Join us for a preview of Community Design For Leaders - a new masterclass hosted by SVA's DSI (MFA Design for Social Innovation) and Division of Continuing Education programs. This class takes the tenants and frameworks of community design and applies them as a practice for organizational development. The course is intended for private or public sector social impact students and professionals who are looking for new ways of working with staff, board members and volunteers more effectively. If you're interested in building a more equitable and inclusive organizational strategy, structure and culture - this class is for you.

This event will provide an opportunity to preview the course and experience a mini-community design lab - so you can get a first-hand feel of what the course will offer.

Community Design For Leaders: Moving Beyond Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) to Power, Belonging and Interdependence

Community Design is a community-generated design framework from the 1960s and ’70′s that’s made a resurgence in the last several years. Unlike Human-Centered-Design, Community Design provides a path to shift not only who is doing the work but what the work is and how it is done.

Leaders will leave with:

Knowledge: A deep understanding of the role of design in private and public sector mission-driven work and what it means for your leadership practice

Resources: Models, templates, tools and tactics to shift to a framework of power, belonging and inclusion

Community: New relationships and a virtual community of support, scholarship and practice

This intensive is facilitated by Sloan Leo (they/them), the Founder & CEO of FLOX Studio Inc. and faculty in the MFA Design for Social Innovation (DSI) program. For more information on FLOX Studio and Sloan Leo, check them out here. For more information about MFA DSI check them out here.

All profits from this course will be used to support MFA DSI’s new Equity in Design Scholarship Fund. We created the scholarship to address intersectional inequalities in design and promote equitable opportunities starting with our own student community. This will be our first time offering the scholarship, which will grant $10,000 to an incoming student each year. We seek to grow and iterate on this initiative to create pathways in design to support and sustain diverse, creative leaders.

For questions, please contact dsiinfo@sva.edu.