Fox Point Community Garden Cookbook, 2025
This special community project, coinciding with FPCG’s 20th anniversary, is the 145-page culmination of a months-long process of collecting recipes, amassing community input and ideas, leading cyanotype workshops, editing, and designing with a team of community volunteers. With design inspiration emerging from cyanotype’s historical ties to plant photography, this book serves as a “pseudo-photograph” of our garden and the neighbors within it, including a scanned selection of cyanotype prints made by gardeners on site. This book is full of unique recipes, lots of character, and endearing anecdotes, as any coil-bound cookbook should be. Credit to Trevor H. Hilker and Peter Shanahan for their design leadership throughout this project.
Fox Point Community Garden, 2024
Established in 2006, Providence’s Fox Point Community Garden (FPCG) is a vibrant community space in which roughly 200 gardeners care for some 130 plots. Honey are a central source of funding for this community, but the existing platform supporting beehives was beginning to age and weaken in the summer of 2023. As a board member, I spearheaded the design process to replace this platform and improve the surrounding space. I centered consistent community engagement and input through this process, and the experience helped me better understand how to integrate design skills into a landscape and community context. Given unexpected developments, this project is actively transitioning to adapt to new shading conditions and garden configuration.
Cabral: A Teaching and Learning Park, 2023
This ongoing project works to integrate native species and murals into a highly trafficked urban park in Providence, RI. Working with the Partnership for Providence Parks (P3), I led the effort to design and propose this project to secure funding from city and nonprofit partners. Beyond beautification, this effort serves as an educational tool for youth, as a buffer against adjacent highway traffic, and to benefit native species, pollinators in particular. This project includes site diagramming and analysis, digital rendering, species selection, budgeting, and workday facilitation including community members.
The Pride of Davey Lopes Recreation Center, 2023
This project involved a total redesign of the Davey Lopes Recreation Center’s outdoor learning space, located in Upper South Providence. This space, located directly adjacent to the center’s entrence, hadn’t been updated in years and required significant updates. Working with P3, I helped facilitate the early ideation and funding of this project. In my role involved meeting with recreation staff and youth to brainstorm priorities and ideas for the future of the space, in addition to drafting a project proposal to Providence’s DownCity Design Team including site context and a theoretical redesign render. This work secured a partnership with DownCity, who’s summer design interns designed and implemented the final product for Davey Lopes.
charlie usadi 