Day laborers, rent stabilized tenants, retail workers, housekeepers, families threatened with eviction, immigrants facing deportation, parents of public school students, nail salon workers, young fathers, and parks advocates — these are some of the individuals and communities CUP has impacted this year.

Working with and for some of the city’s most under-served communities, we’ve used the power of design to untangle complex issues so that more people can effectively advocate for their community needs. In 2014, your support helped us to:

- Partner with CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities and designers IntraCollaborative to create the Chinese & English guide, Rent Regulation Rights

- Collaborate with East Williamsburg students on Space Jam, about infill proposals for public housing sites

- Create Housing Court Help, a guide for tenants negotiating evictions without lawyers, with Housing Court Answers and the Public Society

Through these, and other projects, you helped us reach our largest audience ever. We distributed over 20,000 Making Policy Public posters and 30,000 Public Access Design publications on wage theft, public school decision-making, the Responsible Banking Act, and more. We held 36 workshops on affordable housing, zoning, and land use issues. And we worked with over 400 students from the city’s most underserved neighborhoods on projects about the siting of homeless shelters, fast food workers’ wages, and food stamps, among others. Each project makes a complex and difficult-to-navigate system manageable. Taken together, the projects build towards more informed, more empowered communities, and more meaningful democratic participation in shaping our neighborhoods.

This year we’re especially proud of the extended impacts many of our projects have had. We are producing a Chinese edition of the Zoning Guidebook in response to demand from grassroots groups in Chinatown. We’re adapting Rent Regulation Rights for use in San Francisco with Mission SRO Collaborative. We helped the Pittsburgh Redevelopment Authority develop and launch their own youth education program modeled on CUP’s Urban Investigations.

CUP’s work is reaching more and more underserved audiences, and we couldn’t have gotten here without your help. You know how powerful good design can be, and how important transparency is to enabling democracy. Your support has helped CUP’s work increase in scope, scale, depth — and impact.

We hope you will continue to partner with us as we take on even more in 2015, including:

- Helping New Yorkers navigate the many upcoming rezonings with the help of What Is ULURP? our toolkit that breaks down the city’s complex land use review process

- Completing our Chicago Affordable Housing Toolkit

- Creating a short video on the role of City Council with recent immigrant students in the South Bronx

- Launching a digital graphic that breaks down new flood zone and insurance guidelines for the 400,000+ New Yorkers impacted by them, with Center for New York City Neighborhoods

We need your help to make this all possible! Individual contributions are a critical source of funds for CUP. A gift of $100 will help us keep producing the quality work you know us for. With a gift of $250, $500, or more, you’ll ensure that the work we produce gets into the hands of those who need it most — students in the South Bronx, public housing residents in Rockaway, housing voucher waitlist members in Chicago, domestic workers in East New York.

Help us increase our impact by making a contribution today. Please join us in paving the way for more democratic community participation — and a more just city.

Click here to make a donation today.