La Maraña

La Marana is a woman-led, participatory design and planning non-profit that promotes the inclusion of Puerto Rican voices in the creation of our cities and communities. Inspired by the number of citizen-led placemaking initiatives that have mushroomed across Puerto Rico in recent years, La Marana was co-founded in 2015 as a way to support and offer visibility to citizens hoping to activate their communities and reclaim participation in the urban and community realm. As a result of our work with citizen-led engagement and our core principles of community-based planning, we have collaborated with a series of communities in the exciting task of transforming public spaces through our participatory design and partnership model and have used our innovative methodologies in community planning and design as a way to leverage community-led recovery and advocacy movements across the island. Motivated by our Puerto Rico's deep need for locally-embedded, long-term recovery efforts after hurricanes Irma and Maria, our team at La Marana designed a participatory community recovery model, titled Imaginacion Post-Maria, that offers citizens direct power to imagine, plan and build the changes they desire in their communities. Combining participatory planning and design with the power of micro-finance and capacity building, Imaginacion Post-Maria's 6-step model enables neighbors to collaboratively design a community-driven master plan and implement a commonly elected social impact project in their community, acquiring the skills and tools necessary to believe in and manifest their innate capacity to recover in a just manner. As part of our large-scale vision, we are currently collaborating with three diverse communities across the island, specifically in urban, central, and eastern landscapes, establishing distinct case studies and measuring the replicability of our participatory recovery model. Working hand-in-hand with these three community partners, we hope to transform our pilot implementation into educational, open-source deliverables that can further spark community-led recovery efforts across the island. Thus, as part of our 2019 organizational goals, we will be creating an Imaginacion Post-Maria Toolkit that will outline our methodological approach and best practices in each community and an Imaginacion Post Maria DocuSeries - produced in collaboration with the multimedia non-profit Defend Puerto Rico - that will highlight this empowering recovery journey through the art of storytelling. We hope to these tools serve as a window to new participatory governance models that decentralize the management of resources and offer communities direct power to bring forth change.