In 2019 after presenting to the Board of Directors, the Art, Education, Public Programs, and High Line Network became aware of the opportunity to align values across their Programming and Engagement team and cease siloing their efforts to create an inclusive experience on the High Line for the New York community.

We kicked off this engagement by surveying the team and conducting a set of stakeholder interviews to further contextualize the current state of the organization.

Our driving questions were: what values currently exist across the teams and how might we move into community from a values based place? What units of measurement are teams using to qualify the success of their programs? What about the culture of the organization stood in the way of progress?

To illustrate the opportunity, we designed a series of workshops intended to build off one another and provide space for members of the team to wrestle with their values, to vocalize where synergies could occur and to collectively define how they intend to engage with artists, educators, neighboring residents and their board of directors.

By synthesizing our findings between each workshop, in the end we honed the client’s intentions into a set of shared values that would live across the departments, a set of shared and distinctive priority communities that each department served and a recommendation for how to measure progress.

For the last engagement, my team designed a series of imagined scenarios and gave the HL executives a space to practice bringing their values to the community in a controlled environment.