A mid-year letter from Street Lab’s co-founders

Jun 28, 2024

Dear friends and followers,

We’re writing to share our latest news and invite you to support our fastest growing initiative: creating vibrant, car-free space on streets next to New York City schools. After rolling out an expansion of School Streets work in early 2024, we’re getting a flood of new requests from teachers, administrators, parents, and kids—they all want the feeling of walking out the school doors into a community space that feels safer, healthier, and more connected. With your support, Street Lab can create more of these new public spaces, forging local partnerships that ensure School Streets take hold and are embraced by everyone in the neighborhood.

To our supporters: over the years, you’ve helped us build new things, try new ideas, and share our optimism for New York City at a scale we never imagined possible. In School Streets, we see another opportunity to use our pop-up approach to change the experience of the city in a big way, for generations to come. Thank you for sticking with us and supporting this exciting new work.

Read on to learn more about School Streets and other Street Lab work underway in 2024. We hope you’ll join us with a mid-year contribution, and thanks for your support.

See you out there,


Leslie and Sam
Co-founders, Street Lab

Donate
Kids playing in the street.

School Streets are a unique opportunity to transform the urban landscape in ways that bring out the best in kids and neighborhoods alike. Parents stop to talk with each other. Teachers use the space for recess and learning. And kids are taking the lead in envisioning and designing a new streetscape that makes them feel happy and proud.

Kids playing in the street.

For years, Street Lab has been creating and supporting Play Streets and other ways to bring people together. But our recent focus on deeper partnerships with schools has taken things to another level.

Kids playing in the street.

The initiative is bringing immediate benefits (each community gets a new Open Street for 6-8 weeks) while also laying groundwork for long-term change as schools learn to host and lead these spaces independently.

A map of NYC with dots located mainly in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The label reads "Current" with street names and "Potential" with street names.

We’ve already helped nine schools launch successful Open Streets, and we’re aiming to double that number by the end of the year.

Kids playing in the street.
Kids playing with the obstacle course in the street.

School Streets are a place to move and play…

Two photos next to each other: left showing teenagers taking a selfie on the street. Right showing a child looking at things on the table on the street.

..or even take a quiet moment for yourself…

Students sitting on the bench and a teacher saying something in front of them on the street.

With your support we can re-imagine what is possible for NYC streets and support communities in their efforts to create safer, healthier neighborhood spaces.

Group photo of students and some adults.
Donate

In Other Street Lab News…

People in the park looking at a wooden reading cart.

On top of our work with schools, we’ve maintained our ambitious schedule of pop-ups, fielding 671 requests from community groups across NYC to date and completing/booking 399.

A community engagement section on the street.

To accomplish this, we started working outdoors early. Here we are in March on Thatford Ave with our community engagement program IMAGINE, hosted by Brownsville Community Justice Center. Listen to the powerful stories recorded that day by our partner WNYC.

A shop owner standing next to the wooden cart on the street, in front of her storefront.

Our Meet-a-Small-Business cart has been activating streets on commercial corridors, seen here on Fulton St in Brooklyn, hosted by the Fulton Area Business Alliance.

A rendering of a plant cart.
A woman and child looking at plants in a cart.

Our newest program OASIS now includes a portable landscape and is deploying on streets in heat-vulnerable areas that lack green space, funded in part with a grant from AARP. Join us for a program launch on July 13 in Chinatown.

A promotional material that reads: "Program Launch: OASIS," "Saturday, July 13th 11:00 a..m.-2:00 p.m., Forsyth St between E Broadway & Division St" and "with Chinatown Partnership" and green plants in the background.
Kids drawing and writing things on clipboard on the street.

Enjoy this update? Subscribe to our quarterly newsletter to receive it by email!

Subscribe...
A view of the street with custom-designed furniture activating the space.