The Design Studio at Street Psalms
Co-create.
Start small.
Risk big.
Design for social contagion.
Co-creating models of social innovation that lead to human flourishing.
We are pursuing a vision of cities of peace for all people where everyone belongs, especially the most vulnerable.
The Design Studio accompanies inspired organizations to identify, develop and unleash their gift at scale. Our co-creative process is worked out in real contexts and real time with all of the risk, fun and wildness that reality offers.
We practice what we call Incarnational Design. This way of designing resists abstraction and takes seriously how we become human: in community, over time and always in context. We pay particular attention to desire as the fuel for innovation because it is desire that moves people and desire is contagious.
How we design
Simple, repeatable, contextual, contagious
01 · Discover. Articulate the question. Call forth assets. Clarify identity. Find the social innovation already alive on the ground, and ask what's underneath it.
02 · Experiment. Start small and risk big. Prototype in real contexts, in real time. Test whether the pattern holds when it's named — and whether it holds when it moves.
03 · Launch. Roll out, evaluate, adjust — then circle back and begin again. Let it go. A model is proven when others take it up and adapt it to their own context.
Ten principles guide our co-creation
No. 01
Start Human and Stay Human
Real people and real flourishing stay at the center. Resist idealism; opt for realism.
No. 02
Clarify the Question
The beautiful answer is always preceded by the more beautiful question. Don't settle too early.
No. 03
Nurture Desire
Creation unfolds through desire. Invest in those who already want the change, not those resisting it.
No. 04
Pay Attention to the Outlier
The margins hold the key that unlocks the center.
No. 05
Improvise
"No, but ..." is banned. Only "Yes, and ..." is allowed.
No. 06
Stay Embodied
Stuck? Take a breath. Blocked? Share a meal. We make the road by walking together.
No. 07
Build Antifragility
Seek solutions that don't just survive volatility and chaos, but thrive in them.
No. 08
Seek Simplicity
Simplicity lives on the other side of complexity. Don't settle for simplistic or easy – both are imposters.
No. 09
Tell a Better Story
Humans don't just tell stories; we live them. Re-narrating together reshapes who a community can become.
No. 10
Choose Imperfection
Welcoming imperfection is how we let go of sacrifice and cultivate systems of mercy.
Our Work
The work belongs to the place. The model is what travels.
The work of grassroots communities belongs to those communities and stays rooted in place. Our work is to co-create models through partnerships. A model is a nameable, repeatable pattern of gathering and practice that produces a measurable shift in a community's way of seeing, doing and being that can be adapted by others in a different context, without us. What follows are some examples of our work in co-creating models of social innovation that lead to human flourishing.
Urban Training Collaborative
Most leadership development creates isolated experts who come with answers. The Urban Training Collaborative created a global learning community who asked questions. It was the shared questions and the shared love for the city and the most vulnerable that drew together a global network of contextual models of formation. These "hubs" demonstrated that authentic transformation scales organically when you put the most vulnerable at the center and ask open and honest questions. The result? A living ecosystem of formation where leaders in London learn from practitioners in Manila, where questions trump answers, and where cities become classrooms for authentic change, one relationship at a time.
Preaching Peace
Religious leaders were stuck preaching to their own choirs. We asked a different question: What if weekly sermon preparation became collaborative peace-making? Preaching Peace transforms isolated study into interfaith dialogue, turning every Sunday into an opportunity to bridge divides. When pastors in Kenya started meeting with Muslim clerics monthly to compare their peace-making texts, we knew we'd struck gold. This is theology that gets its hands dirty, faith that builds bridges instead of walls.
Earlsfield
What happens when a parish church stops measuring itself by who shows up on Sunday and starts stewarding its building, its people, and its money on behalf of the whole neighborhood, including those who will never become members? The Earlsfield study maps something extraordinary: how one small religious community sparked dozens of interconnected initiatives that transformed a London neighborhood. From food banks to social enterprises, each project feeds the others, and represents an interconnected web of relationships transforming their neighborhood over time.
Partner with the Studio
Everything we do is in and through partnerships. These partnerships tend to begin one of two ways: a community has something working on the ground and wants to discover why it works and name it, or we have an idea that needs a community to make it real. Either way , we invest where we believe something has the capacity to become a model that is a gift to others.
A partnership typically takes the shape of a project and runs six to twenty-four months. The project is built on our three-phase process and ten principles, but customized to fit the partnership. You get our team in regular conversation with yours, access to practitioners across our global network, tools for understanding what's actually happening on the ground, a case study that carries what we learn to your stakeholders and ours, and the potential for funding, in-kind and/or direct.
What you really get by partnering with the Studio is much more. The Studio is one door into Street Psalms, a community of fellow travelers that isn't bound by a project or a timeline. The project ends. The conversation doesn't.