case study 1 | July, 2026
A neighborhood co-designed its centennial celebrations
Bringing together community members and Civic Association leaders to workshop a full year of celebration.
Cluster
The group read through all of the post-its on the wall, sorted them into themes, and then named the themes.
Everyone put ideas and challenges on the wall: parades, oral histories, a dunk tank, a gala, a dog-walk club, fundraising, etc. 98 ideas were captured!
Brainstorm Together
Berwick turns 100 in 2027. The Civic Association's centennial committee could have picked the events themselves. Instead, they brought 10 residents into a room to design the year together, and asked me to design and facilitate the session.
The Workshop
Three groups planned out a full year of centennial activity across the four seasons, using cut-out shapes, photo prompts, and feeling words to get ideas out fast.
Map the Year
Share-out
Each group told its year as a story, which opened a whole-room conversation about sequencing and priorities.
Big picture theme
Group 3 created the theme for the year: "Rooted in Community" planning history in early spring, service activities and recognition into summer, celebration through fall season, and a formal fall gala, with an eye toward what the BCA can carry into 2028 and beyond.
Season-by-season
Group 1 planned for a variety of activities: School-supply drives at National Night Out, a school history showcase in fall, a neighborhood pet parade, elder check-ins in winter, and spring beautification with a community garden.
History-focused
Group 2 went deep-focus into the history of the neighborhood with: rotating pop-up exhibit, oral-history interviews with longtime residents, research into historical deed restrictions, and an online "look-book" for those who can't attend in person.
What they created
"Vel facilitated a great brainstorming activity to celebrate our community."
In under two hours, a room of neighbors drafted a full year of programming, agreed on a shared theme, and worked through the real trade-off between doing a lot and doing it well.
The process also built buy-in: the residents who helped design the year are already invested in seeing it through.
Why the process worked
All three groups, following their own paths, arrived at these three themes: History, Service, and Celebration. The last question of the day was how to run them across the year, and two paths came out of it: focusing one theme per quarter, or all three running all year.
After the workshop, the committee chose a hybrid approach. Each theme was assigned its own lead and will run a paced series of activities all year. To ensure momentum is maintained, each quarter will only carry about a month's worth of work for each of the three. That keeps the load light for volunteers, many of whom sit on more than one committee.
Workshop conclusion
The decision was theirs. My job was to get them to a place where they could make it well.
Next time:
Add 30 minutes to the session, to provide participants with room to digest the collection of ideas, and map themes onto a matrix before moving to the group planning phase.
At the end of each effort, I take time to read through participant feedback, reflect on what worked and what didn't work, and identify any opportunities for refinement. For this workshop, I quickly realized that two hours wasn't enough. Because of the limitation, we needed to skip the step where groups rank themes by cost and interest. One group mentioned in their feedback that they needed more time with the themes before mapping out the year.
