Today's the day! 2016 Project Grantees for spring have been picked and we are excited to introduce you to this great group of innovators. They signed their contracts today and are getting ready to start their projects...meet the new recruits below:
Grantee: Rob Wilson
Neighborhood: Hyde Park
Project: Avondale Community Voices will bring together experienced leaders with local youth to create change through media in Avondale. Young adults from the neighborhood will identify a community issue, research it and produce a Public Service Announcement (PSA) for local channels. Teams will research issues and look for potential solutions to raise awareness and create change.
Grantee: Aaron Greene
Neighborhood: North College Hill
Project: Bioscience Cincy will present a series of educational pop-ups in the form of interactive and engaging learning tools. Residents will be encouraged to explore various aspects of science through carefully selected, hands-on experiments. Scientists and educators will promote curiosity by providing answers about bioscience-related subjects that are relatable to everyday life.
Grantee: Rachelle Caplan
Neighborhood: Northside
Project: Cincinnati Mobile Music Lab will be an interactive pop-up instrument showroom. This project will foster music appreciation, knowledge, community enrichment and provide opportunities for creative collaboration among individuals of Greater Cincinnati. The Mobile Music Lab will provide children and adults the resources to develop new skills and further their imaginative passions.
Grantee: Dominique Peebles
Neighborhood: Over-the-Rhine
Project: Brick Gardens is an urban gardening model using indoor vertical towers to grow produce that will be donated to a local community. This model will allow for more programs to promote healthy eating in schools, local soup kitchens and/or local food banks throughout the year.
Grantee: Kathleen Cail + Nestor Melnyk
Neighborhood: Indian Hill + Clifton
Project: Through the use of crowd-sourced information and digital iconography, LivABLE will establish a public movement that helps better communicate the accessibility of certain venues. LivABLE will serve as a resource to the community, infiltrating social media and websites with icons that provide accurate information regarding general, and accessibility of spaces.
Grantee: Ben Sloan
Neighborhood: Northside
Project: The Percussion Park, a functional drum set composed of unorthodox materials, will allow for multiple players to participate and interact with sounds. The Percussion Park will be a vehicle for community engagement by activating unused space, bringing people together to create music and strengthening communities. Open to everyone, the percussion set will be installed in Price Hill.
Grantee: Jasmine Humphries
Neighborhood: Avondale
Project: Who ‘They’ Is will be a summer civic enrichment open to young students who will participate in a community design project in Avondale. Students will learn how to plan and manage a project, identify stakeholders, and get community buy-in. They will consequently uncover who “they” is along the way and will become empowered to work towards change.
Grantee: Larry Malott
Neighborhood: Hebron
Project: The Costumed Sidewalk Parades are spontaneous theme-based parades, inviting the public to explore new areas of the city. Parades will be a celebration of personality and self-expression, encouraging everyone to create their own costumes and honor the neighborhoods they live in. Each parade will either start or end with a performance and people will be able to join in along the way.
Spring Project Grantees were selected by a community panel, comprised of area creative, business and civic talent. All project proposals were scored based on feasibility, novelty [specific to Greater Cincinnati] and projected community impact. A huge thank-you to this cycle's panelists, listed below:
Row one: Rodney D'Souza, Barbara Hauser, Matt Wehrman, Michael Bergman
Row two: Galen Crawford, Alicia Townsend, Dan Kroman, Sharmili Reddy
Row three: Cal Cullen, Matt Distel, William Thomas, Peg Moertl