Justice by Design

We were a group of local people in D.C. who were always working on community hopes and dreams and sometimes addressing community issues. We would take courses together and try to apply what we learned to our local challenges and aspirations.

The first time we did this in 2015, a small group—three of us—decided to work on affordable housing in D.C. With a larger group, our next initiative was educational flourishing for all kids in DC starting with our neighborhoods and the barriers to improved integration. These projects were never isolated projects and they were never done. That lack of completion is a big difference between a human-centered design (HCD) approach and a systems approach. Our hope was to be good system stewards and improve the health of housing systems, educational systems, and so much more. There will always be new changes, new stressors, and emerging dynamics to address. Our job is to always monitor, learn, and adapt just as the system is changing shape. Those initiatives never ended.

Finally, we decided to start a meetup group to build a community of local people using a participatory systems approach for hyperlocal and local goals and difficulties. It was a wonderful mix of people across the DMV area, and many of those relationships are still in tact today. We found a course to learn and help us practice a systems approach in our local situation. We found an issue—breastfeeding in DC. We were exploring the dynamic of African-American mothers being 9 times less likely to breastfeed than white mothers in DC. A similar dynamic occurred with mothers experiencing homelessness.

In building a coalition of organizations working on maternal health, child health, and breastfeeding, we learned the importance of honoring organizations that had been doing this work for years, especially among communities of African-American mothers, mothers in low-income communities, and mothers experiencing homelessness. In the end, the city’s Breastfeeding Coalition decided to work with us and lead it and other organizations decided to participate. However, that work was impeded by the hurt one organization felt from not being the one to lead it, given that other breastfeeding organizations focused mostly on middle to upper class mothers and white mothers.

From that lesson, we learned how to build better coalitions after first understanding the landscape. We also learned that we loved this way of working through relationship-building, long-term goals, community leaderships, and civic engagement. So the Washington Participatory Design Center, also called Justice by Design, was born.

It is hard to give an exact year of its birth because we found that most of the work we enjoy doing is not valued in a hypercapitalist society. We keep flexible day jobs and do this work at the pace of community in addition to the speed of trust. There was never a need to register as an official IRS-recognized entity.

However in 2024, we began planning a national project: Constitutional Convention 2027. In 2025, we decided to create a public benefits coop to receive and manage the funds for the People’s Constitution in 2027. We filed the paperwork in 2026. The Washington Participatory Design Center continues to engage in various local and hyperlocal projects in DC.