Engaging in Action Main Street Training

 
You are invited to Minnesota Main Street’s next training workshop, Engaging in Action, happening on Thursday, September 22, 10 am to 2:30 pm in downtown Faribault, MN, a designated Minnesota Main Street community. In this Minnesota Main Street training workshop, participants will learn strategies for engaging community in ways that make ideas tangible and build relationships. James Rojas, an urban planner, community activist, and artist from LA, and Kristen Murray, who manages Juxtaposition Art’s Tactical studio, will be facilitating this training workshop.
 
Click here to learn more and to register online.
This event is FREE for registrants from Faribault!  Advance registration is requested.

Description of Engage in Action Training Workshop:
 
In this Minnesota Main Street training workshop, participants will learn strategies for engaging community in ways that make ideas tangible and build relationships. In the first half of the workshop, learn about tactical urbanism—a practice of prototyping new ideas for public spaces in real time with an eye toward learning—can be a strategy for community engagement that simultaneously starts conversations, tests solutions and promotes vitality in commercial corridors, downtowns and other important public places. You’ll see examples of ways that Juxtaposition Arts designers at partners have used these strategies in Minneapolis. 
 
During the second half of the day, you will dig into a hands on workshop, PLACE IT!: a design and participation-based urban planning practice that uses model-building workshops and on-site interactive models to help engage the public in the planning and design process. Through the PLACE IT! process participants are able to learn about the role of planning and design in shaping how we live, and to translate their dreams and ideas into physical forms and models. From these physical results and their accompanying stories we can generate plans, drawings, and policy recommendations for municipalities, NGOs, and elected officials. Click here to view a video about PLACE IT!
 
Training Workshop Facilitators:
 
Kristen Murray believes that sustainable, equitable design grows out of the creativity, knowledge and assets in a place. After developing workshops and tools for design-based learning at the Science Museum of Minnesota for almost a decade, Kristen returned to the University of Minnesota for graduate school to study urban design and public policy. While there, she received a Judd Fellowship to travel to Berlin and London, and won the Honor Award from ASLA-MN. She participated in the collaborative UMN-Juxtaposition Arts studio, ReMix, and joined the staff at Juxtaposition in 2013. Kristen currently manages Juxtaposition’s Tactical studio, which combines community engagement with urban design, planning and art. The artists, organizers and apprentices she collaborates with leverage an action and asset based approach to urban planning and design projects.
 
James Rojas is an urban planner, community activist, and artist. He has developed an innovative public-engagement and community-visioning method that uses art-making as its medium. Through this method he has engaged thousands of people by facilitating over four hundred workshops and building over fifty interactive models around the world - from the streets of New York and San Francisco, to Mexico, Canada, Europe, and South America. He has collaborated with municipalities, non-profits, community groups, educational institutions, and museums, to engage, educate, and empower the public on transportation, housing, open space, and health issues.
 
Rojas is also one of the few nationally recognized urban planners to examine U.S. Latino cultural influences on urban design and sustainability. He has written and lectured extensively on how culture and immigration are transforming the American front yard and landscape. He is the founder of the Latino Urban Forum, an advocacy group dedicated to increasing awareness around planning and design issues facing low-income Latinos.
 
Rojas has lectured and facilitated workshops at MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell, and numerous other colleges and universities. His installation work has been shown at the Los Museum of Contemporary Art, The Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, the Venice Biennale, the Exploratorium, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Bronx Museum of Art, and the Getty. His research has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Dwell, Places, and in numerous books.