Lessons from CIRE partners on building with communities, not around them. 

What does it mean to belong to a place? And what gets lost when those who hold its memory can no longer afford to stay? 

Community development is not neutral work. Every decision about land, housing, investment, and services shapes culture. It tells people who belongs, whose history matters, and what futures are possible. That’s what Ascala Tsegaye, cultural strategist and facilitator of Thinking Vision Co., brought to a recent session of Community Innovations for Racial Equity (CIRE), a learning community supported by the Kresge Foundation.

Two concepts are at the center of this conversation: 

Placemaking: building and investing in physical space. 

Placekeeping: ensuring that when development happens, communities get to stay, and continue to shape what their neighborhood becomes. 

Culture is living and breathing. It’s the language spoken at home, the mural on the corner, the celebration down the block, the moment someone sees themselves in a story and feels like they belong. Place holds memory, and culture is how communities keep that alive, pass it on, and build from it.

Communities navigate it every day, when new development signals possibility for some and pressure for others. Revitalization and displacement often arrive together. And when culture gets pushed out, people feel it in their health, their stress, and their sense of trust in what’s happening around them.

From the Inside Out: Parkside Business & Community in Partnership

In neighborhoods under development pressure, culture is often the first thing displaced. Parkside Business & Community in Partnership (PBCIP), a CIRE partner based in Camden, New Jersey, is working to ensure that does not happen in Parkside. Their Haddon Avenue Creative Filmmaking Hub, anticipated to open in fall 2028, is being conceptualized on a site that sat vacant for five years after a catastrophic fire. The vision came directly from local filmmakers and creatives who believed in what is possible for Camden. When complete, it will be a home for storytelling, podcasting, filmmaking, and opportunity, aligning with New Jersey’s growing priority to become a destination for film and television production.

That creative energy does not stand alone. It is rooted in honoring the neighborhood’s artistic spirit and cultural legacy. The opening of Eli’s Legacy Park in 2025 pays tribute to Parkside’s entrepreneurs and trailblazers who have shaped a powerful narrative of Black excellence. Along Haddon Avenue, artists have transformed storefronts into canvases, using murals to celebrate the community’s history, identity, and pride, a visual legacy that continues to grow.

“The Haddon Avenue Creative Filmmaking Hub is more than a new development, it is an extension of Parkside’s creative spirit. From film production workshops and mentorship opportunities to community screenings that elevate diverse voices and stories, every aspect of the hub is being shaped by what the creative community says it needs, not by what others assume it should be.”

— Bridget Phifer, Chief Executive Officer, Parkside Business & Community Partnership

Bringing this to life takes community-led leadership, investment, and partnerships committed to a future shaped by the creative community.

Sovereignty and Self-Determination: Siċaŋġu Co.

For the Siċaŋġu Lakota Nation, development has never been just about economics. It’s about wicozani, the good way of life, for this generation and those that follow.

Siċaŋġu Co., another CIRE partner, is working to strengthen the financial and social well-being of their tribal relatives through community ownership, Indigenous governance, long-term wealth building, and cultural continuity.

The Siċaŋġu Food Sovereignty Initiative is rebuilding the community’s ability to grow and share their own food, nourishing people physically, spiritually, and mentally. An immersion school is bringing the Lakota language back into daily life, into the mouths of children, undoing what boarding schools spent generations trying to destroy. These efforts are part of the same thing: a community deciding for itself what belonging looks like.

Michael Prate, Siċaŋġu Community Development Executive Director, shares it best:

“Everything you do is strengthening and evolving Sicangu Lakota culture’ — that’s how one of our elders expressed what our work is about. Art has always been a way to deepen and evolve culture, and that is something we want to explore as a way to further evolve Sicangu culture, to inspire people and expand the collective vision of what’s possible. In the Lakota language there isn’t really a word or idea for “art” the way there is in English — it’s not a separate thing or discipline, it’s the way you live, the way you create, and doing so beautifully and skillfully.”

Reclaiming language, food, and governance all at once is what cultural infrastructure actually looks like when it’s rooted in a people and a place.

What CIRE Partners are Teaching Us

A few things keep coming up across CIRE partners:

• Anti-displacement has to be built in from the beginning. 
• Cultural infrastructure deserves the same urgency as physical infrastructure. 
• Who owns and who governs determines who actually benefits. 
• Community leadership isn’t an addition to the process, it’s what makes the process work.

None of this fits neatly into one field or funding stream. It requires developers, funders, health practitioners, cultural organizations, and policymakers at the table together.

Measuring Development Differently

If we measure development only by what gets constructed, we miss the most important outcomes. CIRE partners show us what’s possible when we build with communities rather than around them. That’s what it means to build well, and that includes all of us.