Creatives wanted: Still time to enter Front Porch project for downtown businesses

Thanks to a $75,000 National Endowment of the Arts Our Town grant, a new placemaking project called the Front Porch will bring together area creatives and six downtown Wichita businesses who will develop outdoor expansions of those businesses.

Downtown Wichita, a private nonprofit involved with creating commerce and culture in the city’s core, is accepting proposals through Friday, Oct. 29, from artists, designers, architects and other area creatives for the Front Porch project.

Placemaking is the term used to define the concept of various community groups coming together to create quality, public-type places where people will want to hang out.

Emily Brookover, Downtown Wichita’s director of community development, thinks the best way to explain placemaking is to call it a “place intervention.” One of Wichita’s best examples of placemaking is Gallery Alley, she said.

Before 2017, the alley located between two buildings near Douglas and St. Francis was a dark, unused and what Brookover called an “unfriendly” space. A placemaking project transformed it into Gallery Alley, a well-lit, vibrant, colorful place with art installations and seating. It’s become both a destination for people visiting downtown and for workers in the area to have lunch — and sometimes serves as a venue for live events.

The Front Porch project is intended to create similar imaginative spaces that will extend into the sidewalk and possibly a parking spot in front of a downtown business. Taking over a parking space is known as creating a parklet, Brookover explained.

The inspiration for the project, along with its name, comes from the idea of a front porch being a welcoming, inviting spot where conversations take place and neighbors visit.

In residential front porches, “we put out benches, swings, flowers, welcome mats, stones with our alma mater and they become places for community and conversations,” said Brookover.

The front porches that come out of this project may likely include art installations, safely spaced seating, green spaces with plants and shrubbery and more.

“We want to invite people back downtown and a placemaking project helps create an identity and destination,” Brookover said. “Everyone knows last year was prickly and we were faced with challenges with COVID. We were thinking about our downtown community and our amazing businesses and how we can support them and how we can get visitors and Wichitans downtown. … We know people are feeling more comfortable and safer being outdoors.”

To develop the Front Porch project, Downtown Wichita, in partnership with the city of Wichita, received one of 63 NEA Our Town grants awarded nationwide. The federal grants are funding initiatives that integrate arts, culture and design into projects that will improve local economic, physical and even social outcomes, according to Downtown Wichita’s website.

Brookover is hoping the project will draw proposals from “anyone who feels they are a creative thinker, are community-minded and are collaborative.”

A small committee, assembled from art-related community partners and other nonprofits, will select the winning proposals. Participating businesses will be located around downtown. Downtown Wichita uses the north-to-south boundaries of Central and Kellogg and east-to-west boundaries of Washington to the Arkansas River to define downtown. It expects to announce the winning proposals and selected businesses in mid to late November.

For more about the project, including proposal guidelines, visit downtownwichita.org/discover/placemaking/front-porch/overview.