December 10, 2020
Sasaki Foundation’s 20th Anniversary Celebrates Diversity and Equity
Hana Estice
In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Sasaki Foundation, we hosted a virtual event on October 22, sponsored by Landscape Forms, with Chief Karilyn Crockett, Chief of Equity for the City of Boston, and Mary Anne Ocampo, Sasaki Foundation board chair and principal at Sasaki.
Since the Sasaki Foundation’s founding, we have supported design initiatives that promote equity in order to strengthen and empower local communities. Similarly, Chief Crockett is charged with leading the Walsh administration’s efforts to embed equity into all city work.
“I am so excited to engage with [the Sasaki Foundation] community in particular,” Chief Crockett remarked, “because I feel like there is a commitment to thinking about not just what is beautiful and what we can make to look at, but understanding power as a vector for translating and understanding what can truly be sustainable and beautiful in a sense of inclusion and as an act of justice.”
Chief Crockett is the author of People Before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making, a book that tells the local story of the grassroots movement that stopped the construction of the 1960s highway project that would have cut through the heart of the city’s Black and brown communities. She is faculty at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. During the summer of 2020, Chief Crockett was appointed by Mayor Martin J. Walsh to head the newly created Office of Equity, a Cabinet-level post, for the City of Boston. In addition to spearheading equity, Chief Crockett is also charged with actively dismantling racism by putting an intentional focus on supporting communities of color and marginalized groups, and building governmental structures to sustain this work.
Co-creating Equitable Cities: A Conversation with Chief Crockett
Sasaki Foundation virtual event
In her conversation with Ocampo, Chief Crockett noted the importance of her new role as Boston’s Chief of Equity: “Part of my job is to think about what are all the things we can and must do together? What does that mean in terms of the structures that we create: governmental structures, social structures, political structures?”
She goes on, “There is a cost and a call that is on the table, and part of my role is to make sure we are answering that call, not just as an individual or as a resident myself, but that the government and our mayor is in a real conversation that pushes all of us to do some real reckoning and work.”
Watch the full conversation below, and keep an eye out for our annual report to learn more about what we did in our 20th year.