MLK Day of Service 2022 Kickoff

PAYETTE will be hosting its annual Day of Service on Monday January 17th, 2022, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Now in its fourth year, the Day of Service has cemented itself in PAYETTE culture and continues to be a cornerstone of our Pro Bono initiatives. This year, we are excited to strengthen existing partnerships and forge new ones. While COVID-19 continues to hinder our ability to collaborate in person with our community partners, we are all now virtual meeting experts and are happy to announce this year’s Day of Service recently kicked off!

The MLK Day of Service continues to be a wonderful opportunity for us to support a variety of community organizations through design excellence, utilizing our staff’s time and creative abilities. The Day of Service is an exciting time of year at PAYETTE with people from different roles on various projects coming together to work on projects that serve local communities. Furthermore, it provides a great opportunity for young designers to take on leadership roles work with a broader group of colleagues. Each team consists of 7-8 PAYETTE staff, who come from departments throughout the office.

We are pleased to announce three selected projects that work with communities across the Commonwealth. These three projects cover a range of design typologies, varying from urban planning to interior renovation to full building rehabilitation.

Elevated Thought Creative Center with Elevated Thought | Lawrence, MA

Elevated Thought believes that all young people should have access to wide-ranging, creative and alternative learning opportunities. ET offers holistic, cross-disciplinary opportunities for learning (arts, humanities, social sciences, philosophy, history), as well as support for youth to take thoughtful steps in choosing professional pathways and preparing themselves for impact and leadership, leveraging creative access and exposure for personal and community transformation. Elevated Thought is aiming to buy a historic (but broken-down) building in Lawrence and transform it into a new Creative Center. They hope this building will provide the Lawrence community with a new and transformative anchor institution.

Moving Main Street Forward with the City of North Adams | North Adams, MA

Bookended by MASS MoCA and Colegrove Park Elementary, Main Street and the compact downtown need to create connectivity and aesthetic beauty that pairs with the historic infrastructure and small business community, while being ready for the next era of growth potential. Moving Main Street Forward is an effort to begin facilitating the critical act of getting community input, inspiration and engagement as a means to support efforts by the City to overhaul of Main Street corridor.

Reimagining the Blue Hills Trailside Museum with Mass Audubon’s Blue Hills Trailside Museum | Canton, MA

Mass Audubon embraces a vision of the Commonwealth in which nature—whether found in a city park or deep inside the forests of western Massachusetts or within an urban greenway or along the 1,500 miles of Massachusetts coastline—is valued as essential to quality of life, and where people live with appreciation and respect for the complex ecological systems that sustain life on earth, working together to ensure that they are protected. Blue Hills Trailside Museum is requesting design services to create a new community and user centric vison for the indoor exhibit, programmatic, and visitor services space at the Blue Hill’s Trailside Museum.

We are thrilled to collaborate with these three organizations and look forward to seeing the design solutions each team develops over the course of the next month. Thank you to our community partners and all the dedicated and talented PAYETTE volunteers!