About
The CBA is a 501-C3 non-profit organization that supports the professionals who engage the community to transform public spaces. Our members have developed the special expertise necessary to lead community volunteers to professional results in a variety of contexts. We place equal value on high quality work and the broad involvement of community participants. We are committed to promoting the development and education of the community built process as a professional practice.
The organization was formed in 1989 to provide a network for professionals and to offer information, education and training to the general public. The many years of experience our members have in building successful community built projects is a testimony to the effectiveness of this approach. Collectively, our work spans five continents. In fact, for almost 30 years, community built professionals have involved millions of participants in thousands of communities in creating successful community built projects!
Our Mission
Our mission is to further the theory and practice of involving community members in the design, organization, and creation of community projects that reshape the physical environment. We recognize the human need for connectedness and are committed to the positive value of communities creating and strengthening themselves through cultural action.
The CBA promotes the further development of the community-built practice, placing equal value on high quality and the broad involvement of community volunteers.
Board of Directors
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Sam Kornhauser
CBA Treasurer
Since founding Schoolworks with fellow architecture students at City College of New York in 1968, Sam Kornhauser has designed and built play and learning environments for children. Starting with a small grant to help parents and teachers create “Do-It-Ourselves” community day care centers, Schoolworks has worked to involve communities in designing and realizing their own visions in all the places kids inhabit, including classrooms, outdoor and indoor play places, museums, and health facilities. Sam’s life and work has led to a surprising career path on the outer edges of art and architecture, from the sewers of Pittsburgh to the streets of Harlem and the favelas of Brazil.
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Tom Arie Donch
Board Member
Tom Arie Donch has orchestrated hundreds of community projects in twenty one states over forty-three years. With a passion for learning and sharing the ingredients of successful community built events he has collaborated with over fifty community built association members and firms. His work has included parks, playgrounds, public sculpture, murals, nature trails, skateboard parks, school enhancements, low income housing projects, environmental projects, gardens and plazas. Currently Tom is lecturing on CBA work, mentoring and creating sculpture on social concerns.
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Dave Lowenstein
Board Member
Dave Loewenstein is a muralist, printmaker and writer based in Lawrence, Kansas. His community-based murals can be found across the United States, and in Northern Ireland, South Korea and Brazil. Loewenstein’s prints, which focus on social justice issues, are exhibited internationally and are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University, and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles. He is the co-author of Kansas Murals: A Traveler’s Guide, a 2007 Kansas Notable Book Award Winner, and is the subject of “Called to Walls,” a feature length documentary that premiered in 2016.
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Amber Hansen
Board Member, Past President
Amber Hansen is a muralist and visual artist who creates socially engaged and community-based artwork throughout the middle of the U.S. with Mural On the Wall (OTW). OTW’s core mission is to work with community members to create murals that capture the collective imagination of the place in which the mural will be located and encourages community participation, collaboration and mentorship. Hansen’s studio work is a dialogue between her formal education and her rural upbringing. She promotes creative engagement for all ages while raising questions about the ethics of animal welfare and human’s relationship with animals and food.
Hansen is the co-director & co-editor of the feature documentary Called to Walls. She is an Associate Professor at the University of South Dakota where she teaches painting and community-based public art.
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Howie Sneider
Board Member
Howie Sneider is a sculptor, community artist and serial-collaborator. His art-making often includes complex partnerships and perspectives. He was the long-time Executive Director of the Steel Yard in Providence, RI, and co-founder of the Public Projects Department. He has produced hundreds of site-specific, one-of-a-kind artworks, bike racks, benches, fences and other public amenities with deep connections to place and community.
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Sandra Kern Mollman
CBA Board President
Sandra Kern Mollman is a mother, life-partner, theatre maker, writer, musician, neuroplasticity-curious neurodivergent philosopher living near Vermillion, South Dakota. She is an adjunct theatre instructor at the University of South Dakota and a South Dakota Artist in Schools and Communities. Her practice explores how we use the artists’ tools and processes to create the real world. Sandra invites individuals to play in the cracks of our certainty to explore possibilities alive at the edges of what we know.
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José R Menéndez
Board Member
José R. Menéndez is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and Architecture at Northeastern. Co-founder of Buena Gráfica Social Studio, his practice spans landscape architecture, marine science communication, and typography to design environmental wayfinding campaigns, public spatial interventions, and the curation and activation of Gráfica Latina.
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Jessica Hammond
Board Member
Jessica Hammond (Brutal Doodles) is an artist, musician, and community organizer from Sioux City, Iowa. She serves on the board of directors for Vangarde Arts, a non-profit art and music venue, along with the CBA. She also volunteers on local festival planning committees including the Alley Art Festival and the Gallery in the Skywalk Art Festival. From community-based mural projects, to planning street art festivals, Jessica has helped facilitate over 120 public artworks in the Sioux City area since 2019.
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Cy Wagoner
Board Member
Cy Wagoner has 20 years of collaborative experience and is a Creative Resistance Coordinator with the NDN Collective. His background in arts activism has always been rooted in a community's expression of visual arts and storytelling. He started out managing an art collective that focused on youth mentorship before working full-time as a trainer coordinator for large organizations across the country as well as sitting on the board for Indigenous People Power Project. Cy feels honored to combine the expression of wellness through artistic resistance which always includes the voice of a community's youth. Cy's early background as a teacher informs his continued dedication to engaging youth in building their voice and skills to continue to fight for a better future. He believes that the future is in the hands of our youth. It is our responsibility to support the youth in creatively expressing their vision of a just and healthy world. Art has always been land and people together. When you no longer live with land, you will be changed. Art does change people.
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Carmelo Castro-Netsky
CBA Board Secretary
Carmelo Castro-Netsky lives and works in Berkeley, California as an art teacher facilitator. Currently collaborating and co-creating with neurodivergent adults living with a range of accessibility needs. Together they find themselves developing art curriculums by imagining and realizing special projects that combine community building with art making.
As a multidisciplinary artists, facilitator, and wilderness guide he enjoys collaborative projects that bridge connections between communities and organizations, individuals and organisms - blossoming mutualistic relationships rooted in agency, empowerment, accessibility and resilience. All in the name of creating safe spaces that allow for an uncovering of individual liberation connecting back to our collective liberation.
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Jeff Mather
Board Member
Jeff Mather is an Atlanta-based community-based public artist and environmental sculptor and interdisciplinary teaching artist. He is the STEAM Artist in Residence at Drew Charter School. He is the lead artist for the BTS Arts Access program in Utah. His public art projects are always collaborations with other artists and community members. A member of Alternate ROOTS since 1992, he has had several of his community-based public art projects funded by ROOTS' Community/Artist Partnership Program.
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Elliza Mollman
Board Member
Elliza Mollman is in the process of moving from Silver City, New Mexico to Albuquerque to attend the University of New Mexico as a theatre major. She is a community-focused creator who shapes relationships and community through theatre, music, sewing, cooking, and more. Elliza was selected to participate in the 2022 Creative Community Leadership Institute, which led her to create The Mending Circle, a gathering space to practice mending while exploring slow fashion, sustainability, justice, and other issues of consumption and capitalism.
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Bianca Ferro