Dear planners, architects, scientists, doctors and anyone else with very important graphs, charts, reports, and studies.
How you share your findings, drawings, plans and work matters.
(Especially if you are doing so to help people make their lives better).
I’m Kristen. I was just a lowly grad student in 2010 who was interested in how cities worked and who loved to write things on her personal blog. Serious things, like my thoughts on how to better our educational system. How to make faith-based settings more inclusive. How to ensure more people were sleeping in homes they wanted, versus sleeping on the side of the road. I was a black woman and I was an urbanist. But when I was reading my textbooks, I didn’t see that represented.
So, I leaned on my first degree in communication and on my budding interests in online media (not just the social sites, but things like email and blogs), and I googled the words The Black Urbanist. No one had purchased those words before as a website, they’d only included them in their thesis work. I went through Bluehost* and I grabbed the domain name. Then I slapped a WordPress theme on top (which Bluehost makes super easy to do), similar to what I’d been doing with my personal site and voila, The Black Urbanist was born. I also created a Facebook page, group, and Twitter account, and later added Instagram once it started to grow. I was already active as myself on LinkedIn. To this day I’m most active on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, and through my weekly email newsletter, which is powered at the moment though Mailchimp.
I give speeches, facilitate workshops, discussions, and community design meetings assisting fellow urban planners, architects and community and civic leaders. I also write proposals and reports on urbanism and related issues. I’ve been active on Facebook since it was only for college students. A successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur told me way back in 2008 that Twitter was going to be my meal ticket to success and I’ve since built up over 10,000 followers on my @blackurbanist handle. 650 people are signed up to the weekly emails and that number is growing. About 2,000 people follow me on all my other accounts.
You can find out more about what else I do here. And watch me speak here.
I made a New Years resolution back in 2016 to help more people learn how to do what I do so that more communities can be served, built, and strengthened by having people there who can tell its stories right.
So I’ve started this platform that strictly focuses on communicating your work and doing it well.
I’ve geared this content towards people involved in community development, but if you are a student of any discipline needing to present technical, scientific or other research, or if you just want to give better speeches at your church, your temple, or your friend’s wedding. I can help there too.
I’ll also be including information about creating nice reports, proposals, and other handouts because I believe they go hand in hand.