Healing Our Highways Convening: Atlanta, GA

Healing Our Highways is a grant program led by Smart Growth America’s Arts and Culture team providing funding and technical assistance for arts and culture projects that confront the harms perpetuated through our transportation system on marginalized communities of color. On May 15, 2024, a cozy Filipino restaurant in a suburban Atlanta Asian shopping plaza was filled with energy, connection, and delicious food as the Healing Our Highways cohort of artists and cultural workers deliberated on strategies for community organizing, building power, and making change.

Advancing Racial Equity Arts and Culture Climate Change Technical assistance Transportation

Meet the Healing Our Highways grant recipients

Smart Growth America is excited to announce the recipients of the Healing Our Highways grant program. With support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kresge Foundation, Healing Our Highways will support creative ideas and activities that build knowledge, connection, and power within disadvantaged communities harmed by transportation systems and climate change. Beginning … Continued

Advancing Racial Equity Creative Placemaking Technical assistance Transportation

An excerpt from Megan Kimble’s new book, City Limits

In Austin, hundreds of families will lose child care if a preschool is demolished to expand an interstate. In Houston, a young Black woman will lose her brand-new home to a new lane on Interstate 10-just blocks away from where a seventy-four-year-old nurse lost her home in the 1960s when that same highway was built. … Continued

Advancing Racial Equity Land Use and Development

Equity Summit: Day 1 Workshops

Day 1 | 4:00-4:55 p.m. At the Equity Summit, we’ve invited partner organizations to lead workshop sessions to examine real-world equity implications in planning. Join the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, CityFi, and Center for Creative Land Recycling for engaging and interactive discussions to move what we hear at the Summit into practice. Check out the … Continued

Advancing Racial Equity

Equitable infrastructure to bridge divides

Divisive infrastructure has had long-term damage, both tangible and intangible, on Black and Brown communities. While we are beginning to see policies, programs, and funding to combat the destructive legacies of past decision-making, work remains and barriers to finding solutions exist. This panel will discuss how street design, community engagement, and a holistic approach to … Continued

Advancing Racial Equity Events

Harnessing data and lived experiences for safe streets

To provide a practical response to the information presented in Dangerous By Design, a Smart Growth America report that identifies unsafe road design as the main culprit in rising pedestrian deaths, this panel will explore a unique partnership between WABA, Howard University, and local high school students to address traffic violence before it happens through … Continued

Advancing Racial Equity Events

Cultural organizing as reclamation and resistance

Learn from cultural organizing groups from community-based organizations across the country working to preserve commercial corridors and community centers through arts and culture outside of historic urban ethnic enclaves. BIPOC/immigrant community members will find effective cultural community organizing strategies to build power and renegotiate exclusionary, top-down, community planning processes. Panelists will also discuss national initiatives … Continued

Advancing Racial Equity Events