Hunter Franks, an artist and founder of the Neighborhood Postcard Project, will spread his ideas for community building to new cities with Knight Foundation support. Photo credit: Hunter Franks.

We’ve become terrible at talking to each other. You can be crammed on a bus, inches away from someone, and it is socially acceptable, socially preferable, to stare off into space or be zoned in on your smartphone scrolling through your Facebook feed. Park benches remain empty of conversation. Cafes are filled with lively music, stifled by personal headphones. I get it. We all need our personal space. But, when we don’t talk to each other, we are left to rely on how people look and what we’ve heard about them to form our opinion of them. Stereotypes arise and lead to fear of other people. We need to stop this cycle. We need to talk to each other, to hear each other’s stories. Related Link

“The Creative Interventions Tour in Philadelphia: Breaking down stereotypes through art” by Hunter Franks on Knight Blog

People really do want to talk to each other. They just don’t know how. So I help them by inserting the opportunity for fun and spontaneous connection into the urban landscape. I’m an artist and I use creativity to build community. I create shared spaces and experiences in public space to break down social barriers and catalyze connections between people and communities.

In 2013, after working with San Francisco youth who wanted to change the perception of their neighborhood, I founded the Neighborhood Postcard Project. The project collects positive personal stories from residents in marginalized neighborhoods on postcards and sends them to random local residents to create connections between people and communities. I’ve sent more than 350 postcards from five distinct San Francisco neighborhoods. The project has brought together total strangers from different backgrounds, cultures and lifestyles and has been adopted in New York, Washington, D.C., Connecticut, Portland and Chile.

I am also the founder of the League of Creative Interventionists, a worldwide network of people working to build community through creativity. Each month we carry out an intervention in public space to get strangers talking to each other. In February, we shared the stories of our first loves on a temporary construction wall in San Francisco, while league chapters in Minneapolis and Cologne, Germany, created similar Walls of Love.

I have become adept at these type of lightweight interventions in public space in San Francisco, and now with the support of Knight Foundation, I have the opportunity to embark on a Creative Interventions Tour to carry out and evaluate how these interventions can lead to more robust and sustained engagement in a variety of cities. I will travel to four cities where Knight invests — Macon, Ga.; Akron, Ohio; Philadelphia; and Detroit — for three weeks each to carry out creative placemaking activities and explore how these activities can be leveraged to help people create the communities where they want to live. I will work closely with community organizations and residents to create a League of Creative Interventionists chapter in each city. The chapter will allow people to come together under one body and one mission to make their city spontaneous and to break down barriers by getting strangers talking to each other.

The Creative Interventions Tour will allow me to assess how these small-scale temporary interventions can create real, lasting change in cities. Along the way, I will document the process and compile a body of work that will help inform and provide key takeaways for other communities on how to use creative interventions to break down barriers and create connections. Ronald Reagan said, “I’ve always believed that a lot of the trouble in the world would disappear if we were talking to each other instead of about each other.” Let’s start talking.