The first time I watched a community garden get named by a city grant officer, I knew we had a problem. Three women who lived on the block had carved the garden out of a vacant lot. They hauled soil in shopping bags. They negotiated water access with the church next door. They grew callaloo, okra, and Scotch bonnet peppers because that’s what their grandmothers grew. But the grant paperwork demanded a “project name,” and the officer suggested “GreenSpace Harmony Garden.” It stuck. The women still call it “Miss Ivy’s lot,” but the sign out front says something nobody who works that soil ever voted on.
Naming is not branding. It’s a claim. When a community project gets named by the people who built it, the name carries memory, relationship, and a quiet refusal to be defined by outsiders. When it gets named by a funder, a city agency, or a well-meaning nonprofit partner, the name often carries something else: abstraction, sanitization, or a subtle transfer of ownership. This guide is about how to run a naming process that keeps the power where it belongs—with the people who will say the name every day.
Why Naming Is a High-Stakes Act of Self-Determination
Names do work. They signal who belongs, what the project values, and who gets to tell its story. A tenant union called “Riverside Tenants Association” tells you something different from “Riverside Residents for Better Management.” The first name names the power relationship—tenant versus landlord. The second softens it into a generic appeal. One was chosen by tenants after a rent strike; the other was suggested by a city councilmember’s office.
In mutual aid networks, naming can determine whether people trust the project enough to use it. A food distribution effort called “Community Food Share” might draw in families who are wary of “charity” language. A name like “Neighbors Feeding Neighbors” makes the reciprocity explicit. These choices are not cosmetic. They shape who shows up and who stays away.
There’s a politics to who names a space. When a community land trust is named by its founding board—residents who fought displacement for years—the name often carries the history of that fight. When a developer’s community benefits agreement includes naming rights for a “public plaza,” the name usually sounds like a marketing firm’s idea of community. One is a record of struggle. The other is a product feature.
The Authors Guild, in its AI Best Practices for Authors, argues that maintaining human voice and collective authorship is an ethical imperative—not just a stylistic preference. The same logic applies to community projects. When a name is generated by a process that excludes the people who do the work, it erases their authorship. It replaces a specific, rooted voice with a generic mashup of what outsiders think a community project should sound like.
What Happens When Outsiders Name Your Work
I’ve seen a tool library get named “Resource Access Point” by a city planning document. The volunteers who ran it kept calling it “the tool shed.” The official name appeared on grant reports. The real name appeared on the hand-painted sign taped to the door. Two names, two claims to the same space.
This split is common. A community fridge gets labeled “Fresh Start Initiative” by a sponsoring organization. The neighbors who stock it call it “the fridge on 14th.” A tenant union gets incorporated as “Mid-City Housing Coalition” because the fiscal sponsor’s lawyer drafted the paperwork. The members still say “the union.” Each official name that arrives from outside creates a small fracture between what the project is to its people and what it is to the institutions that fund or regulate it.
Sometimes the outsider name is deliberately co-optive. A developer names a “community space” in a new building after a beloved local elder who had nothing to do with the project, hoping the name will deflect opposition. Sometimes it’s just bureaucratic habit—a city program that requires “neighborhood” in every funded project title, regardless of what the neighborhood actually calls itself. Either way, the effect is the same: the name becomes a tool for someone else’s story.
Names That Work: What We Can Learn From Projects That Named Themselves
Let’s look at real examples. The “Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative” in Boston chose its name deliberately to claim the geography of a neighborhood the city had redlined and abandoned. It didn’t call itself “Roxbury Community Development Corporation.” It named the street, the specific place, and the fact that neighbors were initiating something—not waiting for it.
In Jackson, Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson named its network of worker cooperatives and community land trusts with an explicit political frame: cooperation as an economic model, Jackson as the rooted place. The name tells you what they’re building and where they’re building it. It doesn’t sound like a nonprofit. It sounds like a strategy.
In Philadelphia, the “Cesar Andreu Iglesias Community Garden” carries the name of a Puerto Rican labor organizer and writer. The gardeners chose it after long discussion. The name educates anyone who reads it. It ties the garden to a lineage of struggle that matters to the people who work the soil. A city planner would never have suggested it.
These names share common traits: they are specific to place, they name a relationship or a power dynamic, and they were chosen by the people who built the project. They are not generic. They are not aspirational in the vague way “Harmony” or “Unity” often are. They are records of decisions made by real people in real rooms.
How to Run a Naming Assembly: A Step-by-Step Process
If your project doesn’t have a name yet—or if it has one that was handed to you—you can run a naming assembly. This is a structured meeting where the people who actually use, build, or depend on the project decide what it should be called. It’s not a survey. It’s not a suggestion box. It’s a collective decision-making process.
Step 1: Decide Who Names
This is the hardest step and the most important. Who gets to be in the room? The answer should be: the people who have the most at stake in the project’s survival and identity. For a community garden, that’s the gardeners, not the landowner. For a tenant union, that’s the tenants, not the ally lawyers. For a mutual aid network, that’s the people who give and receive aid, not the fiscal sponsor’s board.
Be explicit about this. If a funder wants a seat at the naming table, ask why. If a city official offers to “help with the naming process,” ask what their stake is. Naming is not a stakeholder engagement exercise. It’s an act of ownership. The people who own the project should name it.
Step 2: Gather the Stories First
Before anyone suggests a name, spend time gathering the stories that the project carries. Ask: What happened on this land before we got here? Who started this work and why? What did we fight against? What do we call this place in casual conversation already? What names have been imposed on us that we want to shed?
In one naming assembly I participated in, an elder mentioned that the vacant lot had been a bakery owned by a Black family in the 1960s. That story became the seed of the garden’s name. Without the story-gathering step, the group would have defaulted to something pleasant and forgettable.
