Architects and Charities Can Make Good Partners, Experts Say

By Nicole Wallace

Less than a year out of architecture school, Bryan Bell decided to quit his job at an upscale firm in New York,

disillusioned by the feeling that only the wealthy and powerful had access to good design. When he was hired by Rural Opportunities, a charity in Camp Hill, Pa., to develop, but not design, housing for migrant farmworkers, he figured he was giving up the profession.

His earliest encounters at the new workplace only reinforced that feeling. His first day on the job, one of Mr. Bell’s new co-workers, after learning about his background, told him: “Architects build Taj Mahals to themselves that blow the budget.”

Yet the charity ended up drawing on Mr. Bell’s architectural skills, asking for his advice on new housing for seasonal farmworkers.

In time, the organization had him designing housing as well.

His experiences over the next five years at Rural Opportunities convinced Mr. Bell that architects could indeed play a major role in bringing about social change. Upon leaving the charity, he founded Design Corps, a nonprofit organization in Raleigh, N.C., that provides architectural services for projects in poor, rural regions, including housing for farmworkers.

“Our skill is to visualize physical solutions to larger, abstract issues,” says Mr. Bell. “Sometimes dedicated community advocates won’t see something that we have a unique ability to perceive. That hopefully can be our contribution.”

Expertise on Board

Bridging the divide between architects and charities, however, can be hard to do, especially given the financial constraints that social-service groups and other nonprofit organizations face.

For charities that expect to be involved in any kind of a building project, Mr. Bell recommends inviting an architect to join the board, much like an organization might invite a lawyer or accountant to become a trustee.

“They’ll be able to filter your mission from the point of view of somebody who can create the physical environment,” says Mr. Bell. And, he says, because conflict-of-interest concerns would keep the architect, as a member of the board, from accepting the charity’s design jobs, the organization would get the benefit of the architect’s expertise without a personal agenda.

Small nonprofit groups, says Mr. Bell, are often in a bind when they start a building project. They need conceptual drawings and a budget estimate to start raising money for the project, but they don’t have the money to pay for the drawings. Charities in this position, he says, should ask architects whether they would consider offering a combination of pro bono and paid services. For example, he says, organizations could ask an architect to draft the drawings and initial plans free, with the agreement that the charity would then hire the architect to oversee the construction once the funds come in.

Individual architects and firms do a great deal of volunteer work. But unlike the legal profession, architecture did not until recently have formal systems to support and manage pro bono work.

So last spring, Public Architecture — a nonprofit design charity in San Francisco that grew out of the pro bono work of a local firm, Peterson Architects — started a campaign to encourage architects and their firms to pledge 1 percent of their working hours to projects that benefit the public good. So far, architects visiting the site have pledged more than 22,000 hours of volunteer design services.

Architects can also post information, drawings, and photographs of their donated work. The organization hopes to expand the site, http://www.theone percent.org, to include a place where nonprofit organizations in need of design assistance and architects looking for interesting volunteer work could find each other.

If architecture firms were more deliberate, they could use their charitable work to recruit new employees, give staff members the opportunity to learn new skills, raise awareness of their company’s work, and even to meet people who might lead to new business, says John Peterson, chairman of Public Architecture and principal of the firm that created the charity.

“We are trying to encourage architects to look at pro bono work in a very businesslike way and be selfish about it,” he says. “Be philanthropic, but also look at it from, ‘How does this help our firm or our individuals?’”

Volunteer work with charities can also be a rewarding way for architects to learn new skills and a welcome relief from the sometimes monotonous work entry-level architects often find themselves doing, says Elizabeth K. Miller, executive director of the Community Design Collaborative of American Institute of Architects Philadelphia.

“A lot of design professionals go to school because they want to help fix cities, and when you get your first job, you’re focusing on the window details for a high rise in Dubuque,” she says. “You’re not relating your skill sets to the neighborhoods in that particular city where you live.”

Experts say that nonprofit design organizations, many of which are members of the Association for Community Design, schools of architecture, and local chapters of the American Institute of Architects, can all be helpful resources for charities that are looking for an architect.

Clear Vision Key

Architects who work with charities say that because of their collaborative management styles nonprofit clients often have a harder time making decisions and describing what they need than do for-profit clients.

Before meeting with an architect, nonprofit organizations should think carefully about how they’re going to use a space and what they need it to do, and then they should put their ideas in writing, says Mary Fitch, executive director of the Washington chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Ms. Fitch is also executive vice president of the chapter’s charitable arm, the Washington Architectural Foundation.

She tells charity leaders not to worry about using the right architectural terms or making sketches.

“What you need to do is be the really good partner and collaborator with an architect and tell them how you’re going to use the space and what you need,” she says. “Let them sketch it out.”

If an organization is fortunate enough to receive pro bono assistance, Ms. Fitch adds, having a clear sense of a project’s mission and goals in advance will ensure that the architect can spend the volunteer hours doing true design work.

When Boys & Girls Clubs of Fontana, in California, started to plan for its new building, Terrie Schneider, the organization’s executive director, visited other clubs to get ideas and to see how different building approaches worked. Ms. Schneider says she took pictures of everything she saw, and those photographs turned out to be invaluable when she was trying to communicate her ideas with the club’s architect.

When the final drawings for a project are finished, many organizations are tempted to move right into construction. But Ms. Schneider advises taking time to study the plans.

At the design stage, she says, the architect “can always erase something or add something. But once it’s a done deal, you can’t really make changes unless you’re willing to pay.”

While the Boys & Girls club was looking at the plans for its clubhouse, the contractor found a measurement error on the roof that would have cost at least $200,000 to fix once work was under way.

Ms. Schneider and others say that nonprofit organizations shouldn’t be afraid to stand up for what they want when they’re working with an architect.

“You have to look for an architect who’s listening to you,” says Mr. Bell, of Design Corps. After initial discussions, he says, “they have to come back, and they have to show you what they heard and where it ended up in that building.”