ABOUT CPTA
Creative Placemaking Technical Assistance program (CPTA) supports local leaders in elevating arts, culture, and design to strengthen community connections and deepen impact.
Recognizing the myriad of ways that artists, culture bearers, and designers have been contributing to their communities over the years, in 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) began looking deeply at how arts, culture, and design are integral to community development. This included partnering with the Mayors’ Institute on City Design to commission research and a resulting white paper, titled Creative Placemaking, by Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus. This publication, along with a pilot grant program to support place-based work in partnership with the Mayors’ Institute on City Design were formative in the establishment of the NEA’s flagship creative placemaking grant program: Our Town.
Since 2011, Our Town grants have supported creative placemaking in communities of all sizes across the national landscape. In the course of this work, it became clear that Our Town grantees could benefit from direct, hands-on technical assistance while executing their projects at the local level.
In 2016, the NEA and LISC began the Our Town Technical Assistance Pilot Program to provide select Our Town grantees with targeted technical assistance. In 2020, the program was renamed the Creative Placemaking Technical Assistance Program (CPTA), and expanded to serve a wider audience of prospective applicants to, and grantees of, the Our Town program, as well as other communities interested in undertaking creative placemaking activities
The CPTA webinars, workshops, public events, and tools are designed to guide you on your creative placemaking journey. We hope you find them useful.
Top: Moon Viewing, The Rail Park, Philadelphia, PA. Photo by Shawn Sheu.
The CPTA Team
Maya Hering (she/her) joined the Design and Creative Placemaking division of the NEA in April 2022. In this role, she works with the Our Town program, Creative Placemaking Technical Assistance, and with the Mayors’ Institute on City Design. Hering comes to the NEA with 20 years of grant review and grants administration experience through positions at the community level with nonprofit agencies and public entities, at the state level, in positions with national reach, and as federal staff with a grantee portfolio covering Colorado, Utah, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, & Wyoming. Hering says, the through line of her career is about increasing access to, and impact of, public service programs and resources across diverse communities and landscapes.
Ben Stone (he/him) was appointed director of Design and Creative Placemaking in July 2023. In this position, he manages the NEA’s grantmaking for design and creative placemaking, and oversees the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, the Citizens’ Institute for Rural Design, and the Creative Placemaking Technical Assistance Program. Stone most recently served as a senior advisor at the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University, where he helped cities access federal bipartisan infrastructure funding via the Local Infrastructure Hub, a national technical assistance program for municipal governments seeking these resources.
CPTA Resource Team FY 2023-2024
We are fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with a network of seasoned practitioners and field leaders, who have served as Resource Team members for the CPTA program. Resource Team members work directly with Our Town grantees, offer advice, share insights and thought leadership, and help grantees and project partners throughout their projects. Learn more about the FY 2023-2024 Resource Team here.
John Davis
Flannel & Blade LLC
Julie Ann Garreau
Tasha Golden, PhD
Jamie Horter
Theresa Hyuna Hwang
Susannah Laramee Kidd
Looking Glass Creative LLC
Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts NY (NOCD-NY)
Scott Oshima
Renee Piechocki
Marty Pottenger
Michaele Pride
Leah Reisman
Mark Valdez
Our Founding Partners and Collaborators
This work would not be possible without dedicated commitment, thoughtful insights, and genuine interest of our partners and collaborators. In 2014, Jason Schupbach and Jen Hughes had an idea about how to build field support for creative placemaking grantees, aiming to strengthen cross-sectoral projects, enhance the success of programs, and lay the groundwork for lasting community health. They engaged LISC and PolicyLink to build the program, under the direction of Lynne McCormack and Jeremy Liu, and with Rebecca Cordes Chan, Lorrie Chang and Katherine Bray Simons. In 2016, the Creative Placemaking Technical Assistance program launched with support from the Kresge Foundation. Around the same time, LISC created a set of creative placemaking tools, with Melissa Kim, Aviva Kapust, Barbara Schaffer Bacon, Craig Dreeszen, PhD, and Margy Waller. These efforts initiated the Creative Placemaking Technical Assistance Program and Tools, which have served hundreds of grantees, artists, local leaders, culture bearers, designers, stakeholders, and communities of all sizes. With deep gratitude and admiration, we thank them, former Resource Team members, and many others including: 41 North Media, David Greenberg, Mina Kim, Hannah Leatherman, Lizanne Hart Consulting LLC, Lynne Osgood, Rainwater Design, Courtney Spearman, Erik Takeshita, Rachael Viscidy, Nati Taveras, and Meera Chakravarthy.
Programs for Our Town Grantees
While many of the resources on this site are available to anyone interested in creative placemaking, CPTA hosts some offerings specifically for Our Town grantees and their project partners. If you are an Our Town grantee or part of an Our Town project, check the For Our Town Grantees section of this site for more information about ways to connect with your peers and the Creative Placemaking Technical Assistance Program.
More information about Our Town, the Arts Endowments’ flagship creative placemaking grant program, can be found on the Our Town page on the NEA site.
Established by Congress in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts is an independent federal agency that is the largest funder of the arts and arts education in communities nationwide and a catalyst of public and private support for the arts. By advancing equitable opportunities for arts participation and practice, the NEA fosters and sustains an environment in which the arts benefit everyone in the United States.