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
Jen Krava (she/her), Director of Learning, Grants + Research, Forecast Public Art.
Jen holds master’s degrees in public art & design, and landscape architecture, and approaches her work with a multi-directional lens to investigate contemporary issues in public art, placeknowing, and creative economies. Jen sets the vision for consulting work at Forecast and works on projects invested in community driven research and prototyping. She leads arts and culture planning efforts, facilitates equitable RFQ processes, curates public art projects, develops and facilitates customized training, creates online learning systems and content, develops regional capacity building, manages Forecast’s artist grant program, and leads the Change Lab, which is focused on building equity in public art across the country. Jen is the past co-editor of _SCAPE, ASLA-MN’s publication, and a visual artist, studying human relationships to their surroundings, the connection between garments and social perception, and gender challenges in public.
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.
Theresa Sweetland (she/her), Executive Director, Forecast Public Art.
Theresa is an experienced executive director, fundraiser, curator, and leader in the field of community cultural development and creative placemaking.
Theresa holds a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Minnesota Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs with a concentration on community and economic development. She is a co-founding artistic director of B-Girl Be, the world’s first international women in hip-hop summit, now recognized in the Harvard Hiphop Archive. Theresa is a founding director of Creative CityMaking, a pioneering partnership between artists and city staff to advance racial equity goals and engage underrepresented communities in determining the future of Minneapolis. She serves as creative director for Chroma Zone, Minnesota's largest mural festival and public realm initiative dedicated to supporting women and BIPOC muralists in Saint Paul. She was recognized for bold new steps and strategic leadership with the Sally Ordway Irvine Award for Initiative in 2015 and is a 2023 FutureGood Studio national leadership cohort member.
Ebony Dumas (she/her), Director of Planning + Engagement, Forecast Public Art.
Ebony is an urban and regional planner who enjoys building consensus among stakeholders for projects in economic development, creative placemaking/keeping, and community planning. As a Senior Neighborhood Planner for the DC Office of Planning, she recently produced an oral history-based podcast miniseries, District Crossroads, as part of a land use and urban design study.
Ebony was also a board member for the Association for Community Design and a co-founding organizer for Girls Rock! DC, a music education program that aims to bolster leadership, self-expression, and a passion for social change in girls and non-binary youth. Outside of planning, Ebony is a DJ that creates unique and welcoming social spaces designed to bring people together and build community.
CPTA Resource Team FY 2025-2026
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.
We seek up to ten experienced practitioners from across the U.S. to serve as Resource Team Members to support Our Town grantees and their project partners. This contract involves providing one-on-one consultations, facilitating workshops and peer exchanges, and offering targeted guidance on integrating arts, culture, and design into community development and creative placemaking strategies.
Learn more about the Resource Team open call.
Questions? Contact ourtowncpta@gmail.com.
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.