Alum in Action: Courtney Spearman introduces "Fieldwork" — a new initiative supporting rural places and communities

Courtney Spearman (MLA '05 + MArH '06)
Fieldwork Program Manager, Building Common Ground

Alumna Courtney Spearman (MLA '05, MArH '06, she/her) is a passionate advocate for the power of design, arts, and culture in rural and tribal communities. For 11 years she served as Design Specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts, overseeing the agency’s engagement with the design field nationwide. Through the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design, she was privileged to work with small town, rural and Tribal community leaders who are seeking to enhance the quality of life and economic vitality of their communities through planning, design, and creative placemaking. She has a background in landscape architecture and art and architectural history.

We spoke with Spearman about her current role with Building Common Ground and its new program called Fieldwork, which builds on her work with the Citizens' Institute on Rural Design and traces back to her time at UVA. 

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Building Common Ground (BCG) is a collective of practitioners who support rural places and their leaders to create resilient solutions in their communities. The collective recently launched a new program called Fieldwork, which you will manage — can you tell us about this new program?

Fieldwork is a national program offering free design and project development support for rural and Tribal cultural organizations and community leaders. By directing resources to rural communities, BCG helps amplify and celebrate the vibrant history and rich culture in these places. 

Together with Fieldwork participants, we work on projects that help communities and organizations tell meaningful stories, honor local identity, and strengthen places where people gather.

From late Spring 2026 to December 2027, a national cohort of 20 rural and Tribal communities will collaborate with the Fieldwork team to:

• Plan and design cultural and civic spaces rooted in local context
• Engage residents and partners in shaping project direction
• Strengthen project readiness through planning activities, funding strategy, and leadership development
• Work alongside peer communities facing similar challenges and opportunities

Applications are open now through March 27 (check out the RFA and application questions), and we are super excited about the potential projects that are already cropping up. Fieldwork is both a brand new program and deeply rooted in our team’s experience designing with rural and Tribal communities. 

For over a decade you served as Design Specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and as part of that role, you coordinated The Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design (CIRD). How did your experience with CIRD shape BCG and Fieldwork?

The Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design (CIRD) was essential experience — it was a factor in the formation of BCG and is at the heart of the Fieldwork program. Fieldwork builds on the most recent iteration of CIRD, with extended project support that goes beyond what CIRD could do as a federal program.

As a little bit of background on CIRD, the program was conceived in 1991 as a national training program to assist rural towns and places with community development, historic preservation, and design issues. Originally called Your Town: Designing Its Future, it was part of a trio of NEA programs, along with the Mayors’ Institute on City Design and Design for Housing, launched to expand the conversation about design philosophy in community development to foster change with community members involved.

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Over the course of 35 years, CIRD evolved in response to feedback from and experience with the rural communities involved. 

CIRD’s final iteration was its strongest, offering both a deeper dive into design through community-engaged, charette-style workshops and a lighter touch design track focused on capacity building and peer engagement.

Repeatedly through the last years of the program, participants successfully secured next-step funding and exhibited greater confidence in their ability to carry out design projects.

Spring 2025 was a major point of inflection. CIRD, which I had managed for seven years, was defunded, and the NEA offered me a DOGE-led Deferred Resignation. My instinct was that we had to find a way to continue this good work with rural and Tribal communities. The work was genuinely impactful, and on a personal level, gave me more direct access to community-engaged design projects than the more arms-length grants management that was also part of my job (but which I also loved!). The Building Common Ground collaborative, which included CIRD’s design partner To Be Done Studio, had begun to coalesce a year earlier, and it was clear that joining them would allow us to take CIRD’s lessons and model in a new direction. Less than a year later, it’s hard to believe we have charted a path forward with Fieldwork! 

Part of Building Common Ground’s practice is what is described as a “Rural Infrastructure Accelerator”. What does this entail and can you share 1 or 2 examples of success stories?

BCG’s concept for the Rural Infrastructure Accelerator emerged from a perceived gap in rural and Tribal communities’ ability to carry out civic infrastructure projects. Even after going through design and capacity building programs like CIRD, groups were often stuck on the next steps for completing a construction project: finding and arranging financing, hiring architects and contractors, maintaining community momentum and engagement, and generally running their projects. The accelerator model was conceived to support communities through those steps, providing accompaniment through a range of activities to help bring projects fully to fruition.

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One prototypical example of an accelerator project is a new cultural hub for the Eastern Shoshone Tribe in Fort Washakie, Wyoming. 

The Tribe, located on the Wind River Reservation, has dreamed for 40 years about a facility that can house their cultural center and museum and also be a repository for Tribal archives, artifacts, and records from the Tribal Historic Preservation Office.
 

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The Tribe was selected for a CIRD workshop in 2023, which yielded strong design concepts that could work with several potential sites on the reservation. While preparing for the workshop, the Tribe applied for and successfully won an NEA Our Town grant. The grant funding enabled them to proceed seamlessly from the CIRD workshop deeper into site selection and design development, while also putting resources into seeking other funding. The CIRD-generated design materials and additional design development afforded by the Our Town grant led to a significant grant from the Mellon Foundation to acquire a site and complete the design process. There is more work to do, but the accompaniment and design support from CIRD and beyond has been critical to their success so far.

Could you share one or two lessons or lasting impacts from your A-School education that have influenced your professional life? What do you continue to carry with you?

I am so grateful for my time in the A-School! 

I love the landscape architect “lens” I developed and continue to use despite not working in a traditional landscape architecture role — thinking at a range of different scales and of impacts over time. 

Fieldwork gives me an opportunity to stay engaged with landscape spaces and simultaneously expand my program management and accompaniment skills.  

I also appreciate the spirit of collaboration and cross-disciplinary thinking that was so central to the graduate architecture and landscape curriculum in the mid-2000s. 

Studios with Beth Meyer and Bill Morrish, in particular, wired me to think about both the unique contributions of different design disciplines and the places where they overlap, which served me well in practice right after school and later in my work at the NEA.