The Green Dot Coalition is an equity-focused placemaking organization that requested support from the Design Workshop (DW) Foundation to advance their community engagement efforts in Denver's Five Points, a neighborhood in Denver, CO that faces built environment challenges resulting from discriminatory redlining, years of disinvestment, and climate change. Sarah Konradi, DW Foundation's executive director, worked with Design Workshop's Dr. Charles Fountain summer interns along with president and Landscape Architect Robb Berg to help them achieve their goals on a pro bono basis. The Summer Internship program is designed to provide opportunities for students of color who are underrepresented in landscape architecture and planning to provide exposure to a broad range of project types and gain valuable experience in a professional studio environment.

 
The interns were tasked with creating a green infrastructure tool kit to support future community engagement and visioning for Denver's Five Points neighborhood, one of the oldest and most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the city. Throughout the project, the team worked directly with the Green Dot Coalition - a grassroots collaborative of several local non-profits, neighborhood associations, and conservation organizations. The group kicked off the project together in Denver by visiting the area, meeting with the stakeholder group, and learning more about the history and context of the neighborhood. Serving as a cultural hub in Denver for generations, the neighborhood has experienced a transformation from an industrial zone to a dense residential zone within the last 20 years. Nearly 60% of Five Points comprises impervious surfaces, one of the highest percentages in all of Denver.
The vision for the project was to create a plan for green infrastructure centered around community voices and action, bringing nature into urban spaces while protecting existing Black-owned small businesses from potential green gentrification. The team responded by identifying priority areas for re-design, creating a series of accessible green infrastructure typologies to address needs, redesigning Boxyard Park (one of the only parks serving the neighborhood, made up of 18,000 square feet of concrete and no grass), and creating a vision for a network of "green ribbons" to connect the neighborhood, and community amenities.
The toolkit developed by the team communicates and advocates for the value of green infrastructure, validates residents' stories of lived experience with data and analysis, and identifies priority improvements to maximize the Coalition's limited resources. DW Foundation's pro bono support for the Green Dot Coalition has continued since the project started two years ago. Support will continue with implementation and planning efforts for greening Five Points, which will help engage the neighborhood in improvements that will provide dramatic and lasting environmental, social, and climate resilience benefits.