The Community Design Collaborative is featured in the latest edition of the Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal. Connecting Dreamers and Designers, written by Collaborative staffer Haley Loram and Bernard Brown, presents the Collaborative’s special brand of highly-skilled volunteerism.

Nonprofits and corporations tend to focus on philanthropy as monetary donations rather than skills-based volunteering that takes advantage of their employees talents and abilities.  Nonprofits tend to be unaware of pro bono services offered  by for-profit companies, while corporations often under estimate the impact of skilled volunteers. The Collaborative works to fill this gap by helping nonprofits leverage the skills of design professionals and creating connections between design firms and community organizations.

Read Full Story

“Pro-bono or professional volunteer work for non-profit businesses can be rewarding personally and professionally, improve the quality of life in your community and provide opportunities that may be outside the regular business of your firm,” writes Ellen Hunt, AIA, in the Small Project Practitioners Journal.

Read Full Story

Experts are becoming increasingly interested in the potential for modular construction to reduce building costs in Philadelphia which has the fourth highest costs in the nation.  The When We Fix it Coalition and the Building Industry Association of Philadelphia recently released a report on the costs and impacts of modular construction called Going Mod: Reducing Housing Costs in Philadelphia with Modular Construction.

Read Full Story

The prefab 100K House designed by Interface Studio: Principal Brian Phillips says. "Just a small piece of construction is about construction. The other pieces are about politics and labor and money and environmental concerns."

Inga Saffron profiles four groundbreaking Philly architecture firms, showing a common thread shared by KieranTimberlake, Erdy McHenry, Onion Flats, and Interface Studio Architects:  “architects who do not blush in saying that what they’re doing is socially important work.”

“They’re not the sort of architects you go to when you want just another pretty building… instead they dream of making buildings that can go up in weeks instead of months, that are manufactured rather than constructed, that penny-pinch on energy, and can be tossed into the recycling bin when the world grows tired of them.”

The 4^th Annual Ed Bacon Foundation Student Design Competition turned its focus to urban brownfields in 2009 with Brown to Green, challenging participants to create designs for transforming the Grays Ferry Crescent at the elbow of the Schuykill River in South Philadelphia, opposite UPenn’s campus.  The winning submission, by a team of six Cornell University students, would turn the area into a new sustainable neighborhood.

Read Full Story

Professional schools are increasingly emphasizing pro bono work, according to a report recently released by the Taproot Foundation.  Students in architecture, design, business and law are pushing for socially conscious careers, fed by baby boomer teachers and practitioners who are promoting the educational importance of volunteer work, which has created more opportunities for pro bono work for students in professional programs.

Read Full Story

People call it “the Miracle on Seventh Street.” Between a brownstone church, a superblock apartment house, and a scattering of rowhomes, two North Philadelphia pastors built a 56-unit  green-roofed, 55,000 square-foot “cyber village” that offers low and moderate-income seniors an affordable and engaging place to live.

Rev. Martha Lang and Rev Mary Lou Moore, pastors of Mt. Tabor AME Church and leaders of Mt. Tabor Community Education and Economic Development Corporation, were the driving force behind the creation of the Cyber Village.

Rev. Mary Lou Moore, PhD, and Rev. Martha Lang

Read Full Story