Community, Environment & Planning
Community, Environment & Planning (CEP) is an interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Washington. While housed in the Department of Urban Design & Planning, CEP does not provide a predefined educational path. CEP empowers students to pursue their own educational goals in the company of other self-directed individuals. The CEP core curriculum focuses on theory and practice applied to real-world settings while electives are satisfied by taking upper-level courses all across campus. Students participate in a governance process that supports the major while teaching them how to be effective leaders and doers in the world through practice, personal formation, intentionality, communal learning, and stewardship. Our students graduate to become urban planners, educators, non-profit managers, entrepreneurs, communication experts, and professionals of all sorts.
01
studio practicum: Native Village + Gateway Redevelopment Project
In this studio, we worked on client-based projects to aid planning efforts of various organizations in the greater Seattle area. My group worked in collaboration with the Seattle Indian Services Commission (SISC) to gather feedback and community input on their Native Village redevelopment project. Our objective was to conduct outreach and collect input from individuals and organizations in Seattle who have a stake in the Native Village project, centering indigenous people and their needs, to inform the design of the building and its programming. Over the course of 5 weeks, active student, university affiliated, and greater Seattle organizations connected to the Native community and the Chinatown-International District Community were surveyed to add to a collective vision about the design and programming of the proposed project.
02
public policy memo iterations: antiracist education policy
Over the course of the quarter, we wrote three policy memos about an issue of our choosing. The first iteration was a traditional written format, but the other two were created using nontraditional mediums. This was intentional, having us learn to communicate using various mediums and disrupt the perpetuation of communicating only in traditional written format, a hallmark of white dominant culture. I wrote my policy memos about the need for antiracist education policy, and my third iteration was an infographic. The idea for this memo was to try and put all the information into the really popular "informative instagram infographic" format. The first half is an Instagram post format, and the proposed solution is in Instagram story format. The proposed solution is a tool, a policy advocacy guide, meant to be a kind of cross between clicktivism and advocacy. The goal was to deliver the memo information in a way that is super relevant in today's media activism landscape.
04
governance
CEP is a student-led major, and governance is what makes this possible. In governance, a class that happens every quarter, students organize into committees (Outreach & Admissions, Program Events & Student Engagement, Academic Policies & Procedures, Community Equity, Alumni Relations, and Communications) and carry out their responsibilities as defined in the major's governing document, the Plumb Manual. As a member of the Outreach & Admissions committee (O&A) for all six quarters, I helped carry out two application cycles, one virtual and one in-person. This work included outreach plan execution, interview team training, application review and selection, and admitted student welcoming and on-boarding.
Governance is a process that teaches CEP students to be proactive and understand how change is brought about in formal settings. Committee work in O&A has taught me a lot about initiative and teamwork, and I feel that I've come away with a solid foundation for understanding how to design process and materials for equity considerations in outreach and admissions/hiring.
05
zine: the idea of community
CEP 301, the very first course in the program, explores the idea of community. In planning, or whichever of the many professions CEPsters will find themselves in, communities are central. Moving through a reading list of literature and other forms of media, we digest and discuss many different lived experiences of community, both those portrayed in the content and the experiences we ourselves had had. This course challenges us to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon of community which is integral to our lives as humans, as well as to start building a community of our own as a cohort. The final project for this course was to create a zine focusing on the idea of community. Each one of us created three pages that were compiled to form a class zine. I designed my pages around three themes that came up for me during our discussions: history, identity, and community.