Giving Compass' Take:

• Antionette Carroll, founder of the social justice nonprofit Creative Reaction Lab, recruited college students to understand how design can perpetuate inequitable realities for communities. 

• The most recent project of Creative Reaction Lab takes a critical look at the public transit system. How would the needs of different communities impact the way someone can design public transportation?

• Read about another industry that needs to account for equitable design: edtech. 

Antionette Carroll, the founder of the social justice nonprofit Creative Reaction Lab, conducted something of an experiment in her hometown of St. Louis. She went into an Aldi in a predominantly African-American, low-income community, another branch of the supermarket chain in a middle-class neighborhood, and one in a wealthy, predominantly white enclave.

In the latter two Aldis, produce and healthy snacks greeted the people walking through the doors. In the store in the lower-income community, the first thing customers see are chips and cookies.

Even something as easily overlooked as grocery store layouts, Carroll says, can perpetuate inequality.

She founded Creative Reaction Lab to get local designers and advocates thinking about how to use their line of work to open up channels of communication.

The Community Design Apprenticeship Program, launching this spring, will engage a group of local Black and Latinx college students in addressing a specific issue in a St. Louis neighborhood. For the first iteration of the program, the challenge posed to the students will be: “What would public transit do to improve your life?” The apprentices will study the historical issue, conduct a community audit among residents to get a sense of their needs, and propose a new transit system that will address them.

Read the full article on equitable communities by Eillie Anzilotti at FastCompany