The Sasaki Foundation will be celebrating a big milestone throughout 2020—for 20 years, the Foundation has been providing support to individual scholars, design studios, and research teams working in communities to tackle challenging issues of equity. Throughout this year, the Sasaki Foundation will continue building on our program and research framework to develop new partnerships as we explore innovative solutions to new housing models, climate adaptation, community building, and mobility choices.
On our homepage, you will find a timeline of the Foundation’s past accomplishments, and upcoming events that will be held at the Incubator at Sasaki, a shared research studio and workspace curated by the Foundation.
To advance our research agenda of providing access to design for communities that do not have it, the Sasaki Foundation will release our third call for proposals at the end of February, while working with our second cohort of researchers in the Incubator through June. Results of their work will be published this summer and the new cohort will arrive in September with the opportunity to leverage the expertise of Sasaki designers in the adjacent building.
Community learning opportunities such as our February Speaker Series panel, Activating the Public Realm, will take place quarterly to invite members of the public to conversations on key issues facing communities today. In addition to the Speaker Series, the Sasaki Foundation will host events to celebrate Black History Month and Women’s Month, and also will offer multiple events this spring that will provide professional development for the design industry.
The Sasaki Foundation succeeds through the pursuit of collaborative initiatives developed with academia, non-profit organizations, and corporate partners. Of particular significance is the partnership between the Sasaki Foundation and American Student Assistance that allows us to scale our youth programming and open up possibilities and career choices for middle and high school students. These programs include a Summer Exploratory Experience in Design (SEED) for Greater Boston high school students and a Design Mentorship Program for Watertown eighth graders that will continue to blossom this year.
Throughout 2020, the Foundation Board will lead an initiative to tackle issues around mobility choices and equity in the greater Boston region through a variety of approaches, made possible by a generous grant from the Barr Foundation. The work will include a research partnership with the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, a series of workshops in partnership with several non-profit organizations, and the creation of a data visualization tool leveraging the assets of Sasaki Strategies that will support civic leaders and decision makers. The goal of this work is to share technology and design tools that will support advocacy and policy conversations among the leaders of the Commonwealth.
As the Sasaki Foundation grows, we continue to set ambitious goals and generate a meaningful agenda of research, programs, and partnerships that increase our impact in communities throughout Greater Boston. We are a dynamic, nimble organization always striving to improve, and we hope you will reach out if you would like to work with us, celebrate our successes with us, and contribute to this agenda.