#UjimaWednesdays | Brick by Brick: Building Power Through the Built Environment | 5.28.25

Month Description:

Our workshops this May, in keeping with our 2025 theme Power, Transformation, and Miracles, center local and small-scale worldbuilding. The Power in Proximity: Small Worlds, Big Shifts focuses on how  intimate spaces, from neighborhoods to collective gardens, shared workspaces to cultural hubs, become powerful sites of resistance, connection, and transformation. In these small worlds, power is not abstract or distant; it is immediate, lived, and deeply personal.

This series invites us to ask: How do communities reclaim power through the creation of shared spaces that reflect their needs, histories, and visions for the future? How can local organizing, mutual aid, and art or culture shape the way we challenge larger systems of inequality and injustice? What happens when communities create and protect worlds that center collective care, autonomy, and mutual respect? We will learn how local, grassroots movements grow from the most personal connections— from relationships and trust that form when communities come together to meet their own needs—and how they can ripple outward to challenge larger structures of power.

Event Description:

What would it mean to own the systems we rely on every day—our roads, streetlights, power grids, and public spaces? In this workshop, James Johnson-Piett, founding Principal and CEO of Urbane Development, explores the future of community-owned infrastructure. Drawing on over two decades of experience in economic and community development across 100+ neighborhoods, he will share models for transforming the built environment through collective ownership, anchor institutions, and investment strategies rooted in community control. Together, we’ll consider how reclaiming our physical surroundings can become a foundation for lasting self-determination and community wealth.

Facilitator Bio:

As founding Principal and CEO of Urbane Development, James Johnson-Piett is an evangelist for a new kind of community development that emphasizes community anchor businesses and institutions as agents of change – solving local problems and elevating the quality of life for underserved communities. With over two decades of experience in various facets of economic and community development, James is responsible for the overall management, operations, and strategic vision for Urbane, which works with historically disinvested communities through an integrated approach that includes research, consulting, and place-based investing. James has helped raise over $225 million for small business and community development initiatives with the goal of promoting community wealth generation.