Full transcription:
Tracy: In our last episode, aging and climate change expert Dr. Mick Smyer shared his vision for Graying Green, a movement that aims to engage more older adults and taking impactful action on climate change. Today, we introduce you to Sandra Kulli, a community architect dedicated to creating extraordinary places that focus on fostering human connection as she practices the business and art of placemaking. Sandra is an advocate of thoughtful design and innovative problem solving, starting her career as a teacher in a rich and vibrant inner-city school system. Over the years, Sandra has learned that community is local and personal. So in her work in your daily life, she's always looking to connect with others in a more meaningful way. Today, she shares her story and experiences with us, including her five steps for building a community’s well being.
Chris: Sandra, hello, and welcome to the show.
Sandra: Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Tracy.
Chris: A question to get started is if you're out at a dinner party and meet somebody new, how do you describe what you do for a living?
Sandra: Not well. It is always one of those, I can usually describe it well by speaking of a specific thing I'm working on rather than talk about what I do. Because there's something deeply intangible about the way in which we get to creating community in new places. And so it's almost as if it's exactly what we're doing with the community. It's as if you have to experience it, to understand it. And I've always felt one of the things that are so challenging for us, in new places, is previewing what life will be like before there's a community, and that's why I think I have a hard time describing it.
Tracy: Yeah, I feel like you described our challenge in a nutshell, as well. It's like, how do you apply design thinking to business or even to life? You have to experience a little bit of it before you know what that even means.
Chris: Sandra, I've often thought of you as is, if there are architects of physical places, and architects of roads and infrastructure, etc. I've always thought of you as the community architect, you know, the one that puts together the more of the emotive parts of a place. And Is that a fair? Is that a fair assessment? Can you correct me?
Sandra: I think that I am part of the team that does that. Yes, I think that's a very fair assessment. And of course, those things are done, not by a single person, but by a team of people. And usually, interestingly enough by the people who will be coming to live there, to buy a home there to visit there to go to school there. So it is an effort by a bunch of people. And then it's that whole thing that is intriguing in our business is how do you discern from what people say what they mean? And then what are the applications of those things in a real place? It's really fun actually.
Tracy: How did you get involved in this in the first place?
Sandra: I taught inner-city schools for seven years, I really loved the communities in which I worked, and found them to be rich and amazing and full of life and wonderful people. And when I left teaching and went into the development world, I realized I had learned so much from teaching school, and being in these neighborhoods and understanding the people whose kids were in my classroom, and what they ate for dinner and what they did for fun, that it seemed like a really easy next step, to take some of that same learning and apply it to new community development. It's just being observant of people and then seeing what brings them joy. And you can find that anywhere in the world. It cuts across all socio-economic groups.
Tracy: Love that you discovered that in inner-city neighborhoods where I feel like there's maybe a stereotype in those environments, that community isn't present, or it isn't valued. But it seems like in your experience, which is probably similar to so many people's experience that the opposite was true.
Sandra: It was massively true and really encouraging in terms of what public education can do. I think I've never left behind that notion of teaching. And Chris, that's probably what you and I've done together with groups of people when we're working on a place like Todo Santos or Asbury Park in New Jersey, it's understanding what's there. And having the insight to appreciate the things I mean, really listening to people, and hearing what brings them joy, the universals in the community can be old places or new places, we talked about the Happy Planet Index, where an economics professor in the UK was asked by the government, British Government to figure out what is it that brings people a sense of wellness and happiness. And he elicited from talking to a bunch of people all over the world, actually, that there were five things that make for great well being a great community, the first one was connect, the second one is be active, the third, take notice the fourth, keep learning and the fifth one is give, I have found in my work, that if we take these five components of well being and put them into a community, it's remarkable what kinds of inspiration, all the team players from the landscape architect, the architect, the people running the schools, the grocery stores, if they think with this as the construct, it is quite wonderful, what they will do with it. And the beauty of these five things is they're all free.
Chris: What are some examples where those five things are all firing in a very violent way and communities alive and well?
