Placekeeping, Reparative Justice, and Trust
Irfana Jetha Noorani
The text that follows is a transcript of a presentation by and discussion with Irfana Jetha Noorani that took place at the GWU Corcoran School of the Arts and Design on March 20, 2024. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Presentation
I’m an artist, cultural producer, and administrator. I’m a mom, a sister, a partner, a daughter, and a friend. I’m a third-culture kid with ties to East Africa, India, Canada, and America. And I spent most of my youth and adult life training and performing as a dancer and performer. This background led me into administration, first doing work primarily with movement-based artists. I am gripped by body-based practices. I’m obsessed with ephemeral experience and fascinated by expression, gesture, and movement. My work and interests, over time, came, then, to intersect with activities and concerns in the built environment.
The projects that make up my career, I hope, illuminate the importance of transdisciplinary creative practice, as well as emphasize the importance of creative leadership. I share a few examples to illustrate the potentials of expanded and collaborative creative work.
I start with the 11th Street Bridge Park that I had the honor to work on as the Deputy Director from 2014 to 2020. The 11th Street Bridge Park is a unique, community-based, community-centered design project that is transforming a former freeway bridge into the District of Columbia’s first elevated park—spanning the Anacostia River and connecting the Navy Yard and Capitol Hill neighborhoods with historic Anacostia and Fairlawn. The bridge deck has been removed and the pilings are being repurposed to create a pedestrian-only walkway to connect both sides of the river.
The project’s origins and design were driven by thousands of community meetings on both sides of the river. The programming and design concept ideas, crowdsourced from hundreds of area residents, were incorporated into the park’s nationwide design competition in 2014. They include public art that conveys the history of the region, an environmental education center, place-based urban agriculture, and the number one request, performance space. These community-generated programming ideas have informed the project’s primary goals of:
· improving public health disparities that exist between communities on both sides of the river;
· reengaging residents with the river—a resource long neglected by the city;
· creating strong civic infrastructure for historically disconnected communities, both physically and metaphorically;
· and becoming an anchor for justice-centered, equitable development.
In 2014, 11th Street Bridge Park launched a nationwide design competition. A design by OMA and Olin was selected unanimously by our competition jury and also an oversight committee of local residents and stakeholders who provided feedback to architects throughout the design competition.
As the competition completed, the staff started to analyze the impacts of these types of infrastructure projects in similar cities. From the data we collected, we know that these large-scale projects increase property values anywhere from 5-40%, and often way more than that. We also collected data on our community. We know that 70% of our residents east of the river were renters and highly susceptible to displacement in the face of market changes. Rapid displacement, particularly of people of color, and in our case, black DC, is something that many American cities are struggling with. In a report released in March 2019 called “Shifting Neighborhoods: Gentrification and Cultural Displacement in American Cities,” the National Community Reinvestment Coalition stated that Washington DC has the highest percentage of gentrified neighborhoods in the US.
For us to proceed with this project and still fulfill the mission of our organization—to serve communities east of the river—we really needed to get clear about who this park was for and think outside the box to ensure that our residents, in particular black residents, have the opportunity to thrive and benefit from the development of the 11th Street Bridge Park.
This is a critical juncture in our story for the project, where we take a significant turn. We assembled a team of experts from the Urban Institute, Trust for Public Land, DC Fiscal Policy Institute, and the DC Office of Planning to form an equitable development task force. These are amazing organizations focused on the economic and displacement effects impacting communities, eager to support a local project. They helped us analyze the data on the neighborhood and, along with residents and community non-profits, developed recommendations in three key areas where we can have an impact: workforce development, small business enterprise, and housing.
We set to work in an area with a one-mile radius around the park—anyone within a twenty-minute walk. We really got tight. Who is our community now? How can the park benefit those who are here? The research and recommendations were compiled into an equitable development plan. I share a few examples of how the 11th Street Bridge Park is implementing this plan:
· The Bridge Park started a Ward 8 “homebuyer’s club” with a local non-profit called Manna. Over 1282 east-of-the-river residents have participated in the club since 2016 and 131 purchased homes through its support.
· The Bridge Park started the Douglass Community Land Trust for which we hired an executive director, filed articles of incorporation, established a board of directors, and developed a pipeline of 252 housing and commercial units and acquired 65 rental units in Ward 8—preserving permanent affordability for the community.
· For small business growth, the Bridge Park focused on technical assistance for small businesses within the community. To date, 700-plus east-of-the-river businesses have benefited. In workforce, we focused on construction training. 259 residents in Wards 7 and 8 have completed construction training and 104 have been placed in full-time jobs.
*For more updated data on the implementation of the Bridge Park’s Equitable Development Plan please visit bridgepark.org/equity.
