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MAKING SPACE FOR COMMUNITY SOLUTIONS A new equity design institute aims to tackle social and economic challenges.
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olumbus College of Art & Design, in collaboration with Zora’s House and The Women’s Fund of Central Ohio, plans to embed designing for equity into the core of the Columbus community’s economic development efforts with the launch of an equity design institute for women of color. The institute’s mission is to shift power dynamics, so that the expertise, perspective and lived experiences of women of color lead the development and implementation of innovative solutions to some of the community’s most challenging disparities. Put simply: The people most affected by community issues will be at the table when designing solutions to those issues. The institute will bring together cohorts of women to learn equity-centered design thinking techniques, which they will use to generate solutions to problems such as caretaking as a wealth decelerator for women of color. This equity-centered design thinking instruction will be led by CCAD. “We have designed systems that benefit some people and don’t benefit others, and those systems can be redesigned,” says Jennifer Schlueter, CCAD’s associate provost and dean of academics. “That really is what equity-centered design thinking is about. The approach gives folks the ability to look at a problem globally and know that there are ways to intervene. These kinds of cumulative efforts are one way that we can actually get our arms around the problems themselves.”
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▲ CCAD Adjunct Faculty Lara Alsoudani Weeks (left) and CCAD President Dr. Melanie Corn (right) Photo by Michelle Anderson
By addressing social and economic disparities that women of color face, the institute’s cohorts will be better equipped to positively influence community development in Columbus. It will also create more economic opportunities for women of color and, in turn, help them affect change in those around them. “[Tackling inequity] is not a ‘one and done’ type of work,” says Lara Alsoudani Weeks, partner and art director at the design studio FRINGE22. “It’s a lifetime of work that people have to invest in as individuals to be able to affect the businesses that they are participating in.” Alsoudani Weeks is a CCAD alum and an adjunct professor; she will teach equity-centered design thinking at the institute. Schlueter says the idea for the institute came from LC Johnson, founder
Columbus College of Art & Design
and CEO of Zora’s House, the nonprofit coworking and community space for women and gender-expansive people of color, and Kelley Griesmer, president and CEO of The Women’s Fund. The institute, funded by a $1.5 million systems-change investment from JPMorgan Chase and headquartered at Zora’s House, will welcome its first cohort in 2023. CCAD, in collaboration with the women of color themselves, will shape the design-thinking classes and curriculum; eventually, the college will also create a standalone certificate in equity-centered design thinking, available to Central Ohio organizations and the public. “When we think of equity-centered design and human-centered design, we’re talking about everyone,” Alsoudani Weeks says. “This equity institute [will] allow women of color to understand the process so they can apply it to themselves first, which will then trickle down and affect the community—economically, mentally, spiritually, in all ways that we can think of.”