Sandra: I think of a couple of places two very different places. One's in Utah and the other ones in Boston and the cultures are very different in those two states. And all five things are vibrantly alive. That place in Salt Lake City is pretty interesting because it's a development by Rio Tinto, which is a mining company. And it was the land that was leftover, as they've been mining, to being a mine for over 100 years. And it's very rare that you would have mining in a first-world city, this close to downtown Salt Lake City. And what Rio Tinto did 12 years ago was thinking about what kind of community could we create in this place that would bring to life those five aspects of a great community and have people want to live here on smaller lots, with more expensive houses, and share resources in the open space to open public space. The schools in this particular community in Daybreak, the school has 18-hour years, not just as a school, but it's used seven days a week. And it's used for all kinds of things beyond teaching kids from eight to four. So it is a really beautifully integrated community that has, I was at the MIT Age Lab, and we were talking about this place. Because interestingly enough, whether you're eight years old, or you're 80 years old, Daybreak works well, for both groups. You don't need to drive to enjoy this place. It's a place where you can get around on foot. There's a train that takes you up to Salt Lake City. There are bike lanes, their community gardens, there's a little retail street that has everything you would want in it, including a barbershop, a one chair barbershop. And interestingly enough Kisco Senior Living has put a new community for independent living and, and assisted living right in the heart of Daybreak, the land instead of turning this land into a park. And they were very concerned about not getting too many people with children to come into their overcrowded school system. So we design the community to not engage big families. Nonetheless, we have families, but we have a lot of people who are boomers like me. And the contribution of the Pinehills to the town has been phenomenal. So again, it's like you create a new community, there's no boundary to the community. When we create new places, they are joined with the old places that were there before them. And in both Utah and in Massachusetts, these five things are really valued enormously by both sets of people who live there.
Tracy: How do you integrate the two? So obviously, the new is a little bit easier because you know who you're designing for. But how do you pave the way for the old community to feel comfortable with this new path forward?
Sandra: We use food. I know we're all in the farm to table notion of food and craft food and healthy food. And we're very concerned about food being an important part of our communities. We have found that if we bring people together over food, it could be a soup, it could be a potluck dinner, where people bring the food, it can be something hosted by a local farmer, if we bring together people who live in our community, or might be coming to live in the community, with people who are already a part of Plymouth, or already a part of Salt Lake City. And we sit and have what we call dinners and conversations with no specific questions about, do you want a four-bedroom house, do you want a K-8 school, but rather a dinner, where people talk together about what's important to them. It is a very connecting experience that brings all the new community together. In the case of the Pinehills, we thought about putting a market into the community after it was about eight years old. And we did a series of dinners and conversations with people who lived in Plymouth, people lived in the Pinehills, people lived in other parts of the South Shore and found universal agreement about what they would want in a market. And we built this tiny little market 13,500 square feet, we were worried we didn't have enough people to come to it. And it has been a phenomenal success. Because we listened to the people who were going to come to the market and we created a market where the butcher knows their name, where their tips on healthy eating, where we put it right next to the wine store so they could grab a bottle of wine. And it has just become a regional magnet. Far beyond the Pinehills.
Chris: Sandra with it as we talk about successful communities, what are examples out there of things people have done either through their behaviors or through the design that are guaranteed community killers?
Sandra: Things you'll hear people complaining about, that, unfortunately, may not exactly kill the community, but certainly make it diminished is this notion of cookie cutter. And the idea that there's a formula that can be applied without listening to what the local desires are. So if people feel something has come into their community, that is a foreign body, they will resist it. And they will work against it. And they will even make up stories about why it's a bad place. So it would be a tone deaf developer, creating a community that he might see as wonderful. Let's just give an example of a builder who just got back from visiting Brittany and decided all the architectures should be like a French country. In New Mexico, that probably wouldn't be the right architectural design. So that would be a community killer. I think sometimes we don't create ways for people to communicate within the community. So if we haven't set up an association that brings people together regularly when it's new, they will be siloed and you know, go in their garage and not see their neighbors.
Tracy: So I'm curious in these communities, they're planned, there's sort of leadership around it, there are associations. I live in San Francisco and I live in a pretty neighborhood but there's no real leadership guiding us forward. And I'm wondering, as somebody who doesn't have that in their neighborhood, or maybe even is a renter or transient, not sure how long they're going to be there, how does somebody connect to those around them in an easier way?
Sandra Actually, in San Francisco I saw a really incredible thing where it was through art, somebody was doing an art project in an open space pop up gallery that engaged the community with a question, I think they were looking for an additional green base in their little neighborhoods, the artist passed out flyers and invited people to come. I think that shared interests sometimes are the way to connect, I would say your coffee shop, I just finished reading Patti Smith's book on M train. And the power of a coffee shop is pretty remarkable in terms of convening the community. And then almost all cities have some kind of community outreach, and neighborhood council or with technology, it's pretty easy to find people in your neighborhood who might share your interests. So I think actually, it's probably easier than it's ever been. I don't know, have you done it in your neighborhood?
