On a hot summer afternoon in a rough neighborhood in South Chicago, a group of local teenage girls picked up power tools for the first time and started to transform a vacant lot into a new playground. As they worked, others in the community came up to help–everyone from gang members to cops–until the playground was ready for play.

The project was part of the Tiny WPA program from the organization Public Workshop, which looks for ways that youth can make a unique contribution to the design of their neighborhoods, not just by doing a little volunteer work, but by doing something meaningful that adults might not necessarily be able to. Because the girls were from the community (and because they were female, and seen as non-threatening by gang members), they inspired the whole neighborhood to take action.





Tiny WPA projects (named for the New Deal Works Progress Administration, which paid for civic improvements and art during the Depression) have included school redesigns, more playgrounds, new bus stops in Flint, Michigan, and a bright green tree-inspired shade canopy at a farmers market in North Philadelphia. Like the name suggests, each project is a small-scale creative intervention. While a design-build project often takes just a couple of weeks, they always happen in partnership with deeply-rooted local organizations who do what Public Workshop’s founder Alex Gilliam calls “the slow work” of long-term engagement.

Each project happens in full public view, so the students can get feedback and motivation, and, like the playground in Chicago, inspire their neighbors.





“We’re wired to copy one another,” Gilliam says. “When you’re visibly making and doing, it’s infectious. Couple that with the fact that we often see this attitude that ‘If a kid can do it, why can’t I?’ It’s a really powerful thing. It’s especially powerful when the result is design that has another bottom line from simply beautifying–it’s meeting a legitimate need in that community. And when it’s stuff that no one thinks is possible–whether that’s aesthetically or structurally–that totally changes the conversation.”

The work isn’t easy. Last summer, a project at a struggling school in Chicago was delayed as the principal lurched from crisis to crisis; by the time the project started, summer school was over, and the group had lost the community they needed for full participation.

Students are often resistant at the beginning, since they’re used to being told what to do, and the process with Tiny WPA is open-ended and iterative: They’re asked to jump in and start building, failing, and building again. But they quickly adjust, Gilliam says. At the end of the first week of one project, after giving students a page to fill in that said “The hardest thing was …” one student wrote, “The hardest thing was building through play when I never got to do that as a kid. But if I’d had this experience when I was younger, it would have been transformative.”