Community

Carnegie Innovation Hall is merely the vessel to hold and empower all that is Alameda. We plan to rejuvenate this beautiful building into a premiere event venue, meeting place, and center of innovation—but what will make it truly amazing are the people and their ideas. Community input is the essential component of our success.

We invite everyone in the community to co-create programming and services that will be ideally suited to the cultural, entertainment, and educational benefit of all of Alameda.

Interested in joining our Community Advisory Board? Contact us here.

Outreach and Diversity

Our community needfinding will begin with reflective teamwork using Liberatory Design, a complexity approach to designing for equity developed by the National Equity Project and Stanford d.school K12 Lab. As a founding team, we understand that the first step to a truly inclusive mindset is self-awareness, so we’ll first work to uncover our own biases and blind spots that may otherwise impede our ability to welcome our entire community.

Our next step will be to reach out to invite community members to share their needs and desires with us, and to invite them to actually be a part of building this unique innovation center. We want to engage early and often, and to be sure that we understand what our community values. What are the actual needs of individuals, families, small businesses, and schools? How can our project build on what makes our community great — and fulfill any needs our community feels are missing?

Our outreach will include a combination (or all) of the following: community workshops; meetings; surveys; direct mail; face-to-face engagement; and, a Community Advisory Board. We’ll reach out to existing Alameda organizations to invite members to offer input and be a part of our project-building process. Establishing a Community Advisory Board will allow our team to facilitate ongoing, regular input from key community representatives and organizations.

For more information, please download the slides (83mb) presented at the Community Meeting: Reuse & Restoration of the Carnegie Library on February 13, 2019.