Courtney Bengtson is director of strategic initiatives for the Wichita Community Foundation, one of Knight Foundation’s partners in 18 small to mid-sized cities where the Knight brothers used to own newspapers. 

Community foundations around the country have a personal stake in making the cities we live in more vibrant. We know our communities and can be trusted to help make these changes because we are part of the fabric of our cities. We work side by side with our neighbors to achieve this goal, and when our work is successful, we see the results reflected in the places we call home. They are the communities where we work, raise families, make our lives. 

A few months ago, I led a team of community doers to Lexington, Kentucky, for a two-day learning exchange centered on people-first design. The gathering, hosted by Knight Foundation and led by Gehl Studio, challenged residents from four Knight communities to focus on ways to creatively engage people in public spaces.

Michael Ramsey of Bokeh Development, Becky Tuttle of HealthICT and Scott Wadle, a senior planner for the Wichita-Sedgwick County Planning Department, joined me for the training. All three are significant proponents of finding ways to grow Wichita sustainably into a more livable community. And we learned just that from Gehl—how to think about projects for people-first communities. We learned first hand from Lexington that these projects do not need to be big or fancy. And that failure is okay.

After we returned home to Wichita, we were inspired to test a small-scale public life project. We put together a proposal, with help from the Wichita Downtown Development Corp. and the Wichita Community Foundation, for a 60-day installation at one of the main intersections downtown. With nearly $1 billion invested in our downtown in the last decade, the momentum and opportunity for public spaces is apparent. And the results are exciting; we found the installation had a significant impact on lowering the speed of drivers. This has implications on the livability of the community, increasing public safety and improving the pedestrian experience. KSN-TV even covered the results.

The people-first design pilot was a minimal investment from the Knight Foundation Fund at the Wichita Community Foundation (less than $10,000), and was installed in one day with the help of community volunteers. The city of Wichita provided tremendous guidance and support for the project. The experiment was constructed prior to Wichita’s Riverfest, Kansas’ largest community event, and is located less than one block from Pop-Up Urban Park, also a Knight Foundation Fund project. It’s exciting to see traffic slow down in what was once viewed as a dangerous intersection to reclaim it as a public space. Who would have thought that was possible with a few bales of hay and a few stackable chairs and tables?

From a short email invitation inviting Mike, Becky and Scott to Lexington, to planning the pilot while eating lunch from a food truck in the Pop-Up Urban Park, to the finished product, the team accomplished an amazing feat in 45 days. It’s remarkable what residents can do for their communities in such a short amount of time.

We just returned from Akron, Ohio, for a learning exchange with Jason Roberts, co-founder of Better Block, and several community leaders. We have ideas brewing and can’t wait to launch another prototype from what we have learned.