The Tommy Pacello Placemaking Fellowship

Applications for the inaugural Tommy Pacello Placemaking Fellowship are now open! Click here to apply. Applications will remain open until July 31, 2023. 

Thank you to the many incredibly donors who helped us exceed our fundraising goal for this year!

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Tommy Pacello loved great public spaces. He loved great cities. He loved people who worked together to improve their communities. He was a planner but he believed in action. He was a lawyer but he wasn’t afraid to bend the rules. He loved good music, good beer, good food, and good people. 

Tommy introduced the notion of tactical urbanism to Memphis - thinking big and building small - because he knew that design could be both intentional and iterative. He believed that city-building was a process, not an outcome. He inspired us to “do better” and “make cool stuff.” Tommy Pacello believed in community.

The Tommy Pacello Placemaking Fellowship will be a cash prize awarded annually to an individual or team that is making cool stuff -- specifically, design projects, public realm improvements, or other activities that celebrate Tommy’s approach to catalytic placemaking and city building. This award will be made annually by a committee of Tommy’s friends and colleagues.

Recipients will also benefit from technical assistance and professional guidance provided by members of the committee in the sectors of law, project design and management, communications and stakeholder engagement, and fundraising. 

Recipients of the award will be asked to document their work through a video, photo slideshow, slide deck, white paper, or other media. They will present this work publicly within one year after receiving their award, and their presentations will be shared and archived online.

For more information on Tommy's life and work, please visit TommyPacello.com.

Applicants who wish to be considered for a Pacello Fellowship should provide the committee with:

• An idea for a project or series of projects that will improve your community by addressing a clear need or challenge. We define “community” as a block, neighborhood, district, city, or region.
  • The scale of the idea is less important than how well it addresses the following questions:
    • Is it innovative? What is new and different about your idea?
    • Is it catalytic? Will it help make additional “good things” in your community? How do you know?
    • Is it connective? Will it build new partnerships ones among businesses, neighbors, local government, and/or other stakeholders?
    • Does it put people at the center -- particularly the ones who may already live in the community? 
• Proof that you live and work full time in the community where they are applying.
• Proof that you have capacity to complete your project within one year of receiving the award
• Documentation of your project in a way that can be shared and archived online within one year of the Fellowship grant being made. 

Applications will be scored by a subset of the organizing committee (see below) using a rubric that favors innovation, diversity, equity, and work in traditionally underserved communities. Fellowship awards will be made annually every autumn in the amount and quantity allowed by available funds at that time. 

Additional information about our process for application submissions will be provided soon.

Less than a year before he died, Pacello described his work by saying “Our job is to serve as a catalyst for the good things.... Cities evolve and change. We are a catalyst and an effort to turbo charge the development.” That’s the spirit -- fearless, curious, hopeful, welcoming, and fun -- that we want to celebrate and pass forward through the creation of the Tommy Pacello Placemaking Fellowship.

Our goal of the fellowship is to honor Tommy’s memory by supporting people who are doing innovative, catalytic work in the communities they love, and to grow a strong nationwide network of these leaders over time. The value of this work will compound and amplify over time, as recipients share and learn from each other.

The committee intends for these awards to be used in the development or implementation of a specific project or projects, but will not require an onerous accounting of funds spent. Generally, utilizing the award to further Tommy’s unique approach to placemaking, wherever and however possible, will be in keeping with the spirit of the award and its intended purpose.

Tommy may have been a localist, but he wasn’t a nativist. He knew that great ideas flowed within and between cities, and cherished the opportunity to visit his friends in great cities around the country to see what they were doing. One of the most important outcomes of the Fellowship will be the documentation and sharing of awardees’ work, which is meant to inspire more great placemaking work everywhere. That’s why we put such a big emphasis on documenting your projects in a way that can be easily archived and shared digitally.

In addition to the cash prize, recipients will be given up to 20 hours of professional advice and technical assistance from members of the committee, via one-on-one in-person, video chat, or phone meetings, over the course of one year from the date of the award.