Last week, some 1,000 members of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) gathered in New York for the organization’s 47th annual conference. Titled Believe the Hype: A Global Collective of Industry Change Agents, the program attracted nearly all of NOMA’s 1,300 professionals—and about half of all licensed African-American architects in the United States. Across the 100+ events, the conversation focused on strategies for recruiting the next generation of professionals.
The low number of licensed African-American architects—which has hovered around two percent of the industry total for three decades—is the biggest issue NOMA is facing. The organization’s president, Kimberly Dowdell, a principal in the Chicago office of HOK, used her conference address to outline an ambitious plan to double the number of licensed black architects from 2,300 to around 5,000 by 2030. (The AIA’s Large Firm Roundtable is supporting these efforts, as large practices in general seek to diversify.) Dowdell’s Access, Leadership, and Legacy (ALL) platform calls for bolstering NOMA’s existing Project Pipeline Camps, which introduce design training and the idea of becoming an architect to children as young as kindergarteners, as well as adding a new Foundation Fellowship program to place students from accredited undergraduate or graduate architecture programs in 12-week paid internships in firms, and subsidizing their housing, travel, and licensure exam fees.
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