Claire de Mézerville López welcomes Deanna Van Buren and Adrienne Hogg to the Restorative Works! Podcast.
We are joined by Deanna Van Buren, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS), and Adrienne Hogg, Co-Executive Director of Community Works. Together, we explore how spaces, rooms, buildings, and environments in which we gather directly shape our nervous systems, our sense of dignity, and our ability to repair harm. Deanna reframes "trauma-informed design" as designing for well-being, offering a body–mind–spirit lens on how spaces can regulate, inspire, and care for us. Adrienne shares how Community Works brings this philosophy to life by creating warm, culturally rooted, non-institutional spaces where young people, survivors, families, and staff feel seen, grounded, and capable of restoration.
From reimagining classroom design in higher education to redefining what justice spaces can communicate, the conversation weaves together architecture, community wisdom, creative practice, and systems change. Both guests illuminate how co-designing that deeply involves communities, including those most impacted by harm, becomes its own restorative practice.
Deanna Van Buren is the co-founder and executive director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces. An architecture and real estate nonprofit working to end mass incarceration through place-based solutions, DJDS builds infrastructure that addresses its root causes: poverty, racism, unequal access to resources, and the criminal justice system itself. Van Buren has been profiled by The New York Times and has written op-eds on the intersection of design and mass incarceration in outlets such as Politico, Architectural Record, and Stanford Social Innovation Review. Her TEDWomen talk on what a world without prisons could look like has been viewed more than one million times. She is the only architect to have been awarded the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist fellowship, and she is also the recipient of UC Berkeley's Berkeley-Rupp Architecture Prize and Professorship. Van Buren received her bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Virginia and her master's degree from Columbia University, and she is an alumna of the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.
Adrienne Hogg is co-executive director at Community Works. In this role, she focuses on finance, administration, and operations in addition to working with her co-executive director on strategic and development activities. Prior to joining Community Works, Adrienne founded Gather Locally, a startup e-commerce technology company. Before starting Gather Locally, Adrienne was the head of finance and controller for several public and private corporations in the life sciences and construction industries, where she managed accounting, finance, human resources, legal, and facilities. She is an Oakland native who received bachelor's and master's degrees from the UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business.
Tune in to learn more about how the spaces we build reflect the futures we believe in.
