While at Glass House Collective, Teal Thibaud and her team created an How-To Guide as an instruction manual for residents to work with neighbors on temporary projects. The guide was designed to encourage local artists to collaborate with residents to inspire renewal in the neighborhood.

GHC produced two guides, in 2013 and 2015, with a total of 19 projects to connect and beautify the community. In addition to step-by-step directions and sketches, the guides also list supplies, costs, time frames, and necessary collaborators for each individual project. Community banners, pop-up shops, movie nights, bike repair stations, and wayfinding signage are a few of the projects included in the guides. Each tactic addressed a need previously identified through community engagement.

At the heart of the guide is the belief that the most direct route to creating a new place, a new story, is to empower artists to co-create that place one-on-one with the folks who live, work and play in that place. Each tactic in the “How-to Guide” was executed from the bottom-up by a resident and artist team with the intent of making Glass Street cleaner, safer and more inviting.

The How-to Guide was displayed in the NYC Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum as a part of the exhibit “By the People: Designing a Better America” in 2017.