Using design to foster young civic leaders in Tennessee now.
Design Your Neighborhood and Nashville Youth Design Team are Civic Design Center youth education programs that take place in Tennessee.
Design Your Neighborhood centers around a project-based curriculum that takes place in middle through high school classrooms.
Nashville Youth Design Team is an extra-curricular high school internship program that builds on skills learned from the Design Your Neighborhood curriculum.
History
The Civic Design Center has been engaging youth in Nashville’s city planning since we were founded in 2001. Our first large scale project as an organization, The Plan of Nashville, was a platform for hundreds of community members’ ideas to take shape into something we could imagine. Youth were included in that process, and we quickly understood the value behind raising youth voices to advocate for their unique perspectives in how our city is developed.
Why design?
Design thinking is unique because it requires considering how one might create something to serve a functional purpose, while also representing a visual look that creates or feeds into identity. We focus on place-based design thinking, so youth can take their lived experience and use that to make a physical improvement to their neighborhood before the age of 18.
“One of the biggest impacts of the Design Your Neighborhood curriculum is the ability for students to come back and represent their community.
We’re going to have kids who are thinking, you know, ‘maybe I can do architecture, maybe I can report on this.’”
— LaTonya Davenport, I.T. Creswell Middle School ELA Teacher
