Johanna Richards is the Community Engagement Program Manager for the Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center for ASU @ Mesa City Center. She works to connect the people, institutions, and organizations of Mesa communities with the MIX Center and to ground the MIX Center in the Mesa community.
Johanna was a reluctant Arizona resident now rooted in Mesa. A six-month Asset-Based Community Development project in 2015 introduced her to people who care deeply about the place they live, working to see it flourish. They welcomed her into the various histories and communities of Mesa. She is heavily involved in the arts and development community of downtown Mesa and the Broadway Corridor.
Her 18+ years of social service and community engagement experience includes work in Missouri, Kyrgyzstan, and Arizona. She has worked with parents navigating the child welfare system, helped families strengthen their support networks, developed community health education programs with at-risk women, and co-run a neighborhood community center. She currently serves on the City of Mesa Housing and Community Development Advisory Board, the RAIL Community Development Corporation Board, at Paz de Cristo, and as part of Missio Dei Communities Mesa. She formerly served on the Mesa Arts Center’s Creative Catalyst Committee and as a lead project artist for the Mesa Prototyping Project.
“A community is not merely a condition of physical proximity no matter how admirable the layout….[but] the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives.” –Wendell Berry
“Far from an exclusive circle, membership in [a community] comes to mean…the grateful inclusion of any who live in devotion to the wellbeing of the town and it’s environs. The membership isn’t self-appointed. But it is self-identifying. Those who are devoted to the place recognize one another by their mutual inclinations and sacrificial practices.” -Eric Miller