Dream Play Build

The room is dim, the chairs are in perfectly lined rows. The city planner puts up a color-coded diagram of the street improvement project, dreading the inevitable angry responses. Jana loves her community and is glad to be able to attend the evening meeting, and she has a lot of ideas for community change. But she has a hard time hearing, and can’t see the diagrams clearly. She leaves early. It’s time to imagine a different type of community engagement – one that inspires connection, creativity, and fun. People love their communities and want them to become safer, healthier, more prosperous places. But the standard approach to public meetings somehow makes everyone miserable. Conversations that should be inspiring can become shouting matches. So what would it look like to facilitate truly meaningful discussions between citizens and planners? What if they could be fun? For twenty years, James Rojas and John Kamp have been looking to art, creative expression, and storytelling to shake up the classic community meeting. In Dream Play Build, they share their insights into building common ground and inviting active participation among diverse groups. Their approach, “Place It!,” draws on three methods: the interactive model-building workshop, the pop-up, and site exploration using our senses. Using our hands to build and create is central to what makes us human, helping spark ideas without relying on words to communicate. Deceptively playful, this method is remarkably effective at teasing out community dreams and desires from hands-on activities. Dream Play Build offers wisdom distilled from workshops held around the world, and a deep dive into the transformational approach and results from the South Colton community in southern California. While much of the process was developed through in-person meetings, the book also translates the experience to online engagement--how to make people remember their connections beyond the computer screen. Inspirational and fun, Dream Play Build celebrates the value of engaging with the dreams we have for our communities. Readers will find themselves weaving these artful, playful lessons and methods into their own efforts for making change within the landscape around them.

Buildings, bridges, and books don't exist without the workers who are often invisible in the final product, as this joyous and profound picture book reveals from acclaimed author of The Christmas Boot Lisa Wheeler and New York Times bestselling illustrator of Love Loren Long All across this great big world, jobs are getting done by many hands in many lands. It takes much more than ONE. Gorgeously written and illustrated, this is an eye-opening exploration of the many types of work that go into building our world--from the making of a bridge to a wind farm, an amusement park, and even the very picture book that you are reading. An architect may dream up the plans for a house, but someone has to actually work the saws and pound the nails. This book is a thank-you to the skilled women and men who work tirelessly to see our dreams brought to life.

After being diagnosed with terminal cancer, a professor shares the lessons he's learned—about living in the present, building a legacy, and taking full advantage of the time you have—in this life-changing classic. "We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand." —Randy Pausch A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull over the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy? When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave—"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"—wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have . . . and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living. In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.

For Gwendolyn Wright, the houses of America are the diaries of the American people. They create a fascinating chronicle of the way we have lived, and a reflection of every political, economic, or social issue we have been concerned with. Why did plantation owners build uniform cabins for their slaves? Why were all the walls in nineteenth-century tenements painted white? Why did the parlor suddenly disappear from middle-class houses at the turn of the century? How did the federal highway system change the way millions of Americans raised their families? Building the Dream introduces the parade of people, policies, and ideologies that have shaped the course of our daily lives by shaping the rooms we have grown up in. In the row houses of colonial Philadelphia, the luxury apartments of New York City, the prefab houses of Levittown, and the public-housing towers of Chicago, Wright discovers revealing clues to our past and a new way of looking at such contemporary issues as integration, sustainable energy, the needs of the elderly, and how we define "family."

Build your vision, work with purpose, and live the life of your dreams The Dream Chaser shows you how to step out of the day-to-day grind and start creating the life you want. Does your daily effort at work build your dream, or someone else's? Do you do your job for the paycheck or the fulfillment? It's possible to have both, and this book shows you how to get there. The key is in following your passion and purpose. You have a natural-born talent—whether you know it or not—that can make the world a better place. You have a unique story and vision that can lead you to the life you love. Purpose-minded entrepreneurs are changing the world every day, living and working with passion and excitement. This book shows you how to stay focused on your goals, build a solid hands-on strategy, leverage your talents and abilities, and build a business that benefits the world. Your ideal life is not going to appear out of the blue. You have to actively build it yourself; but first you need to realize just what you're capable of, and then you need to set yourself up for success. This guide shows you how to begin that journey of a lifetime. Follow your passion to achieve success Play to your strengths in strategy and execution Stay focused amidst distractions and obstacles Build the life and business you've always wanted Your dreams, goals, and purpose matter, and it's time to start making them a priority. When you work from a place of passion, drive and strength come from within; you become an unstoppable force, and every day is an adventure in its own way. The Dream Chaser shows you how to start living your real life, starting today.

Lisa Sugar has an amazing job. She spends her days at POPSUGAR creating content about pop culture, must-have handbags and makeup, healthy recipes, and Instagram-worthy sweets. She manages an enormously successful, growing company with employees who love what they do. And her life is just as great at home. She and her husband have three daughters and she’s the number one soccer mom who loves reading bedtime stories every night. How did she do it? By figuring out what her dream job was, taking risks, and believing in herself. And now she wants to motivate others to do the same. She wants to show them how to live colorful, interesting lives where every second counts. She'll do so by sharing her personal and business story. Lisa knows that creating your dream job requires hard work, patience, and experience. She'll give advice, in big and small ways, about exactly how to do that, from starting a company to ditching a relationship that isn't working to becoming a fabulous boss. And with the great, accessible writing style that has made PopSugar such a hit, she'll make it fun!

A collection of illustrations, concrete poetry, and photographs that shows how young children's constructions, created as they play, are reflected in notable works of architecture from around the world.

Dreaming of a day when there will be a real playground in her own neighborhood, a little girl is ecstatic when she learns that a local playground has been planned, in a story inspired by the construction of the first playground built by the KaBOOM! national nonprofit.