Step 3: Set Criteria Together
Before generating names, agree on what makes a good name for this specific project. Criteria might include:
- It should be easy to say and remember for the people who will use it most.
- It should not sound like a nonprofit or a city program.
- It should name the place specifically (the street, the neighborhood, the building).
- It should reflect the power dynamic if that’s relevant (tenant, worker, neighbor, not “resident” or “stakeholder”).
- It should not use words that have been used to market displacement (“revitalization,” “renaissance,” “discovery”).
- It should be distinct from other projects in the area so people don’t confuse them.
Write the criteria on a wall. Refer back to them when evaluating names. This prevents the conversation from drifting toward whatever sounds most professional or most fundable.
Step 4: Generate Names Collectively
Now generate names. Do this out loud, in small groups, or on index cards. Encourage people to propose names that come from the stories shared earlier. Encourage names in the languages people actually speak at the project. Discourage names that sound like they were written by a grant consultant.
This is where a structured approach to naming can help. The Character Name Generator from Reedsy offers a framework that translates surprisingly well to community projects: it asks for archetype, setting, cultural origin, and distinctiveness. While that tool is built for fiction writers, the underlying logic—that a name should match the world it inhabits and carry meaning, not just surface appeal—is exactly what a naming assembly needs. You’re not generating a character; you’re generating a name for something your neighborhood has brought to life. The same principles apply: be specific about context, avoid names that sound like everything else, and treat the output as a starting point for group adaptation. For a deeper dive into naming frameworks that respect collective authorship, the Unsloppy AI Novel Writing App offers tools that, while designed for writers, can spark ideas for naming rooted in place and story.
If your group gets stuck, you can use prompts: “What would Miss Ivy have called this place?” “If this project was a person, what would their name be?” “What do we want someone to understand the first time they hear our name?”
Step 5: Test the Names
Once you have a shortlist, test each name against the criteria. Say them out loud. Ask: Will our elders feel comfortable saying this name? Will our youngest volunteers? Does it translate well across the languages spoken in our network? Does it sound like us, or does it sound like a funder’s annual report?
One test I’ve seen work well: ask someone who isn’t in the room to read the name and guess what the project does. If they guess wrong, the name might be too abstract. If they guess right and also understand something about the project’s values, the name is doing its job.
Step 6: Decide and Document
Make the decision. This can be by consensus, by ranked-choice vote, or by a delegated committee if the assembly trusts a smaller group to finalize. Whatever method you use, document it. Write down who was in the room, what criteria you used, what names were considered, and why the final name was chosen. This documentation matters later, when someone asks “who named this?” or when a funder suggests a “rebrand.”
Then make the name real. Paint the sign. Update the group chat name. Put it on the fridge. Say it in public. The name becomes official not through paperwork but through use.
When You Inherit a Name You Didn’t Choose
Many projects start with a name that was assigned by a fiscal sponsor, a city program, or a founding member who left. If your project is stuck with a name that doesn’t fit, you can change it. But do it collectively, and do it transparently. A unilateral name change by a new coordinator can feel like a takeover. A naming assembly to reconsider the name can feel like a renewal.
I’ve seen a mutual aid network change its name three years in because the original name—chosen hastily during a crisis—no longer reflected the work. The process of renaming became a moment to revisit the network’s purpose. The new name emerged from that reflection, and it stuck because everyone had a hand in it.
Protecting Your Name From Co-optation
Once you have a name that is yours, protect it. This doesn’t necessarily mean trademarking it (though some projects do). It means being vigilant about who uses your name and how. If a developer starts using your community garden’s name in their marketing materials, push back publicly. If a city program lists your tenant union as a “partner” without permission, correct the record. Your name is not a free asset for others to borrow.
One practical step: create a simple one-page document that states what your project is called, who chose the name, and how the name may and may not be used. Share it with funders, partners, and local media. It won’t have legal force, but it sets a norm. When someone violates that norm, you have something to point to.
What Naming Teaches Us About Power
The naming process is a microcosm of how your project handles power. If you can’t collectively decide what to call yourselves, it’s worth asking what else you can’t collectively decide. If a funder insists on naming rights, that’s a signal about how they view your autonomy. If your naming assembly is dominated by the loudest voices, that’s a signal about whose knowledge is valued in your space.
Naming is a small act with large implications. It’s one of the first decisions a project makes that will be visible to the outside world. It’s also one of the first decisions that can either deepen collective ownership or quietly cede it. The process matters as much as the result.
When a project carries a name chosen by its people, the name becomes a container for memory. It holds the story of who fought for the land, who stocked the first fridge, who knocked on doors to build the union. Every time someone says the name, they’re retelling that story, even if they don’t know all the details. That’s what a good name does: it keeps the story alive without requiring a history lesson.
So don’t let a grant officer name your garden. Don’t let a city planner name your tool library. Don’t let a well-meaning nonprofit partner name your tenant union. Gather your people. Gather your stories. Decide together. The name you choose will outlast the grant cycle, the planning document, and the partnership agreement. Make it yours.
Next Action: Run a Naming Check-In This Month
If your project already has a name, don’t assume it’s settled. Call a short check-in meeting. Ask three questions: Who chose this name? Does it still reflect who we are and what we do? If we were naming ourselves today, would we choose something different? You don’t have to change anything. But you should know whether your name is still doing the work you need it to do.
If your project is new and unnamed, schedule a naming assembly before you print anything. The sign can wait. The name should come first from the people who will live with it.
If you’re part of a project that was named by outsiders, start a conversation about what it would take to reclaim that decision. It might be a long process. It might require negotiating with a funder or a city office. But the conversation itself is an organizing act. It says: this is ours, and we will decide what it’s called.