Tracy: No, it's interesting. There's one thing that is kind of really the neighborhood, there's a little garden called Little City Gardens, and it's the only urban garden in San Francisco, there was an empty lot just on the street next door to me. And a few years ago, a couple of gardeners were like, hey, we want to turn this into something and the owner leased the property to them to do so just recently, the property was sold to school. And they initially were going to build, you know, like a lower school and incorporate the garden into their plans. And then once they got the land, they submitted plans, and they were completely different and really took over the whole space, there's no space for the garden. And you know, the concerns in the neighborhood are that it's going to increase traffic on a one way street. And it's in a flood zone. And so that's not great and, and some neighbors just sort of spontaneously started this save the farm campaign. And all they did was passed out eight and a half by 11 sheets of printed paper yellow that say save the farm. And almost all of the neighbors have put them up in their windows to show support. And I loved the spirit of that it was so simple. I mean, it shows the value of this tiny little property that had been an empty lot. For years, it was kind of an eyesore, that people cared enough about it and felt compelled to want to continue incorporating it into our community. And I don't think that anyone is anti-school. But we're pro-integrating the two together and finding ways to make it work.
Sandra: I love that. I love that whole story and that it's so visible, you can see how much support exists to save the farm. I would say having been a teacher, that there's undoubtedly a teacher who will be at that school who would share the community's sense of I think it was the O Wilson, you know, the biologist from Harvard who said it's wired into our DNA to love gardens. And that what that it seems there's probably a really good possibility, even if it's container gardening on the roof of the school that somehow you and they could create, or like Ron Finley did, where you do the the parking out between the sidewalk and the street, where you do a garden in that space. If you've got that much community engagement, you want to harvest that passion for the neighborhood and aim it at something with a sense of positive effort that will result in something where the kids and all the people live in the neighborhood benefit. It's that notion that how can we come together for good things, as opposed to opposition, it sounds like your neighborhood, they want to do something positive rather than just stop the school. And I think that communication is the key to community cooperation in the new home, or the development business. And Chris, we saw this at Todo Santos. Silos don't make for a great community. When the teams talk together, and I would say your neighborhood in the school or a team talking together. That's when great things happen. Just people working together with common purpose.
Chris: I'm going to make an assumption here that I don't have any evidence to base it on but I'm going to assume that a very large portion of the population outsources or sort of leaves the community to those that are natural community makers, and they sort of stumble upon it on occasion. But for the most part, just aren't contributors overall. And I would say, that might be a natural tendency, but I think a lot of people would reference just busy-ness as being the primary reason they don't really contribute to their community. And I wonder if you could share an example of how busy people united with little time and actually successfully creating a community.
Sandra: People are busier than ever. There's a fantastic book by Sherry Turkle called Alone Together. And I think the subhead is why we expect more from technology and less from each other. It's that notion you have an excuse because you're really busy and you don't have time. Colorado State University and Todo Santos. There were a small number of people who worked with some people on the ground in Todo Santos to think about what in the world could we do if we put an Ag school from Colorado in a community in Baja, California. And one of the ways in which they made it real was they worked with Mexican nationals from La Paz and San Juan del Cabo, to set up these little kinds of dinners and conversations we referenced earlier, inviting people to come together and talk about what's important to you. And the idea that you are invited to come to have a meal, and say what's important to you without somebody giving you a list of things that are important to you, is the way in which community engagement is constant. Once people are involved, they stay involved. And they feel invested in the future of what's going to happen, because whoever invited them to come talk actually listened to them. And I think if I could just throw it over to save the farm. It could even be somebody Chris, who's never done much of anything in community engagement, but saw the opportunity of the school going in across the street, that if they just made a call, didn't do an email, or walked over and talk to the principal. I think people are yearning for opportunities to be engaged. If it's not going to be a waste of their time.
Chris: You, yourself lead an interesting life. Give us examples of community and your own personal day to day.
