Mara Mintzer is co-founder and Executive Director of Growing Up Boulder, a child- and youth-friendly city initiative rooted in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Community Engagement, Design, and Research Center. She leads efforts to embed young people’s voices into city planning, writes and speaks internationally about participatory planning with youth, and helped launch projects in Boulder that put children’s perspectives at the heart of policies, parks, housing, and public safety.

Jay Pitter, MES, is an award-winning placemaker and author creating joyful public spaces that foster belonging, prosperity, and cultural memory. She advances this work through cultural planning, policy frameworks, and storytelling—bridging rigor and collective imagination to advance public joy as essential urban infrastructure and a human right

In this episode of The Sidewalk Ballet, we sit down with Kady to talk about placemaking as practice and possibility. From Placemaking class to her on-the-ground experience building community through culture, she shares how storytelling, celebration, and showing up shape the way we live together. It’s a conversation about creativity, access, and the small, artful moves that change the feel of a city.