Designing for Healing at the LAF Future Now Summit
The recent Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) Future Now Summit was organized around the idea that strategic action is essential to meaningful change. The event brought together the landscape architecture community to identify, share, and scale actions that address climate challenges, inequities, and resilience, while reinforcing the power of collective leadership and collaboration. It built on the momentum of the New Landscape Declaration and framed the convening not simply as a professional gathering, but as a call to action for a future grounded in climate, biodiversity, equity, and inclusion.
Sarah Konradi, Corey Dodd and Aaron Bridgers facilitated an interactive workshop, Designing for Healing: Trauma-Informed Community Engagement, connected to the larger theme by showing how action can begin at the level of process, facilitation, and relationship-building. Using the East Kinston Neighborhood Hub project as a case study, the workshop focused on how landscape architects and planners can recognize and respond to collective community trauma while designing engagement processes that center healing alongside physical design. The workshop translated the summit’s broader call for transformational leadership into practical tools for community-based practice. It also aligned especially closely with the action areas “Up Your Game” and “Use Your Voice,” emphasizing both skill-building and more inclusive, equitable communication strategies.
Participants actively practiced trauma-informed facilitation methods through hands-on exercises adapted from the East Kinston Neighborhood Hub process. Attendees worked through a healing mapping exercise that identified sources of trauma alongside community assets and healing resources, redesigned a typical public meeting format using trauma-informed principles, tested the redesign through a listening session, and reflected on how to move groups from acknowledging harm toward future-focused visioning. These activities gave participants a chance to explore how to create physically and psychologically safer spaces for difficult conversations and how to structure engagement so that painful histories are acknowledged rather than bypassed.
The workshop positioned trauma-informed planning as a necessary evolution in practice for work in communities facing environmental injustice, climate impacts, disinvestment, and displacement.
Attendees left with a trauma-informed facilitation toolkit, adaptable exercises and meeting templates, case study documentation from East Kinston, a self-assessment checklist for evaluating engagement through a trauma-informed lens, and greater confidence in bringing healing-centered approaches into their own projects. Just as importantly, the workshop reinforced that community engagement is not separate from design outcomes; it is foundational to building trust, supporting authentic participation, designing with empathy, and creating more resilient and equitable places.
