Designing Creative Communities: Your Town is Your Canvas. Learn How to Make Your Mark

We all want to be a part of a thriving community. But few of us know how to meaningfully contribute to the places where we live, work, learn and play.

Whether you dream of launching a community innovation center, want to enhance your town with colorful murals, or are simply looking to strengthen relationships with your neighbors, Designing Creative Communities is the guide for you.

Award-winning community builder, Spud Marshall, coaches emerging leaders and community members alike through a simple process for how to design your own creative community. Filled with stories from Spud’s work over the past decade, Designing Creative Communities teaches you how to actively create change and have a lot of fun along the way.

The book will introduce you to the CANVAS Framework where you’ll learn how to:

• Step 1: Chart Your Path – Determine what success would look like, how your unique style will influence the idea, and how to move past fears preventing you from getting started.
• Step 2: Ask Probing Questions – Get a pulse on what your community needs by getting face-to-face, testing your assumptions, and learning how to ask curious questions.
• Step 3: Name Early Adopters – Identify those who are most eager to rally behind your idea and build momentum by asking for deeper engagement over time and incrementally.
• Step 4: Visualize a Prototype – Develop moments of wonder, which are small experiments to tangibly test your idea and learn what works. Think small, cheap, and fast to test the boundaries of what’s possible.
• Step 5: Articulate Your Story – Design a clear and compelling narrative for your project that stands out and is easily shareable, while leveraging various media forms.
• Step 6: Sustain Efforts With Partners – Find partnerships that satisfy a mutual need and learn how to lean on your network’s trust as a critical currency of partnership-building.

“A brilliant take on how to design your own creative community! This is a must-read for any emerging leader.”
— Erin Krampetz Boyd, Co-Founder of Ashoka U and Business Operations for Culdesac

“Spud is hands down the most creative community builder I’ve ever met! In his book, he showcases his unique journey step-by-step, the highs and lows he navigated along the way, and how you too can shape the community of your dreams.”
— Alexis Taylor, World Economic Forum Global Shaper and Davos Lab Taskforce Co-Chair

“An essential read for anyone in community and economic development professions, or anyone that just wants to make a positive contribution to their community. Spud weaves captivating and highly entertaining stories about success, failure, and overcoming adversity from his own creative practice in dozens of communities, providing powerful tools for creative transformation with humor, humility, and honest self-reflection. This book is hugely relatable and difficult to put down; it is one influential guide that I will be recommending widely to colleagues and communities alike.”
— Michael Fortunato, Founding Partner of Creative Insight Community Development