Projects from our four grantees

The recipients of the Healing our Highways grant worked with their communities to build knowledge, connection, and power within communities harmed by transportation systems and climate change. Learn more about their creative ideas and activities.

Arts and culture as celebration and resistance against displacement

Tampa Heights, one of Tampa’s oldest neighborhoods, has faced the challenges of gentrification while striving to preserve its cultural identity and historic landmarks. Conscious Community Connectors brought the community together to protect a historic Black church from demolition. Read more >>

 

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Cultural organizing for awareness and solidarity

Doraville, Georgia, a diverse immigrant community along Buford Highway, faces significant safety and equity challenges due to decades of racially biased infrastructure decisions. The Buford Highway People’s Hub empowered residents to address these inequities and work together to reimagine more inclusive infrastructure. Read more >>

 

 

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Defining community resilience

Boyle Heights, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles, has faced lasting health and mobility challenges from redlining and the construction of the East LA Interchange. The community hosted co-design workshops to gather resident input, envision change, and advocate for infrastructure that reflects local needs, inspiring a model for community-driven transformation. Read more >>

 

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Using arts and technology to visualize the public space

The Atlanta team developed a web-based app that allows users to reimagine highways as vibrant community spaces, equipping residents with tools and data to advocate for people-first infrastructure. Read more >>

 

 

 

 

Important insights from this work

With unrestricted funding and technical assistance, the Healing Our Highways teams were able to make significant progress toward their goals, while gaining unforeseen insights. The Tampa Heights team’s ability to compensate local artists and creatives galvanized public awareness and urgency for preserving an endangered historic community space. The Doraville team integrated education around transportation equity and climate justice into their ongoing community education series and youth liberation conference and also hosted photo walks to allow community members to see their home from a new perspective. The Boyle Heights team held space for community members to envision what the often abstract concept of “resilience” means for their neighborhood, generating invaluable feedback while growing interest among local artists and cultural workers in community design. And finally, the Atlanta team created an app illustrating what public spaces could be like if people were prioritized over car infrastructure, integrating that visualization as the cornerstone for creative community engagement .

Through their participation in Healing Our Highways, the teams demonstrated what is needed to enable artists and cultural workers, particularly those in very small community-based organizations, informal collectives, or working independently, to meaningfully engage in conversations and decisions about the development of their own built environments. Here are several elements the Healing Our Highways program revealed as critical to uplifting the leadership and expertise of those who know their communities best.

1. Flexible funding establishes local precedent for the value and impact of centering the creative leadership of social practice artists and cultural workers in cross-sector work

The funding this program provided was critical to the teams’ ability to carry out impactful projects. In addition to paying for supplies, spaces, and photography to document their accomplishments, funding allowed the teams to establish a powerful precedent of paying local creatives to contribute to the events and projects. Investing in local talent proved to be an extremely valuable part of the project as it strengthened relationships, uplifted the community’s culture, and created a sense of ownership for community members participating in the projects. Setting this precedent, value, and bargaining power for community- and socially-engaged creative practice, especially for independent artists and cultural workers unaffiliated with any organization or institution is particularly meaningful in jurisdictions and with public agencies that have not yet adopted best practices.

2. Technical assistance and support from a national intermediary is critical for emerging grassroots leaders in frontline communities to share knowledge and mutual support, and expand targeted access to more funding and larger networks

The Healing Our Highways program equipped participants with knowledge about topics, including the ways dangerous infrastructure impacts communities, how data can be leveraged for advocacy, and the connection between climate and the built environment through virtual learning sessions. This type of education is critical because it furnishes artists and culture workers with the language and understanding to apply their unique perspectives and more effectively advocate for the changes they want to see in their communities.

The cohort would have greatly benefited from training and support surrounding logistics and project management that more funding would have made possible, in addition to more extensive education and training on the built environment, community organizing, and power building. Expanding the learning curriculum for participants to include project management would supply participants with practical skills essential for larger and more complex projects in the future. More funding would have also created more opportunities for grantees to be exposed to and draw on SGA’s extensive cross-sector expertise.

