We do outreach and serve as a sounding board to identify needs and bring together the people and resources to fill them.

We don’t have one! We are here to support and share information about the vision that emerges from our outreach efforts and the CREATESTATE process. This vision is coming to life as we speak, encompassing a wide range of ideas from stakeholders, including residents, business owners and organizations.

Beyond the success of the parklet project and the community conversation series, we are so excited by the way we are already seeing community ties being built and strengthened. We love feeling the buzz and seeing the spontaneous cooperation that’s emerging as people forge new connections.

This is a community that takes pride and takes ownership, and the community will always be the heart of State Street.

To be sure, there are challenges ahead on many fronts, and this will take time. We are working to support a State Street that delights people now and has a foundation to grow for the generations to come.

The people are the fabric of this city. We are here to support that sense of ownership and help build on that momentum, because we live and work here.

While we collect and disburse donations like a foundation and bring together community stakeholders like a business improvement district, our role is unique.

We serve as a layer of support and connection, bridging gaps between the city’s processes and the needs of local businesses and community organizations.

We are being mentored by the NYC Highline Network who have shared best practices and toolkits from their group of infrastructure reuse projects and the people who are helping make them come to life.

When downtown businesses needed to paint their parklets to stay in compliance with city regulations, we partnered with Downtown Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Department of Public Works, started with working with SBCC students from the Construction and Design Technology class to help measure every single outdoor dining structure.

We then brought in Benjamin Moore to donate paint and community volunteers to get the job done -painting 14 parklets all in one morning. We tracked down the specific paint colors required for outdoor trim specified by the Santa Barbara urban historian, and posted the information on our website for businesses.

The relationship we’ve established with Santa Barbara Paint Depot now enables local businesses to find the approved paint colors easily at a reasonable cost. In short, we are ready and willing to do the legwork that helps local businesses and organizations have more time to focus on what they do best.

We also initiated and sponsored a regular conversation series with City State Street Planner Tess Harris. These sessions are tailored to local stakeholder groups to ensure that everyone has a chance to make their voice heard in a focused, small-group setting.