Melody Gibson is the Education Director at the Civic Design Center where she developed the youth education programs Design Your Neighborhood (DYN) and the Nashville Youth Design Team (NYDT). After receiving a Bachelor's of Architecture at University of Tennessee, Melody developed her unique passion for empowering youth to help shape the spaces they inhabit when she taught high school math. She then pursued a Master of Arts in Curriculum and Instruction to deepen her interdisciplinary work of pre-college architecture and planning curriculum development.
Melody was a 2020 Nashville Emerging Leaders Award Finalist for her innovative work with DYN and NYDT. Melody was recently published as a contributing author to the Handbook on Participatory Action Research and Community Development where her work serves as a practical example of how communities are empowering themselves to bring about systemic change. Melody’s work addresses the need for diversity in design professions by exposing thousands of young people to design at a young age, which she additionally contributes to by serving on the AIA Tennessee Chapter’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee where she leads the Minority Licensure Scholarship program.
You can see more about Melody’s work in the blog post links below: