In 2011, FIERCE, Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment, a member based organization that works with LGBTQ youth of color, was working to develop a 24 hour youth drop in center in the West Village in a campaign called “Our Spot.” To help facilitate an engagment process HST worked with FIERCE to create an outreach tool, the Pop-Up “Our Spot” Center to help FIERCE engage LGBTQ youth at open spaces serving as both an advocacy tool, and a mobile home base to gather input for the design of the community center. The result was a lightweight push-cart where community members could express their needs and ideas about the potential locations, resources, and programming of the community center. The pushcart was used in and around the West Village, and the collected ideas and oral histories to understand what the young people FIERCE serves would need in a drop-in center, and to inform the design of a center.
Two years later FIERCE’s campaign goals shifted away from developing a physical center. HST worked with FIERCE to retool the Pop-Up center for their Know Your Rights campaign to help engage young people around police harassment and the Stop and Frisk law that disproportionately was affecting youth of color.