, and grants.
To sustain the first year, I am seeking $69,550.
Fundraising began Monday November 10th - no funds will be used until the project is fully funded.
Support can take many forms:
Funding • Fiscal Partnership • Space • Resources • Collaboration
If you believe in Northside — its culture, history, and future — support this project.