In late 2014, the Conservancy was selected by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the William Penn Foundation as convener for Reimagining the Civic Commons, a collaborative initiative that began in Philadelphia as a way to connect the city’s leading public space operators and five planned new civic spaces (the Reading Viaduct, Bartram’s Mile, Lovett Library and Park, Discovery Center in East Fairmount Park and our own Centennial Commons in the Centennial District of West Fairmount Park) and has, as of fall 2016, gone national. The initiative included an Innovation Fund that has allowed us to test new strategies for public space interventions and build connections among communities surrounding the five Philadelphia Civic Commons sites.

Philadelphia is an ideal choice because of its booming millennial population, rapidly changing neighborhoods, widespread civic space innovation and entrepreneurship, a vast array of urban infrastructure available to repurpose, and the presence of a committed and influential local funder – the William Penn Foundation – with significant investments and parallel interests in understanding how the civic realm can be better leveraged to promote greater social and economic integration, retain young residents, and foster social and economic opportunities.

As the partnership between these funders developed, the Fairmount Park Conservancy was put forward by the William Penn Foundation as the local organization most suitable to lead a pilot effort that would draw the city’s leading nonprofit public space operators into a collaborative network, a new “Civic Commons Collective”. In December 2014, the Conservancy was award a three-year $5,442,500 grant from the Knight Foundation to convene and invest in the Civic Commons Collective in Philadelphia.

Over the course of three years, the Collective demonstrated, through a series of place-based investments at five sites in Philadelphia, the ways that civic assets can be elevated and connected as an integrated, sustainable system and how they can be designed and developed to foster talent, opportunity and engagement. The Collective encouraged a more collaborative environment among Philadelphia’s nonprofit network while improving, repurposing, and repositioning the city’s existing urban infrastructure to provide new amenities that generated a competitive advantage for the city and its neighborhoods. For a one-page PDF about the project, click here.