Boston, Massachusetts

Enterprise Community Partners engaged CSC in an action-learning initiative to integrate arts, culture, creativity, and design into its national neighborhood revitalization work.

At a pivotal moment in Enterprise’s evolution toward a more opportunity-oriented agenda, the organization sought to clarify how creative placemaking and cultural strategy could strengthen housing, economic development, and community-building efforts across its National Initiatives portfolio.

With support from The Kresge Foundation, CSC partnered with Enterprise leadership to:

• Articulate Enterprise’s position on creative placemaking
• Develop an integrated framework linking cultural strategy with neighborhood-based revitalization
• Strengthen organizational capacity to embed creative practice across teams
• Identify structural gaps and opportunities for long-term institutional alignment

Rather than treating arts integration as a programmatic add-on, the engagement focused on aligning culture, strategy, and organizational design — ensuring that creative practice informed how Enterprise worked across sectors and with communities.

Over eight months, this approach was piloted within and across teams to explore new ways of working that elevated relational trust, cultural intelligence, and adaptive capacity.

The initiative built on Enterprise’s earlier national effort, Made with Love, which leveraged shared cultural experience to strengthen community social fabric. Together, this work advanced a more holistic model of neighborhood revitalization — one that recognizes culture as infrastructure and community voice as central to durable development.

This engagement reflects CSC’s broader commitment to integrating cultural wisdom and structural investment — helping national institutions align values, relationships, and capital strategy to support equitable and regenerative community futures.