Grinnell College has announced Antionette Priscilla Carroll as its 2026 social innovator in residence, a seven-week fall residency that brings an outside practitioner to campus to work alongside students, faculty and the broader Grinnell community on a project tied to their ongoing work.
Carroll, founder of CRX Lab based in St. Louis, was selected for her approach to redesigning systems by centering the voices of those most affected by the challenges those systems produce. Her work departs from conventional design thinking, which has traditionally placed decision-makers at the helm of community processes, often consulting affected communities only after the framework for change has already been established.
Vicki Nolton, assistant director for Social Innovation Partnerships and Education at the Center for Careers, Life, and Service and a member of the selection committee, said Carroll’s practice stood out for how fundamentally it reorients who holds power in a design process.
“Traditional design thinking has often been folks who are in the place of more power or decision making,” Nolton said. “Antionette is very much coming alongside the folks who are most impacted by the challenges and redesigning that process so that those folks have more voice, more power and are true co-creators.”
Nolton said what impressed the committee was how broadly applicable that approach is.
“Everyone is always in some kind of situation where a challenge is affecting them, but they oftentimes don’t feel heard or they’re patronized within the process,” she said. “And so then there isn’t true agency for those folks.”
A central focus of Carroll’s residency will be trust, which Nolton described as an “invisible but essential part of the infrastructure that’s needed for change making.”
Nolton said Carroll has identified three areas she wants to engage during her time at Grinnell — government, education and spiritual communities — and that the arts will also feature prominently in how Carroll works and communicates. Carroll has done extensive work with youth as well, and Nolton said young people’s voices are expected to be part of the residency’s design.
“She definitely wants to connect with all of our arts folks, both on campus and community, because that’s also part of her method of working through her process,” Nolton said. “Youth are obviously very affected by the challenges, and it also helps train or prepare them for being part of that process in a co-creative way.”
Carroll will arrive on campus next week for a planning visit before her full residency begins in mid-September and runs through late October or early November. Student worker positions are expected to involve event facilitation and co-creative work between campus and community. Nolton said students drawn to the position should care about social justice work and approach it with an open mind.
“I anticipate that it would be a blend of some kind of co-creative work between campus and community, probably arts too,” she said.
This is the second year Nolton has stewarded the social innovator in residence program, which was inaugurated by Monica Sanders. The experience has sharpened her sense of what the residency can realistically hold. Nolton said all of the innovators who have come through are big dreamers, and that one of the ongoing challenges is helping them whittle down their ambitions to fit a seven-week window while still protecting time for the rest and reflection the residency is also designed to provide.
“A lot of these folks have a hard time slowing down,” she said. “We want to make sure that we build that in, in some kind of structure.”
The residency carries a $30,000 honorarium awarded at the start, a $20,000 stipend for work completed during the seven weeks and between $20,000 and $25,000 in operating funds Carroll may direct toward her project, events and community engagement efforts.
