Laura Gómez’s project is based on her experience as an immigrant. Right after moving to Macon, Laura started thinking about the need to create a city where the Hispanic population could enjoy and thrive. Her KECC project, Macon Para Todos, aims to make downtown Macon more accessible, enjoyable, and attractive to the Hispanic community.

To achieve this goal, she has set out to:

• Offer activities for Hispanics to enjoy downtown through arts, games and public space-based activities.
• Collect data to understand where Hispanics live and spend time in Macon, and what barriers they face to enjoying downtown Macon more.

The first six months of implementation of her project have been insightful and busy.

The 3-day Studio in Toronto, organized and led by 8 80 Cities, helped me refine my project and meet with other champions.

After this impactful experience, she spent three months finding the support and permits she needed for her first activity. She recruited six volunteers, who helped her better understand the activities she wanted to implement and what to do on each activity. She also received support and guidance from Bike Walk Macon, a partner organization for her project.

She then decided to implement her first activity called “A pintar y a jugar” (Let’s paint and play) on December 7th. For three hours, Laura and her volunteers offered different activities for Hispanic families to have fun and reconnect with their roots. The activity occurred on Cotton Avenue Square, a renovated public space in Downtown Macon. She also offered snacks and discounts for local Hispanic restaurants so that people could stay downtown after the activity.

While activities occurred, Laura also collected data on Hispanic people’s interest in visiting Downtown Macon more often and their transportation preferences to understand other alternatives they would like to use.

Bike Walk Macon, led by Rachel Hollar-Umana, a former KECC alumn, supported the activity and provided brilliant ideas for the data collection and some of the game elements. Their support was crucial to making the activity a success.

In the six months since its launch, the project has helped:

• Make Hispanics visible: It is sometimes heard that there are no Hispanics in Macon. The activity proved there are many, and they are interested in participating in community activities. The project also has shown that talking about a Hispanic community may not be accurate, as Hispanics are a very diverse group. However, they still share values, interests, and language (mainly Spanish).
• Make use of public space and assets while promoting a new vision of public space: Cotton Avenue Square is a beautiful public space with benches, tables, and trees that need to be used more often. People in the public space, enjoying, doing physical activity, and meeting neighbors should be the raison d’être of the public space.
• Collect innovative data: Little data exists about Hispanics in Macon. The project is a first opportunity to understand more about this community’s needs, interests, and dreams.
• Contribute to Hispanic businesses: The participants enjoyed the products offered by some Hispanic businesses through the discounts they offered during the activity day.

As a snapshot of the impact so far:

• Around 50 people attended the activity and stayed for 3 hours. Several of them expressed interest in continuing to participate in the project activities.
• Children primarily benefited a lot from the activity.
• Six volunteers were part of the team, and two were Mercer Students.
• Three businesses were involved and benefited from the activity.
• Local media channels, such as QuePasa, Macon Melody, NotiVision, and 41NBC News, shared information about the project and its activities.
• A meeting with Wesleyan College students from the honor program to discuss the project occurred in November.

Permit management was a challenge, it changed the activity from its original form. The initial idea was to paint a few sidewalks with Hispanic-inspired designs, playground games (e.g., hopscotch), and shapes that made the public space more attractive and fun. The city administration didn’t allow permanent paint on the sidewalks, so the activity changed, but it had a positive outcome.

During the activity, collecting data was also challenging, as a person fully dedicated to collecting the surveys and using the map (a map had been printed for people to draw routes they would like to use to get to downtown in sustainable modes) was needed. The team capacity did not allow this.

Laura’s next activity will be a walking tour led in Spanish in March. The goal is to provide a walking activity in Spanish for participants to learn about Macon’s history and meet Hispanic businesses and the stories of their owners. Laura will partner with Visit Macon, Bike Walk Macon, and other organizations and individuals. She is still in the planning process for the activity.

Lastly, in late April she wants to hold a public space event like the one in December, to celebrate “Children’s Day”. The details of this activity are to be confirmed.

About Laura Gómez

Laura is a Latina who dreams about cities for everyone. She moved from Bogotá to Macon (GA) and faced a different reality regarding the possibility of enjoying the public space, using sustainable transportation modes, and finding other Hispanic people. As a road safety and sustainable mobility advocate, and with her background as a Political Scientist, she knows that public space allocation is a way of reinforcing power relationships, and that public space is an enabler of life quality and livability. The increasing presence of Hispanics in Macon, and the fact that its downtown has benefited from investment and improvements in the last few years, made her see the need to offer activities for Hispanic individuals to enjoy downtown and reconnect with their roots while connecting with others.

Laura is pregnant (baby Mato is due in May!), but it has not stopped her from implementing her project. If her health allows, she expects to implement all her project activities by April 2025.

Follow the project @maconparatodos #MaconParaTodos