You’ll notice that all of these projects are done in partnership with NGO’s that have expertise in these areas—and not alone. The 11th Street Bridge Park really acted as a convener to address major issues facing our city. We’re still working with the Urban Institute to track our impact—for accountability and transparency.
So, here’s where I come in as an artist sitting at the table. In addition to economic gentrification, we also need to think about cultural gentrification and the placekeeping and preservation that must occur in the neighborhoods we serve. In 2017, we formalized cultural strategies with our local artists and cultural leaders in the community and added these strategies to the plan. Our community asked the bridge park to serve as a platform for celebrating the history and culture of residents on both sides of the river. In particular, they called for the park to amplify the stories, culture, and heritage of the enduring black residents. Ideas that the community came up with under the arts and culture sector of plan included:
· the park as an information hub for the community—a physical space for sharing information about happenings in the park and surrounding neighborhoods;
· design inclusive of both formal and informal spaces that welcome and make room for all people, especially people of color; and,
· affordable programming accessible to all visitors and that prioritizes collaborations with residents, local organizations, and neighborhood creatives and amplifies the narratives and voices of the black residents.
Of course, there are significant challenges that we have faced and continue to face, lessons learned along the way. I want to touch on one major thing that is still with me—and that is how this work is sustained beyond the project and what the lasting legacies of the work are. I’m talking about systemic change. One of the biggest gaps that remains is policy. How do we permanently integrate our understanding with the everyday operations of the city? How do we create policy that supports this work—getting beyond just capital investment?
Now, moving on to the second project… Transform 1012 is one of the most amazing projects that I’ve ever worked on. It’s a Texas-based non-profit. It’s a coalition of local arts, grassroots, and service organizations, including DNAWORKS—which is a theater company, LGBTQ SAVES, the Opal Lee Foundation, SOL Ballet Folklórico, Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice, the Welman Project, Window to your World, and the Transform 1012 youth council. The mission of Transform 1012 is to transform a former Ku Klux Klan auditorium in Fort Worth into the Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing. The building is a monument to hate that they want to turn into a beacon of truth telling, reconciliation, and liberation for the nation.
The Fred Rouse Center is a reparative justice project. It will honor the life and memory of Fred Rouse, a black butcher who was lynched by a white mob in Fort Worth in 1921, by returning resources to communities that were targeted for marginalization and violence by the KKK. Transform 1012 represents groups of people in Fort Worth who were targeted by the KKK in the 1920’s—specifically, black, Catholic, Hispanic, immigrant, Jewish, and the LGBTQ+ population. The placement of this piece of infrastructure is really interesting in where it sits within the city of Fort Worth; it sits between downtown and the part of the city allocated to immigrants—who would have to pass the building every single day to go to work. Just think about the violence of architecture in this situation.
And, lastly, another project on which I’ve been working is called Vital Little Plans. Vital Little Plans is an artist collective and giving circle that supports equitable and creative plans that are arts-driven and community-led for neighborhoods and places. I started this collective with five friends who I met through ArtPlace America—a ten-year collaboration among multiple foundations, federal agencies, and financial institutions that operated from 2010 to 2020. ArtPlace’s mission was to position arts and culture as a core sector of equitable community planning and development. We started Vital Little Plans as a continuation of the community and friendships that we had built through ArtPlace and a way to continue giving to similar types of important projects. We are diverse in who we are, and in our disciplines as artists. We are a authors, dancers, theater folx, painters. All of us are very multidisciplinary. And we are spread across the US.
Before I proceed, I want to share a definition of a “giving circle.” From Philanthropy Today, it is a group of people with shared values who get together to discuss collectively and decide where to donate a pooled gift. We, as Vital Little Plans, trained with Philanthropy Together to develop our infrastructure and approach for creating our own giving circle. We wanted to create something to further the practice of trust-based giving. Our collective works to center relationships of trust. We decentralized leadership and work collaboratively. We employ a consensus-based decision-making model in which we all get to agreement and alignment before moving forward. We get there, when we all get there. Sometimes it takes us a little longer to make our gifts to the artists that we support, but we get there. And we will continue to work in this way… until it maybe doesn’t work anymore.
The mechanics of what we do are as follows. Everyone in the collective pools 1% of their income and .1% of their wealth to fund arts-driven and community-led projects. We made this rule so that it’s equitable in how everyone gives. We also give whatever we can at the end of the year—less or more depending on whatever is going on our lives. This is how we practice trust with each other. We also provide technical assistance to projects and artists. And we support each other’s personal and professional development.
