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This research-based design project is being developed by MS Design and Urban Ecologies students in collaboration with the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. The project seeks to envision innovative organizing and planning tools to help underserved and immigrant communities build capacity as they start their recovery efforts. The tools will become part of LISC’s community-planning process ensuring equity and inclusion which remains at the center of the organization’s planning and collective impact process.

Women, Care, and Housing: Envisioning New Housing Cooperative Models for Sunset Park’s Immigrant Communities initiated in the fall of 2018 as part of Design and Urban Ecologies Studio 1. Students worked closely with Beyond Care, a worker cooperative led by immigrant women providing childcare services in Brooklyn, which became a partner during the previous semester. As part of this project, a number of workshops, working sessions, and discussions around housing cooperatives and Community Land Trusts were organized in collaboration with Beyond Care members to work toward the design of a new model of housing cooperative for their families.

United for Housing is a collaborative project developed by first-year students from the MS Design and Urban Ecologies program, the Community Development Finance Lab, and United Families of Sunset Park, a group of over 15  families who are organizing to establish a housing cooperative in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. The project involves the co-production of educational and organizing tools to advance the efforts of the group, the design of methodologies to identify potential properties for the project in the neighborhood, and the development of scenarios to create a cooperative housing considering local assets and available public programs and funds.