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The Kingsville B.E.S.T. Program
Date: Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Time: 11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Location: 11911 Dorsett Road, Maryland Heights, MO 63043
Cost: $15 (Register Here)
The B.E.S.T. Approach is a comprehensive intervention strategy for highly distressed neighborhoods grounded in Wraparound Theory. Realizing that the range of problems that Black St. Louisans face due to structural racism is too daunting to be conceptualized at the city level, a group of stakeholders, approximately five years ago, decided to devise an approach that focused on the basic needs of community residents for a limited area. The project targets 20 blocks situated in the Near North Side that has experienced hyper-vacancy and severe population loss in recent years (City of St. Louis, 2024f; STL Vacancy Collaborative, 2023a). The proposed pilot intends to launch a bundle of activities designed to generate data to evaluate the effectiveness of the B.E.S.T. Approach and its replicability for similar neighborhoods.
Catalina Freixas has taught in the Sam Fox School since 2004. She is engaged in urban humanities research and practice, with a focus on neighborhood resiliency. Freixas seeks to use Wraparound Theory as the intellectual framework to treat neighborhood problems in a comprehensive fashion while also intimately involving community residents and stakeholders. Her ultimate research objective is to use her current neighborhood project as the first step in developing an interventionist methodology that can be effectively replicated in other communities. Freixas’s ongoing research attempts to identify characteristics of resilience as integrated processes and systems. Her long-term goal is to use this research to generate quantitative eco-urbanism tactics that can be utilized to promote resilient communities in a wide range of urban settings. She is currently working with St. Louis Association of Community Organizations, St. Louis Public Schools, and the Urban League to undertake a pilot project in the KingsVille community, a highly distressed area in North St. Louis. Freixas’s previous research sought to better understand the causes and consequences of urban racial residential segregation as well as to generate new mitigation strategies. This project led to Segregation by Design: Conversations and Calls for Action in St. Louis (2019). Her work has been supported by grants from The Divided City initiative (Mellon Foundation) and InCEES (Washington University in St. Louis). She has shared her research widely at national and international conferences and in peer-reviewed papers and publications. Freixas weaves her approach to resilient design into her studios and seminars which has had a significant impact on students in our undergraduate and graduate programs.
Register by Friday, March 15 at 3 p.m.
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