Before a city decides what to do with a place, it gathers data.
There are the maps, the demographic studies, the property records, the economic projections. There are the environmental assessments and the historical reports. And all of these are all essential parts of a legible and necessary process of development.
But what happens when the data cannot tell us what a place means to the people who have lived there? When the vacant building that shows up on a planning map remains occupied by memory? When a piece of land carries histories that cannot be adequately represented by its current zoning designation?
What does it take to build a community where organizations work together—not simply alongside one another—to improve outcomes for children and families? Join City Rising and First Things First Porter County for a conversation about what collective impact looks like in practice.
Organizations collaborate more than ever to address complex social challenges—yet many collaborations stall or fail to produce lasting impact. This City Rising webinar introduces ecosystem thinking, a practical approach for understanding why collaboration struggles and how leaders can better align people, organizations, and resources to create meaningful change. Participants will explore the difference between program thinking, collaboration thinking, and ecosystem thinking, and leave with a downloadable Ecosystem Shift Guide and worksheet to help apply these ideas within their own work.
An evening of documentary storytelling, live conversations, poetry, music, and video art at Kan Kan Cinema.
Who gets to shape the future of a place, and whose memories get carried forward?
For more than 150 years, the Indiana Women's Prison was a place of confinement, punishment, and profound harm. But for the women who lived there, it was also a place where friendships formed, communities emerged, and complicated relationships with the idea of "home" took shape.
City Rising is excited to welcome Marissa Byers, Corey Ewing, and Daniel Gray-Kontar to the Beyond These Gates project team as Poetic Inquiry Data Artists. Through their residencies, Byers, Ewing, and Gray-Kontar will help shape the project’s exploration of the former Indiana Women’s Prison, using poetry as a form of inquiry to surface stories, generate connections, and deepen understanding of the women who called the prison home; the complicated relationship between the prison and Indianapolis’ Near Eastside; and the ways this site, its history, and the people connected to it might be remembered and reimagined.
