Designing Justice + Designing Spaces

We Build Spaces That Transform and Heal Communities

Designing Justice + Designing Spaces is an architecture and real estate development social enterprise that helps communities imagine, design, and build a world rooted in healing instead of punishment. We work with leaders, organizations, and agencies across the country to turn a just future into a lived reality – spaces for care, repair, and belonging. 

Our board just pledged to match every gift, dollar-for-dollar, up to $10,000 — but only if we hit that goal by 8/28. That means whatever you give today goes twice as far.

$50 provides stipends for system-impacted designers / $100 funds materials for a prison redevelopment workshop / $250 supports pro bono advising for community organizers.

Together we can build a world with spaces for peacemaking, education, housing, and healthcare instead of incarceration.

Here's what your gift to Designing Justice + Designing Spaces supports:

10 Years of Building a More Just, Caring, Equitable World

Architecture and real estate have long been used to exclude and control — through stolen land, redlining, dispossession, and hostile design, most visibly in the prisons and jails built to warehouse people instead of repair harm. The result is a built world that encodes inequity in our daily lives.  

For over a decade, Designing Justice + Designing Spaces has been changing who holds this power of world-building. 

We work alongside community-based organizations to dream, design, build, and own spaces that affirm life rather than diminish it. From restorative justice hubs to supportive housing, we create physical infrastructure that anchors and fortifies movements — making abolition a lived reality, one project at a time.

BIPOC-Led Design for BIPOC Communities

DEANNA VAN BUREN, RA
Co-Founder, Executive Director, Design Director

Deanna Van Buren is one of the national leaders researching, formulating, and advocating for restorative justice centers, a radical transformation of the criminal justice system. She is the design director and executive director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces.

SHELLEY DAVIS ROBERTS
Studio Director

Shelley Davis Roberts focuses on social justice architecture, which creates the infrastructure needed to end mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on underserved communities of color.

TOLA THOMAS, RA
Architect & Design Studio Manager

Tola Thomas, RA is an Architectural Designer from the SF-Bay Area with a passion rooted in using the power of design to create spaces that give power and ownership back to underserved communities. 

Sustainable Community Impact

Our donor-funded work has allowed us to build spaces rooted in care, repair, and belonging. 

Because of donors like you, we have been able to:

• Design and build over $157,460,000 in current market value of completed assets
• Collaborate on new and redesigned spaces with 63+ client partners across the country
• Engaged over 4,000 community members in design processes
• Provided over $1,000,000 in pro bono services for community-based organizations