3. Spending time together in person is vital to building solidarity, and these relationships are already leading to further collaboration among participants

The in-person convening held in Atlanta, Georgia, was an essential component of the program. Virtual learning, while offering convenience, cannot match the connection, engagement, and rapport of in-person interaction. Providing this cohort, a group of creatives and cultural workers, an opportunity to interact more organically, share ideas visually, and receive real-time feedback from peers was particularly important. The activities at the convening centered on strategy for implementing change, including identifying stakeholders and how to build relationships and steer the conversations necessary to realize their goals. In addition, the Healing Our Highways participants are now part of a peer network that they can access beyond this program to share ideas, opportunities, and knowledge. There was universal agreement that the time spent in Atlanta greatly enriched the learning and skill-building process and that more time in person would have deepened their connection and reinforced what they learned.

4. A clear understanding of how communities are centered in arts and culture efforts is needed for meaningful and durable outcomes

A key factor that manifested itself in the design, evolution, and impact of the goals and activities for each project was the depth of each team’s relationship with their partner community-based organization. Teams that worked with communities where they had newer or more limited personal ties followed a project-based approach that focused on the community for the project duration but was not rooted within the community. In contrast, the other teams were able to leverage existing community ties and relationships for a more durable and self-reinforcing impact. While both approaches resulted in positive outcomes, the community-centered approach nurtured a self-sustaining ecosystem of autonomy and empowerment within the community, generating impacts that extend past the period of the program. In order to see more of these long-term impacts, teams and individuals with well-established personal and professional ties to the community they intend to work within must be prioritized.

How we’re using what we learned

The Healing Our Highways program demonstrated how artists, organizers, and culture bearers who are rooted in their communities, with funding and technical support, are uniquely positioned to build knowledge, connection, and power for repair and healing. The projects carried out by the Healing Our Highways team provided space for communities that have been harmed by our infrastructure systems and that are now most vulnerable to climate change to build awareness and solidarity. By centering the voices and expertise of artists and culture workers deeply connected to their communities, providing them with the resources and support they need to participate fully, and equipping them with critical knowledge about the built environment, the potential for these groups to reduce harm and contribute to decisions that supply communities what they want and need is abundant.

Building on the lessons we’ve learned through Healing Our Highways and melding them with our artist-in-residence work with state DOTs, Smart Growth America’s Arts & Culture team is excited to share a special opportunity to embed culture, creativity, and design into the community-centered efforts of metropolitan planning organizations and state departments of transportation. We invite teams from MPOs and state DOTs to express their interest in joining the Culture and Community Network, which will ground agency public engagement in artistic and cultural practices.

Over seven months, from April to October 2025, Smart Growth America, the State Smart Transportation Initiative, the Atlanta Regional Commission, and Powerful Pathways will lead and support a select group of agency employees to effectively and substantively center community voices while delivering more meaningful outcomes.

Participants will receive the following benefits:

• Practical insights: A blueprint sharing strategies and recommendations for embedding culture, creativity, and care into community engagement.
• Collaborative learning in a peer network: Six (6) monthly virtual training and discussion sessions and a two-day workshop bringing together MPO peers to develop tailored action plans for institutional change.
• Ongoing support: A dynamic network to collaborate, share ideas, and foster courage and creativity.

For agency leaders, this is a chance to elevate their organization as a model for community- and culture-centered planning. For staff, particularly those seeking to cultivate culture and creativity in their community engagement work, this is an invitation to deepen their impact and connect with others around the country with similar aspirations.

Carrying out the work of undoing, repairing, and healing from past infrastructure harms while designing and building more resilient and just systems requires vision, creativity, curiosity, courage, care, and commitment. Bringing artists, organizers, and cultural workers who are neighborhood anchors into these endeavors is essential in ensuring these values are honored and embodied throughout our work.