PennPraxis Design Fellows reflect on lessons learned by working with community partners over the summer of 2026.
Julia Yost (right) and the Design to Thrive team with Penn Praxis Project Manager Dyan Castro (left) at the Fresh Air Fund's Sharpe Reservation in Fishkill, New York.
The Design Fellows program at PennPraxis—the practice arm of the Weitzman School that supports design action in solidarity with students and communities working for change—offers students and recent alums the opportunity to work in close partnership with neighbors in the Philadelphia region and beyond to increase their quality of life through design, art, planning, and heritage preservation. This summer, Design Fellows brought their skills to many projects.
I worked on two projects this summer: East Camden Community Resilience Plan and Case Studies in Design [an open-access library from PennPraxis of outstanding examples of community-engaged practice]. Researching and contributing to the diverse and exciting ways of engaging with communities through both projects was my favorite part of the summer – I felt that I was learning and doing at the same time.
This experience reinforced my belief that design is interdisciplinary and introduced to me the value of being able to listen to and engage with people. As an MArch and MLA dual degree student at Weitzman, I hope to continue developing this invaluable skill across fields.
My favorite day was mid-July when we had back-to-back meetings on site. First, we went to Camden for a brainstorming meeting with our project partners and community members where we shared a series of maps researching flooding, urban heat, and housing typologies in East Camden. Afterwards, we toured the Fringe Arts building for Case Studies, which will be the location for an upcoming summit we are planning on January 29, 2027: Engage! Designing For Community Power. Keep an eye out for more information!
Working with the Center for Environmental Transformation, Nate Dansie helped advance the East Camden Community Resilience Plan, which includes a proposed resilient central park for Camden.
This summer I worked on the North Philly: A Black Freedom Jawn project. The Jawn is an intergenerational neighborhood initiative aimed at highlighting the brilliance and resilience of Black North Philadelphians. I learnt a lot from my team at Praxis while translating that vibrant and complex history into asset maps, virtual tours and outreach materials.
I enjoyed learning about Philadelphia’s history from the lived experience of our community leaders on our tours of North Philadelphia. Their stories brought new context to each space and reinforced the importance of community knowledge in shaping how we understand the city. I hope our work continues to add depth and diversity to Philadelphia’s historical narratives.
Sam Khare’s work on the North Philly: A Black Freedom Jawn project included site visits to many local landmarks including the John Coltrane House in Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood with Bakari Clark (MCP/MLA’27).
This summer, I spearheaded a full website redesign for PennPraxis alongside my advisor Anushka Samant. We designed an online home for the organization that forefronts the important work the team is doing alongside their community of collaborators. What makes this website— and PennPraxis—unique is that every project has a rich network of contributors: community organizations, indigenous leaders, policymakers, design fellows, and others from the larger Penn community who bring each project to life.
In order to showcase these relationships, projects and people are connected in the database and the user interface. Each project links to every person involved, and each person links to every project they have contributed to. This is a simple concept but pulling it off involved creating a strategic and clean information architecture so that the team can continually add people and projects to the site with these connections automatically preserved.
My hope is that the new website will allow the PennPraxis team to demonstrate the tremendous impact they and their collaborators are making every day, and that as more of their work is added over time, it will grow into a rich resource that brings the depth and impact of their community-engaged design practice to a broader audience.
The new PennPraxis site offers extensive information on the organization’s projects and the people behind them.
Over the summer, I was part of PennPraxis’s Design to Thrive (DTT) team. The DTT team has an ongoing partnership with The Fresh Air Fund, a New York-based nonprofit that hosts five sleep-away camps in Fishkill, New York, for New York City youth.
This year, Fresh Air asked if we could work with campers to design a new orchard for the regenerative farm at camp. This was exciting for us young designers because it meant we were getting involved at the very beginning of a project.
I ended up viewing our time up in camp as a month-long site analysis phase. Every day we formed bonds with our primary users (campers), asked questions of the site experts, walked through the site of the new orchard, saw what happened to the site when thunderstorms passed through, and began to understand all of the micro interactions that happen on site every day. We got to have this intimate relationship with the site we were designing that still has me wondering how best to conduct effective analysis and community engagement as a designer.
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