Between July 2024 and July 2025, the Lauer’s Park Neighborhood Plan brings together neighborhood residents, organizations, city government, and others to coordinate and catalog shared priorities for improving life for residents in this part of Reading. We will use this written plan to advocate and organize together for safer streets, quality affordable housing, good transportation, parks, local institutions, and more. Learn more about the plan here.

Upcoming: October 3, 2025: Lauer’s Park Neighborhood Plan: Exhibit & Celebration

September Block Party: Neighborhood Model Building

At the September 6th Ward Block Party, GoggleWorks artists introduced the plan to residents by collaborating to build a large-scale neighborhood model, having imaginative conversations, and documenting what we know about this place: who lives in the neighborhood and what important places and buildings we should know about.

Lauer’s Park Elementary School Neighborhood Arts Activities

Lauer’s Park students and teachers collaborated with teaching artists and designers from GoggleWorks Center for the Arts to study their neighborhood, then make art about it to share with neighbors. Building on the school’s ongoing curricula on civics, careers, and architecture, students create maps, drawings, photographs, and models to record their existing knowledge. They also discovered new things about the area surrounding their school, including houses, stores, factories, open spaces, streets and around 3,000 human beings! 

Photos below show Miss Freshley’s 2nd-grade class, during a 2-week curriculum titled “Who Lives & Works in this Neighborhood?” The students prepared and conducted interviews with A Reading teacher, artist, scientist, and police officer.

Lauer’s Park Elementary School Neighborhood Arts Activities

Lauer’s Park teachers and the project team collaborated to create and distribute over 600 copies of a 10-page activity book for every student at Lauer’s Park Elementary School to take home. Through drawing, writing, and diagramming activities, the book invited students to reflect on their daily lives, document what they see and understand about where they live, and engage with their parents on pressing neighborhood issues—including housing, public spaces, jobs, arts and culture, and more.

Download your copy of activity book here

See a selection of their work below. 

Pages from Lauer’s Park Elementary School Take-Home Family Activity Survey Packet

Cailin, 5; Kamron Cooley, 6, Charmayne Yancey, 7; Jairy, 8; Jodel, 10; Kailya (Dad); Deborah (Mom) ; Bryan Miguel Infante, 7

Small Group Conversations: Porch Parties 

The project team and resident outreach partners co-organized and co-facilitated small group conversations with neighbors. These lively discussions—typically in groups of five to ten, gathered around a café table with snacks and coffee—focused on current conditions and potential projects that residents and organizations could take on related to key neighborhood plan topics: parks, housing, jobs, arts and culture, and resident empowerment. Highlights from these meetings are summarized in our plan 

Neighborhood Conversation & Family Photo Day

The project team and Lauer’s Park Elementary School co-hosted an event to bring families together for group conversations about the neighborhood plan. Parents, students, neighbors, teachers, and community advocates were invited for an evening of shared discussion. The event included a community dinner and offered each family a free portrait taken by professional photographers.

Neighborhood Business Walkshops

Facilitated by the Berks County Latino Chamber of Commerce, the project team visited and held discussions with neighborhood business owners. Participants spoke about barriers to starting and growing small businesses, including challenges navigating city compliance processes, the need for business financing support, parking constraints, and improvements to public spaces to better serve pedestrian customers.

Neighborhood Conversation at Barrio Alegría

The project team partnered with resident outreach leaders at Barrio Alegría to reconvene past porch party participants and welcome new neighbors into the process. Facilitated through community theater and performance activities, residents discussed the power structures shaping their shared work and voiced frustrations, challenges, hopes, and visions for the neighborhood.

Here are just a few notes from participants, sharing their frustrations, challenges, hopes, and visions for the neighborhood