Design Action Generates Lasting Impact

PennPraxis addresses a wide range of challenges in urban and rural communities by connecting students, recent alumni, and faculty with community leaders and by supporting student initiatives with Praxis’s team of experienced project managers, planners, and designers. 

Students working as Praxis Design Fellows express that Praxis deepens their educational experience by offering opportunities to learn how to do community-engaged, interdisciplinary work and to drive a flexible activist practice that can respond to the current times. These projects are especially powerful because they transform the nature of the studio conversation and build long-term mutual relationships with communities that are often overlooked. This approach links the essence of design training to concrete, lasting impact in the world, responding to social and environmental issues of the 21st century. 

 

Dakar Greenbelt
People talking around a map.

PennPraxis is a key part of a collaboration that is supporting the creation of a regional greenbelt in Senegal to shape and concentrate sustainable growth as well as conserve water and natural resources. The greenbelt is powered by an international team, including the Senegalese Ministry of Water and Forest, the United Nations, and local environmental activists in Senegal. Praxis is leveraging the initiative of a remarkable Weitzman doctoral student and creating a platform for other students to contribute to the design and implementation of pilot projects. Spanning two years, these projects will propel a regional initiative to protect Dakar's natural assets, strengthen climate resilience, and shape growth.  

Coastal Resilience in Camden
Ben Franklin Bridge

PennPraxis is completing a Coastal Resiliency Master Plan for Camden, New Jersey with an application for $100 million in implementation funding to be submitted in June 2025. Weitzman faculty, Praxis staff, and students are working with environmental justice leaders at the Center for Environmental Transformation, gaining experience with grassroots climate action planning, while also learning from technical experts at Weitzman, eDesign Dynamics, Drexel University, the Water Center at Penn, and New Jersey public agencies. Camden residents participating in focus groups and community meetings are excited about lending their voice to decision-making about priorities and the design of projects that will reduce flooding.  

Penn New Bolton Center Campus Sustainability Plan
People gardening.

Praxis is supporting PennVet’s campus planning process and has developed the Integrated Trail and Riparian Buffers Plan for the Vet School’s 700-acre farm campus. The plan introduces thirty-six acres of new woodlands to protect water quality and stream habitat, containing three miles of trails that will improve campus life and offer students and visitors opportunities to see research in action on experimental plots. Young cows have just begun to graze in areas where students and farmers working with Praxis helped plant 5,000 trees over the last eighteen months. The plan will accelerate opportunities for research, community engagement, and farmer outreach.

Funding Priorities

Design Fellows Program

Since 2018, the Design Fellows Program has offered students and young alumni integral roles in applied projects that rely on every Weitzman School discipline. Simultaneously, Praxis has built a vibrant community of collaborators inside and outside of the University. Through this program, Praxis has deepened the education of over 375 Weitzman students in just eight years. This program has also multiplied the entire School’s capacity for community engagement and social impact, reaching people and communities least served by design.

Projects Supporting the Future

Individuals can invest in a wide range of PennPraxis projects at a local, regional, or international scale. Weitzman staff can help match donors with initiatives geared to their priorities and interests, including environmental justice, youth development, leadership training and local capacity-building, cultural preservation, design and improvement of community spaces, climate resilience, regenerative agriculture, nighttime planning, and spatial analytics for community self-determination.  

Ellen Neises

PennPraxis is a platform for collaboration that is unique among art, design, and planning schools. We identify an opportunity for design action in partnership with a community and then look for resources to convene the right mix of creative thinkers to work with our students and faculty to generate strategic, imaginative solutions.

Ellen Neises Associate Professor of Practice, Landscape Architecture Lori Kanter Tritsch Executive Director, PennPraxis