Glitter is a Philadelphia-based neighborhood cleaning service that lets neighbors pool resources to care for their block—creating local jobs while experimenting with where individual, collective, and municipal responsibility for public space meet.

Community builder and entrepreneur leading the Seattle Chamber of Connection, creating programs and shared experiences designed to strengthen belonging, relationships, and civic connection across the city.

Christine Brooks PHD is an educator, coach, and practitioner whose work explores creativity, self-awareness, social intelligence, and community building. At the California Institute of Integral Studies, she helps prepare expressive arts coaches and facilitators to use creative practice as a tool for connection and transformation.

Expressive Arts Coaching & Community Building is a pioneering program that integrates collaborative, liberatory creative practices with coaching and facilitation to inspire individual and collective transformation. Graduates acquire a unique foundation that encourages their practice and professionalism as credentialed coaches, expressive arts facilitators, and leaders in the field.

ARTogether’s mission is to provide art programs that foster compassionate communities where refugees and immigrants can flourish

We envision a world where there are no barriers—or borders—to art and creative expression, where everyone is welcomed and their stories have impact.

Leva Zand is an Iranian-American conceptual artist, organizational development advisor, and human rights advocate. She is most notably recognized as the founder and former Executive Director of ARTogether, a prominent Oakland-based nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering community, healing, and belonging for refugees and immigrants through the creative arts.

In Sunamganj, Bangladesh, communities work with government engineers to build and dismantle portions of a submersible embankment each year—protecting rice crops before harvest while allowing seasonal flooding afterward. The project combines local knowledge, ecological adaptation, and community participation in an unusual model of co-produced infrastructure.

Kady Yellow is a creative placemaking practitioner and Vice President of Placemaking and Activations at Downtown Vision in Jacksonville. Through PlacemakingJax and a career spanning public art, Pop-Up Civics, and community-led activation, she works to give people a meaningful role in shaping the places they call home. Also, someone wrote a song about her.

Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place introduced the influential idea of the “third place”—informal gathering places outside home and work where people become regulars, relationships develop, and community life takes shape. Cafés, bars, barber shops, bookstores, and similar places become essential pieces of social infrastructure.

Majora Carter is an urban revitalization strategist, real estate developer, MacArthur Fellow, broadcaster, and author whose work focuses on creating opportunity within historically undervalued communities. Her approach connects economic development and talent retention to the belief that people should not have to leave their neighborhoods to find opportunity.

Abra Allan is Cofounder of Big Creative Consulting and Sidewalk Ballet’s unofficial Foreign Correspondent.