Summary: AIA National Board of Directors spent part of their Saturday on September 5 to pull weeds, gather trash, and fix up furnishings in a community park in Philadelphia during a break from the day’s Board meeting. Twenty volunteers, including Board members, family, and AIA staff joined with the Point Breeze Pioneers cleaning up Concert Garden and surrounding areas in the city’s Point Breeze neighborhood.

A Keith Haring “Radiant Baby” Mural graces a wall on the Concert Garden site. Photos by Tanya Barrett.

The day’s efforts, enthusiastically embraced by the Board and Executive Vice President/CEO Chris McEntee, is part of the AIA Legacy Project, a joint effort among AIA components to ensure that AIA meetings include an activity that brings members in contact with local communities and students, providing the opportunity for the general public to get to know that architects care. “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” notes AIA President Marvin Malecha, FAIA.

Volunteers finish preparing a garden plot for planting.

Other AIA community outreach activities in 2009, which includes a program test period that will result in a component-inspired Legacy Project guideline in 2010, have been the Shadow an Architect program at AIA Grassroots and National 2009 AIA Convention, volunteering for the 9/11 Day of Service, AIA Middle Tennessee’s Rebuilding Together, the upcoming Solar Decathlon, and many other state and local programs across the country.

Another element of the Legacy Project resulting from the AIA Board’s September meeting in Philadelphia will be a donation of used computers from the AIA to the Philadelphia Charter High School for Architecture and Design, which itself was begun in 1999 through the efforts of AIA Philadelphia.