There is no better way to learn about a community than to immerse yourself in it, and this weekend CEDIK’s Community Design/Downtown Engagement team did just that in Whitesburg, Kentucky. If you were in Whitesburg you may have seen us there with our portable chalkboards and wondered what we were doing. If you weren’t there you may have seen us on social media and wondered the same thing. How could asking people to write on a chalkboard have any sort of impact on their downtown, especially if it’s only set up for that day? These are all valid questions, and ones that we’ve asked ourselves repeatedly. This event represented months of listening and conversations. Not regarding the boards themselves, but on how our community design and placemaking efforts can be most effective throughout the region.

The idea for the ‘Chalk and Talk’ was born while our team was touring one of the downtowns in the Promise Zone region of Southeastern Kentucky. This downtown has an impressive, yet underutilized alleyway off their main square that inspired us to imagine how the alley could become a destination itself.  We brainstormed how we could help activate this inactive space using our collective arts, design and planning skills to create a safe and welcoming public place (with a minimal budget, of course). However, if we want people to use the space, we need to understand their feelings regarding that space. Throughout the Commonwealth there are downtown spaces like this, and any engagement tool that we created to understand what people wanted would need to be adaptable to these diverse spaces. Ultimately, any initiative would need to be lighter (transportable), quicker(easily accomplishable) and cheaper (the first step towards a longer term goal). This led us to develop our ‘Chalk and Talk’ program we piloted in Whitesburg’s Oktoberfest.

Since our initial piloting of the Chalk and Talk in Whitesburg the program has been employed 5 additional communities in Kentucky with several hundred direct participants and several thousand other observers.  Further, the Chalk and Talk was featured at the Southeast Arts  Placemaking Conference in Chattanooga where it was set up in the lobby of the host hotel and was featured as a workshop where several participants from fellow Southern states who expressed interest in bringing it into their own communities.