I now have shared several different facets of my work as a creative leader. And, of course, there’s more, like my personal creative projects and my involvement with the Ford Foundation and other philanthropic organizations. It all appears vast and disjointed. Even I have struggled to pull it together, to find the throughline. But, I want to say that all of it connects to ideals for I want to see in the world: I act in transdisciplinary ways. I find collaborators outside of my medium. I enter spaces where creative leadership is needed. And I see new opportunities as chances to learn new things and push my creative craft.
Q&A
SS = Support Structures
IJN = Irfana Jetha Noorani
AM = audience member
SS: Let’s start with a question about transdisciplinarity. I’m curious what you’ve found to be best practices for navigating the multiple needs, roles, and cultures of mixed-discipline, collaborative efforts? Disciplinary workers, a byproduct of contemporary education, are trained to operate through specializations or expertise. These positionalities, then, can bump up against each other in uncomfortable, and unproductive, ways. I’m wondering, specifically, if you have run into replicable scenarios that either trigger tensions or facilitate cooperation.
IJN: This is why it’s so important for artists to be in spaces in which we don’t typically operate, or in which we’re uncomfortable. Back to the 11th Street Bridge Park, it was me, a dancer and performer, and Scott Kratz, the Director—who has a background in museum education, who looked at the design project and said that we cannot operate in the same way that design projects typically operate. Everyone around us was working in silos: in housing, small business, the health sector. But we have to take care of whole people. We’re in the business of working in neighborhoods, in the community. We have to think holistically.
Our intervention, then, was critical in breaking down the silos that we were confronting. Our best practices involved leveraging and convening power, leveraging the relationship making techniques that we employ in our creative work. Just learning from people, hearing them, and representing the many ideas of others in an artistic work. Bringing the cultural piece forward. We talk a lot about the economic gentrification happening in our communities, but not a lot about the cultural piece that is lost or missing when these new environments come to be. How do you build cultural connection? How do you build ownership of these spaces?
SS: Expanding on the question of interdisciplinarity, it strikes me that you, individually, are many things. You’re an artist, a producer, an administrator. Will you elaborate on how you became these multiple things? And what do you see as the overlap in these distinct ways of working? You are an individual example of how to break disciplinary boundaries.
IJN: My career is a career of winding roads. And, I have guides. I have really great mentors who have steered me into the unknown. Those people are so important. I remember, when I got the 11th Street Bridge Park position, I also got a position in a performing arts institution at the same time. I called a mentor of mine and was like: “Well, the obvious choice is this performing arts organization. I have never worked in architecture or design.” And this person was like: “No, you need to do the bridge park project.” This push in a new direction led me to learn a radical volume of new stuff. Now, I’m slightly dangerous. I know about community land trusts; I know about affordable housing; I can work with small businesses. Without that push, this world would not have opened to me.
Then, since I started my cultural consulting practice, I’ve come back to my creative center. I’m producing events, working with artists, working in philanthropy. This is just a different iteration. I’m not making dances; I’m not moving in the same way. I’m moving with people; I’m moving with communities; I’m moving with neighborhoods. And, through all of this, I’m reclaiming the title of artist. I have an incredibly creative practice. It’s just different than when I was a dancer.
SS: So, Vital Little Plans. This is a very bottom-up solution to our nation’s arts shortcomings. Do you see this work as something that is replicable, that could upscale, that could be a model at a governmental level? Or is it a one-off or something that is site-specific?
IJN: This is a great question, because I just had a conversation with an artist here in DC who found Vital Little Plans and wants to set-up a DC version. Already, we are not regional; we are national. And it’s really hard to work at that level. We don’t want to grow at a pace that’s faster than we can go. Expansion means significant change and I’m not sure we want that… yet. So, when I was talking with the DC artist, I was saying that she should not start from scratch. We have materials and bylaws that we can loan to get them started. That could work. At the end of the day, though, Vital Little Plans operates as a group of friends.
SS: My last question is less about the material in your presentation and more about your work with the Ford Foundation and other major philanthropic organizations. You and I spoke independently about the potentials of “trust-based philanthropy”—which is an evolving approach to philanthropic giving. Do you see other strategies developing within philanthropic organizations or community groups? And how are they implemented and structured?
IJN: I have a list.
First, we established Vital Little Plans to counter big philanthropy and its restrictive and supervisory nature. Some of the ideas for making support more accessible and widespread that we’re exploring include: multi-year funding, unrestricted funding, turn-over funding. These interrelated approaches allow grantees to spend their awards on whatever they want to spend them on, on their own timelines. Basically, don’t ask questions and walk away. We already do this with Vital Little Plans. And also nobody applies for our support. We shoulder that responsibility. We do the research, the due diligence, to find artists in need. We just reach out and send our recipients money, no strings attached.
