The future of creativity in Sacramento.

Admittedly, as the primary voice of the CCC, I’ve been a little absent in my posts here lately, due in part to my busy work schedule, but also because I’ve been transforming my design studio and the nature of the work that I do in the Sacramento region. If you don’t already know, I’ve recently partnered with a talented young woman by the name of Barb Hennelly and created a new business. Barb’s the voice and visionary behind Kidaround Magazine, a local publication geared towards modern moms and she’s a living breathing example of what I’m all about. Find a market and fill it, and she’s done so very well. After many conversations, Barb and I discovered that there was a void in the local creative marketplace for incubatory design firms and we felt that we had an obligation to fill that void and change the way Sacramento uses creativity and design to reshape the lifestyle experience in the capital city.

So we started Romp Creative, “a playground for ideas & business” which is a full service design studio and creative incubator. We wanted to use Romp as a way to help catalyze business development and creative events around the Sacramento region. We believe that Sacramento is ripe with opportunity for innovation and cultural advancement rooted in sound design thinking and entrepreneurial passion. So we’ve been actively promoting this manifesto at events like our Designer Pint Nights, the UDA design dialogues and Pecha Kucha night. It became quickly apparent that we weren’t the only ones thinking this way. Local organizations like the American Institue of Architecture, the Urban Design Alliance, Valley Vision, Midtown Business Association, The Urban Hive, Capsity Offices, the Landmark Forum, Pecha Kucha and several others have been working on collaborative spaces, community centered design, public art projects, leadership training and design competitions just to name a few. A few key individuals like myself have been working diligently to launch new events like these, and business projects that seek to redefine the landscape of Sacramento’s urban core and its surrounding areas with a more far reaching sense of possibility.

The one theme that seemed to keep surfacing in all these happenings was imagination. If we can imagine a brighter, more active and vibrant Sacramento, we can make it a reality. It recent months, i’ve had literally dozens of conversations about the future of Sacramento and how creativity plays such a vital role in shaping it’s outcome. I’ve met local architects, designers, entrepreneurs and students that are desperately trying to build a ground swell of energy and enthusiasm around their ideas so that we might all reap the  benefits of this more lively metropolis.

In our own attempt in at radical change at the street level, The Capital Creative Collective held the first ever live design battle at the MARRS building in May with both great success and support. We’re currently planning our next one and several other events that we hope will have a huge impact on the future of Sacramento. In addition to that, we’re redesigning the CCC’s primary website and blog for more indepth experience. I’ll also be speaking at several events over the next few months, with many of my peers and elaborating on my vision for Sacramento in the years to come. I’ve also recently joined a marketing committee for SARTA’s Medstart program to launch a new event series for them, hoping to foster more growth in the medical startup sector. The CCC is also partnering with several local design institutions to further promote our program and theirs. It’s all part of our efforts to build relationships and ignite the creative process in our community.

The Capital Creative Collective has been a way to take all these organizations, individuals and ideas and gather them in one place to provide a single marketplace for collaboration and connectivity for Sacramento and beyond. It is my belief that the goal of the CCC is to gather all the great thinkers of Sacramento and put them into one concise resource that allows us to discover, interact and get involved with them, in new and innovative ways that push Sacramento further into the future and with greater success in each and every instance. Much like Architeture for Humanity, we believe good design is a basic human right. Do you?