About
Center for Community and Regional Design
CCRD is a regional leader in design strategies for the long-term future of Central New York (CNY), with the freedom and flexibility to explore unconventional approaches. We also work in regions outside of CNY where the planning and design needs are similar to our own. By staying abreast of current events shaping the region/world and national/international best practices, CCRD is a clearinghouse for planning and design exemplars.
Our Executive Director Dr. Margaret Bryant and Assistant Director Anukampa Freedom Gupta-Fonner operate within a community of committed faculty and accomplished students who have a passion for the transformative effects of good planning and design. Through CCRD, students work directly with community members in ways that enrich all participants. We pride ourselves on our ability to provide professional practice exposure and experience through our work.
Community strengthening and learning-by-doing are at the core of CCRD’s operating ethos. We are fueled by the passion of our students who have a relentlessness for learning and creating new knowledge. The combination of students and community members is powerful. For students, CCRD bridges the gap between formal education and future jobs, supporting career development while also benefitting our community partners.
Vision, Mission, and Values
Vision: We strive to improve the quality of people’s lives through community, spatial planning, design, and research.
Mission: We educate, innovate, and research to foster harmony, build community, and solve society’s most pressing public interest planning and design problems.
Values:
- Abundance: Our overarching goal is to increase the availability of resources to all with whom we work.
- Ingenuity: We believe in creating new knowledge and pathways of implementation through low-cost innovation.
- Empathy: Care, interconnectedness, and empathy are the core values that inform our worldview and how we design ecological, economic, and sociological systems.
- Nonpartisanship: We are guided by scientific rigor and intellectual honesty.
- Public interest: Through our actions, we advocate for policies, plans, and designs that serve the interests of people and ecological communities.
Our Team
M. Margaret Bryant, Ph.D.
Executive Director, CCRD
Associate Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture
Dr. Margaret Bryant brings a depth of experience to CCRD, having worked in urban and regional planning and landscape architecture for over 35 years in New York, Virginia, Georgia, and Massachusetts. Dr. Bryant is the former Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at SUNY ESF. She believes that the design process is a powerful way to see possible futures and that anyone can learn to employ it. Dr. Bryant began her career with work in regional planning agencies and multidisciplinary firms where her knowledge of ecological science and geographic information systems made her a valuable team member. She is an award-winning teacher and has devoted over 25 years to the education of landscape architecture students, something she sees as a special privilege and delight. Working with communities has been at the center of Dr. Bryant’s teaching career, with projects carried out in design studios and through work with graduate students. She is eager to build on her experience to establish CCRD as a premier source of planning and design support in the region, State of New York, and beyond.
Anukampa Freedom Gupta-Fonner, M.P.A.
Assistant Director, CCRD
Freedom is a Social Entrepreneur. She has deep experience in building regenerative and circular systems that democratize climate action. Over the last ten years, she has innovated to reduce waste, fight plastic pollution and build large scale systems of refillable, returnable, and reusable packaging with the vision to make trash history. For this work, she has earned patents on packaging design alongside recognition at the national level.
Prior to this, Freedom graduated with an M.P.A. at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. She started her career at civic engagement nonprofits, leading efforts in volunteer and stakeholder management, environmental revitalization, and community engagement.
Freedom brings the disciplines of innovation, community organizing, and project management to solving the most urgent environmental and public health challenges. Decisive action, efficiency, and compassion are hallmarks of her leadership. She believes, “people can change anything that they want to, and that means everything in the world.”
Freedom’s mission is to empower people through connection with the natural world. She is deeply passionate about creating spaces where humans and wildlife can co-habit.
At ESF, Freedom strives to serve, inspire, and walk the walk. At CCRD, Freedom’s vision is to co-create a fiscally sustainable organization that is rooted in integrity, public interest, and harmony.