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Cristin Cooper

Rev. Cristin Cooper is a pastor, chef, entrepreneur, and founder of Coop’s Soups, a social enterprise that grew from her experiments gathering neighbors around soup and bread as an unconventional form of ministry. Her work uses food, hospitality, and everyday encounters to build relationships, combat loneliness, and create a deeper sense of belonging and community.

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Coop’s Soup

Coop's Soups is a community-focused social enterprise and ministry founded by pastor Cristin Cooper in Olney, Maryland. It uses locally sourced, vegan, and gluten-free soups packaged in reusable mason jars to fight loneliness, build local connections, and support a participatory dinner church gathering known as Soup Church.

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Creative Placemaking

Creative Placemaking is a landmark 2010 white paper by Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa that helped define and popularize the idea of using arts and culture as active tools in shaping the social, physical, and economic life of communities. Drawing on research and case studies from across the United States, the report looks at how artists, cultural organizations, governments, businesses, and residents can work across sectors to animate public spaces, reuse underutilized places, strengthen local economies, and build community identity. It also confronts the challenges inherent in the work—from financing and sustaining partnerships to measuring impact and avoiding displacement—and helped establish creative placemaking as a significant framework in American arts, planning, and community development policy.

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Trauma Informed Placemaking

Trauma Informed Placemaking offers an introduction to understanding trauma and healing in place. It offers insights that researchers and practitioners can apply to their place-based practice, learning from a global cohort of place leaders and communities.

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The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking

This Handbook is the first to explore the emergent field of ‘placemaking’ in terms of the recent research, teaching and learning, and practice agenda for the next few years. Offering valuable theoretical and practical insights from the leading scholars and practitioners in the field, it provides cutting-edge interdisciplinary research on the placemaking sector.

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Cara Courage

Dr. Cara Courage is a placemaking practitioner, researcher, writer, and cultural strategist whose work explores the relationships between culture, community, and place.

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Detroit Soup

Detroit SOUP brought neighbors together over a shared meal to hear local ideas, pool small contributions, and collectively fund projects making Detroit better.

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Amy Kaherl

Amy Kaherl is a Detroit-based community organizer who helped build and lead Detroit SOUP, the celebrated microgranting dinner that brought people together over a shared meal to hear ideas for improving their city and collectively decide which ones to fund. Building on a participatory dinner model that originated in Chicago, Amy and her collaborators helped turn Detroit SOUP into a powerful local institution—and an approach that would itself inspire similar gatherings around the world—demonstrating how food, small amounts of money, and a simple act of gathering can create meaningful opportunities for civic participation and connection.