People's Emergency Center (PEC) nurtures families, strengthens neighborhoods, and drives change. We concentrate our efforts on providing supportive services to homeless women and their children. Through our comprehensive, strategic approach to neighborhood revitalization, which builds upon neighborhood assets and responds directly to the needs of the community, PEC works to transform the West Powelton, Saunders Park, and Mantua neighborhoods into a "Community of Choice"--a community in which people choose to live, work, and thrive. Over the past 15 years, PEC has transformed these neighborhoods by renovating more than 100 blighted properties into nearly 200 units of affordable housing, four social service facilities, and a community playground. Through its financial literacy seminars, PEC has helped more than 150 community residents improve their financial awareness. With the Digital Inclusion Program, PEC has provided computers, training, internet access, and technical support to more than 200 low-income residents and has offered dozens of teens and sixth graders on-line scholastic tutorials and computer training.

Slought Foundation ('Sl-aw-t') works with communities in intimate and participatory ways, exploring new forms of practice. Culture means more than just preservation or presentation to us; it means the exchange of ideas, the creation of concepts. As a grass-roots nonprofit institution, we value agility and the experimental disposition. We have presented exhibitions and educational programs internationally and in Philadelphia, operating at the forefront of curatorial innovation. Our recent selection by the U.S. Department of State to represent the United States at La Biennale di Venezia (2008) was an honor for our small West Philadelphia organization and recognizes a new spirit of community activism and inclusiveness across the country. We collaborate with leading artists and architects in an intimate and participatory environment to engage the particular issues and challenges our communities face today, and we envision our activities as a bridge between different socio-economic and cultural communities.

Estudio Teddy Cruz is a research-based architectural studio. The studio's work often explores the dynamics of urban conflict on both sides of the United States-Mexico border, from the affluence north of San Diego to homelessness and neglect in Tijuana, Mexico. Cruz has been recognized internationally, in collaboration with community-based non-profit organizations such as Casa Familiar, for his work on housing and its relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs. Following his graduation from the Harvard GSD and the establishment of his practice in 2000, Principal Teddy Cruz received the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome and was the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize by the Canadian Center of Architecture and the London School of Economics. He currently serves as an Associate Professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at University of California at San Diego.