Workshop #2: Pop-ups 101 with Rebecca Stone

Will be hosted via Zoom

Pop-up projects are fun, AND they’re also one of the smartest planning strategies around. Quick, temporary, inexpensive projects and demos can be invaluable tools to build support for long-term change, create energy and attract volunteers, demonstrate complex ideas, build local capacity, gather data, make rapid improvements to public spaces, and experiment with potential designs or options. During the Covid-19 pandemic, pop-up public space improvements are also emerging as an essential tool for re-opening businesses and restaurants and providing safe, outdoor gathering spaces.

This fast-paced session will dig into the best ways to plan, design and create pop-up projects with impact. You’ll learn about a number of project types, best practices for setting up pop-ups that catalyze longer-term impacts, and stories of towns that have strategically used pop-ups to test and refine livability improvements. Registrants will receive a link to the DIY Community Cookbook – a resource packed with how-to instructions for small projects with big impacts.

Key Take-aways:

• An understanding of what pop-up projects are (and different types)
• An understanding of the different goals or impacts pop-ups can address (experimentation, activation, engagement, etc.)
• Examples of simple, fun and replicable pop-up projects that attendees can use or adapt (in a variety of sectors, from community building to economic development to site design)
• Best practices on how to design and implement successful pop-up projects
• Examples of pop-up projects that are helping communities respond to the Covid-19 pandemic

Registrants will each receive a copy of the DIY Cookbook, with ideas and strategies to use in their own communities.

Thank you to our event sponsors!

About Our Speaker:

Rebecca Sanborn Stone is a community planner, strategist, writer and speaker who is passionate about helping people create great communities. She is a Principal at the Vermont consulting firm Community Workshop, which brings creative engagement, planning, placemaking, and effective communications to towns, cities and non-profit organizations across North America.

Rebecca has particular expertise in resilience and sustainability, tactical urbanism, and collective impact. Recent projects include the EPA’s Local Foods, Local Places initiative, the Resilient Vermont Network, the Mad River Valley’s Ridge to River Initiative, and the national Play Everywhere Challenge. She recently authored the new DIY Community Cookbook, a how-to guide to creating small projects with big community impacts.

Rebecca is also an active community organizer in her town, Bethel, Vermont, where she works closely with the Bethel Revitalization Initiative and serves on the Town Meeting Committee. Rebecca is a co-founder of the unique free community pop-up university, Bethel University, and has helped spearhead tactical urbanism and creative placemaking initiatives including Bethel Better Block and a downtown artscape.