Another approach is to rethink evaluation metrics. With the evaluation project that I’m doing for another large US funder, we sent a survey to grantees asking them to tell us how they’re doing, what they’re working on. I suggested to the foundation staff that, instead of making the grantees report in a standard quarterly report, the survey was enough. There is a real need to develop procedures that honor the time and resources of the communities and people that are (potential) awardees.
Next, I wish there were more transparency. Cut people loose if you’re not going to fund them. Don’t waste their time. One of the reasons I transitioned from doing a lot of work in fundraising was that I couldn’t beg people for money anymore. It was killing me. I wish that the people who were never going to give money had just said so. I could have taken them off my list and moved on.
A big one. Cede power. There is a really good example of a trust-based philanthropy model here called the iF Foundation and they have implemented a participatory grant-making approach. It gives decision-making authority about their funding to the communities that the foundation aims to serve. They set up participatory grant-making groups to select recipients of the grants that go out.
Last, underlining all my work with philanthropy, wouldn’t it be better if we just spent the money? Are we waiting for things to get worse? Things are not going to get worse because you spend the money. If you spend the money now, things could get better.
One caveat that I want to add to the philanthropic organization critique is that there is something special about the expertise of foundation program officers. They see the whole picture. They see how everyone is operating at a national level. They see what’s happening regionally. That expertise is truly mobilizing and can be such an asset.
SS: With that, we open the conversation and see what questions the audience might have for us.
AM: When you were talking about the Anacostia River project, the pivotal shift that you all made post-2014, it’s clear that the project turned to do some really innovative work in the area, but can you talk more about the pivot process? It doesn’t seem like that would have been straightforward, turning from High Line inspired expectations, to something much more granular. That can’t have been easy.
IJN: It was super tough, because we had to assess what was in our power. What could we recommend? How could we utilize our intention and convening ability to change course? Scott’s and my creative practices, not being embedded in status-quo design processes, informed a different understanding of the possibilities. And, we also had tremendous support in our partnering institutions, especially LISC—Local Initiatives Support Corporation—which is a CDFI (community development financial institution) based here in DC. Their director, Ornamenta Newsome, was really asking the right questions. To the High Line’s credit, they started their High Line Network around that time. The purpose of that network was to prevent other projects from making the same mistakes that they had made. They had spent all of their time working to convince people that a project like theirs could happen. It was a wild idea in their time to utilize infrastructure in the way that they did. We didn’t have to make that argument. They did that for us. So, the next step in the evolution of their work was to figure out how to make an impact on infrastructure projects across the country. This combination of influences—ours, the community’s, and the High Line’s—accumulated. It wasn’t immediate. We built toward the change.
AM: Thinking about when you were talking about relating, specifically with black residents, will you walk through the process of convening, how you approached gathering?
IJN: We have a practice in the Bridge Park staff of going to where community already is. There is very little asking people to show up. We would just go and sit in community events, even if we weren’t on the agenda, just to listen to issues that the community was facing, what their concerns were. We were there and part of what was already happening. People got familiar with us because we were regularly in the room.
Another thing we did with respect to convening, particularly with artists and community members, I would never submit a budget to the project funder without accounting for childcare services and food. We would hire a local arts organization to do a craft with the kids. And we hired neighborhood caterers and restaurants to feed everyone. I made sure participants were compensated for their time.
AM: I’m curious how you position yourself. How do we make an argument for creatives to be in unfamiliar and uncomfortable places?
IJN: I believe in the innate value of artists. I don’t want to spend my time proving artistic value. So, I show it. I just do things. I don’t theorize. Whenever I’m involved in organizational or project assessments, I leave that to a research partner. I’m the one who figures out implementation and strategy, what we are going to do. And, that work, by default, just brings everyone along.
Irfana Jetha Noorani (she/her/hers) is an artist, producer and administrator based in Washington, D.C. She supports neighborhoods, public spaces, cultural organizations, and philanthropic institutions with equitable planning processes and programming that center people of color and justice-based outcomes in their work.
Irfana founded a cultural consulting practice in 2021 and currently serves as a Project Consultant to the Ford Foundation, Gehl, and Therme Group US. Other recent projects include providing interim executive leadership for Transform 1012 N. Main Street, leading a public art commissioning process for the 11th Street Bridge Park, and serving as a Senior Fellow to the High Line Network.
From 2014 – 2020, Irfana served as a founding staff member and the Deputy Director of the 11th Street Bridge Park. Irfana is a Founding Member of Vital Little Plans (a national artist collective and giving circle that challenges the power of Eurocentric philanthropy and supports creative and disruptive initiatives that are arts-driven and community-led).