The RICHMOND HANDBOOK is an interactive guide to exploring and shaping our city for young people, their families and residents of all ages

Imagine living in a city where access to food, transportation, green space, and opportunity is universal. The Richmond Handbook can take us there! A place where everyone is empowered to participate in the planning and design of their own communities.

Why?

Place profoundly impacts opportunities and life chances. In Richmond’s changing landscape, residents, specifically middle-school-aged youth, do not have the opportunity to participate in the city planning, nor understand the complex forces shaping the designs. All of the elements of our neighborhoods come together through planning and design.

Through the topics of Land Use, Transportation, Health and Wellness, and Housing, residents are encouraged to investigate the city’s past planning, discover current challenges, and design solutions that create change in their lives and communities. When the public is engaged in planning decisions, both a place and its people benefit: solutions align more closely with what matters, outcomes enhance equity of access, and trust in government grows.

The Richmond Handbook will support the goals of the city’s new master plan, Richmond 300: A Guide for Growth: to create a more equitable, sustainable, and enjoyable city. By connecting residents to the resources they need to arrive at real life solutions for Richmond’s built environment, the book will transform engaged citizens into agents of equity and change.

How?

With the help of many! Storefront is collaborating with urban planning and design professionals, consultants, local partners, educators, and youth to gather content and co-design. This book will provide an urban planning curriculum with supplemental activities for middle school classrooms as well as after school programs, and be an accessible design education resource for residents of all ages.

Becky Slogeris, author of My Baltimore Book, will serve as one of our project consultants, guiding the work of local urban planning and design professionals, consultants, nonprofit partners, educators, local policy advocates, VCU design faculty, Richmond Public School youth and Storefront staff. Additional stakeholders and subject-matter experts will be recruited throughout the process to envision and review content and design activities. Together we will develop an interactive guide to civic engagement written on the 6th grade reading level.

The success of similar guidebooks in Baltimore and Chicago were the inspiration for Design Richmond.

We need your support! We have big goals for The Richmond Handbook. Through continued collaboration with educators and nonprofits across the city, we hope to introduce a pilot of the handbook in middle school classrooms in 2025. The interactive guide and activity book will amplify the classroom experience by immersing young people in real-life situations where they can exercise their new-found understanding.

Volunteer

There will be opportunities to volunteer as peer reviewers, participate in focus groups, help create activities for the book, or share and develop content. Interested? Complete our volunteer form to let us know.

Sponsor or Donate

Your support will provide us with the capacity to keep this proejct moving, inculding stipended-opportunities for RPS educators and youth to lend their expertise and join focus groups to help build content for the book. In addition, your support will assist with vital staffing/administration, design and printing.

A HUGE thanks to current and past supporters of our youth innovation programs and development of this initiative.

Grant Supporters

Sponsors

• Highwoods Properties

• Froehling & Robertson, Inc.