Sierra Mack-Erb never wanted to live in New York. She grew up loving art and design in a small town in southern Indiana. She never felt pulled to the big cities her design peers ended up in.
But as she launched her career, Mack-Erb was still shocked by design firms’ lack of community engagement — even while creating public spaces.
“So, we end up in a world that really isn’t designed thoughtfully or equitably to be inclusive of everyone,” she said in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas.
Mack-Erb also had community development experience after two years working on sustainability projects as an AmeriCorps volunteer in New Mexico and Utah.
“I really just knew in my heart of hearts that I wanted to work in spaces that combined creative practices and civic engagement to develop actionable solutions for communities,” she said.
In pursuit of that goal, Mack-Erb used her AmeriCorps benefits to attend graduate school at Illinois State, where she is an Applied Community and Economic Development Fellow with ISU's Stevenson Center. Fellows front-load the first year of their programs with course work, then spend their second year on field work.
Mack-Erb has spent the past seven months studying the social impact of community-centered design in real time by conducting a broad participant evaluation with the Citizens' Institute on Rural Design [CIRD], a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Housing Assistance Council.
CIRD works with rural communities nationwide to develop solutions-focused revitalization plans at no cost to those communities.
“I couldn’t believe how the stars aligned, really, that I got to work with this program,” said Mack-Erb, whose mandate was to assess CIRD’s programs by interviewing participants themselves, rather than relying on staff or program perspective.
Last weekend, Mack-Erb presented her findings as the kickoff to a month-long exhibit called Rural Perspectives on Design through March 1 at Illinois Art Station. The show is aimed at sharing her academic output with community members and sparking imagination about rural revitalization, an extrapolation of her deep-seated value for community engagement. The exhibit itself is a combination of photos, oral histories and visualizations of Mack-Erb's thesis.
“I really believe in the value of democratizing access to student research, faculty research — really any research,” she said, “and especially design research.”
Setting communities up for success
At the heart of CIRD’s mission is a desire to provide support to disinvested rural communities looking to get the ball rolling. If a rural community has a vacant, dilapidated building, for example, or an abandoned town square, it can apply to CIRD’s three-day workshop and come away with blueprints and a design plan developed in partnership with them.
“It costs a lot of money to bring an architect or a planner in to develop new site plans,” Mack-Erb said. “What the Citizens’ Institute for Rural Design does is provide that service for free.”
CIRD engages with local and regional architects and connect communities to other necessary resources, which sets them up to pursue state and federal funding for getting the project built.
Most of Mack-Erb’s work was conducting virtual interviews with participants after a workshop concludes, but she joined the team in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, where community members sought to redevelop a public trail and park that frequently flooded.
“They wanted to find a way to revitalize that area so that the local community had better access to outdoor recreation opportunities," she said. "They also wanted to make more tangible the culture and the history of their community.”
There can be tension
Buy-in hasn’t been difficult; the program is free and low-stakes. Anyone can apply. Communities come away with a plan they've weighed in on with no mandate to see it through to completion.
“You don’t have to have a town-wide vote to participate in the program,” she said. “Maybe a couple city council members discovered it. Often, it’s the leaders of local nonprofits who see this as an opportunity to add capacity to their organizations.”
In one case, Jolene Brink, an artist living in Two Harbors, Minnesota, “was just a concerned mother,” Mack-Erb said. “She really wanted to see a parcel of land protected in her community and made more accessible.”
But not everyone agrees on what should be done — or if anything should be done at all. And Mack-Erb found that some communities are dubious about federal programs. In one instance, a community in the Pacific Northwest was leery of outsiders working with communities to make suggestions about what to do with a forested area.
“Some community members felt we didn’t really have a right to have a say there — and I don’t think that’s an unfair perspective to take in some sense," she said. "But unfortunately, we were really trying to affirm that what we were doing was providing resources, and the solutions that were going to be developed were going to be for and by community members. In that case, in three days, those tensions couldn’t be alleviated.”
Rural Perspectives on Design is free and open to the public through March 1 at Illinois Art Station, 101 E. Vernon Ave., Normal. illinoisartstation.org.
