Juanli Carrion emphasizes care as critical to meaningful community engagement and mutual development and highlights the fluidity between pedagogical and creative practice. Carrion places importance on understanding a community’s structure of feelings, cultural identity, and social-political context in collaborative projects, which he frames in the context of co-creating community gardens in some of New York’s NYCHA public housing complexes. He approaches gardens as spaces for community engagement that foster self-sufficiency and agency, which he elaborates on in describing the development of the OSS (Outer Seed Shadow) Project.