Sandra: I have a wonderful life. And one of the things I do is I ride a bike a lot like a street bike, I ride around my city. And since it's Los Angeles is pretty darn huge, I joined a group called Ride-Arc, about 10 years ago, which every once a month on Friday nights at 930, we would ride around and look at architecture and anthropology, and go all over the city 930 at night till 130 in the morning. And about five years ago, I heard about something called CycLAvia, which was when about 12 people got together and said, we don't have a lot of parkland in LA, but we've got a lot of streets. What if one day a year, we close down a street like Wilshire Boulevard for 10 miles and let everybody come out on a Sunday and join together with all the other people who live in LA. And so CycLAvia was born. And I was deeply interested in this phenomenon in my own huge town of 12 million people. And I raised my hand to join the board. And I have met some of the most amazing people ever that have never crossed paths with me any other way in my work or, you know where I go to the gym or where I go to the symphony. There are people I wouldn't have known except for CycLAvia and there are some of my favorite people of all time. So it's kind of looking for things you're interested in, going in new avenues of engaging those things. And perhaps because for me as a leading-edge boomer, I would like to leave my city better than I found it. And things like CycLAvia feel very, very actively engaged in making the community deeply relevant now. Now we'd have a 10 times a year, we close streets, and they happen all over the city. And all kinds of people are involved. And we just got a new executive director, who was the deputy mayor for Via Ragosa. And he chose to come run CycLAvia because he's so passionate about what it means to LA.
Chris: Obviously there's the work you're involved in and then and then nationwide efforts. Are you bullish on the community right now or how do you feel about the overall societal trends right now in terms of community making?
Sandra: Black Lives Matter on that trend, I feel deeply depressed since I figured the arc of my entire life that we're still talking about something as fundamental as the color of your skin. So, I feel as if there's a lot of light shined on this conversation there. Well, I'm a pretty huge optimist. And in all the places that I'm working, I am, I'm working in Charleston, South Carolina. And one of the members of our team, this really amazing guy. J.A. Moore, his sister, was one of the people who was killed in the church, in Charleston. And the way in which that town healed and came together and joined as one is probably one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen in my life, to music and food and church, and singing and voice and listening and coming together as a town. They are healing in amazing ways. So this guy, J.A. Moore is pretty interesting. He runs our coffee shop, they have a new community, very difficult. If you think about it, the owner of this land, they grow trees. And in the last few years, Charleston has just gotten a huge lot of manufacturing great jobs. And then they've grown outside of Charleston, to the ring around it, where the trees are. So the population has grown out to where this community is in the Midwest, Baker was the name of the tree people have land that can now be turned into new office residential retail, where people live and go to school. And the challenge was, how do you take what is in Charleston, which is pretty, unbelievably wonderful, and bring it out to a brand new, brand new community. So what they did is they brought people like J.A. Moore, who's in the food business, he runs the cafe. That is where people, that's our sales office, the Cornerhouse Cafe that J.A. runs, you can get a latte, you can get a doughnut even you can get a conversation, you can sign up to work in their community garden, you can see the performing arts school, you can look at a house, you can ride a trail, you can hear about the tree harvest, and through this young man, you've got a sense of Charleston, repotted in a new community. And one of the ways we did this, which I thought was pretty interesting, we did something called a slow share. Back to Sherry Turkle. And the notion of alone together and technology. We took a huge thing in Charleston called the wine and food conference. And we took a booth there, and we created this place that was like Summer's Corner. And we had 22 mailboxes, those old silver mailboxes with the little red flags on them. And we have typewriters and postcards. And we invited people to write a postcard or type a letter to a friend, and we would mail it to them. Well, it was unbelievable how many people wanted to do that. And because we mailed the letters for them, over 2000 people participated, we got the most incredible insights into what's on people's minds, including one postcard that was addressed to heaven. And so we took the slow share that we had the wine and food in Charleston, and we put it in the corner house cafe. And when people come in to get a coffee and talk to J.A., they can also write a letter or write a postcard, about anything that's on their mind. And we have found this slow share, to give us some of the best insights into community building we could ever hope to hear.
Tracy: So different from having people sit in a focus group room and behind a one-way mirror to mirror and share their thoughts.
Sandra: I think Chris said it and I certainly felt it for years, maybe 20 years ago. I'm done with these. Chris said we call them the F groups and we don't do the F groups. In my opinion, that is not the way people are going to reveal to you their innermost thoughts, we quite often will do collages, where at the dinner and conversation will say describe a favorite childhood experience and they'll cut and paste pictures. And then they'll talk about their collage and usually, I'm not usually, every single time and insight will come out that will have application for the community that we're creating. I read a great book by I can't remember her name, a reporter for the LA Times, and the book is called The Inventing Desire. She spent a year living at Chiat Day, right around the time Steve Jobs was doing things differently. And her whole notion writing inventing desire was how in the world inventing desire for a computer or a taco. You may remember Yo, Cara Taco Bell, in that year talked about the magic of marketing, almost like, we believe in the farm, a yellow piece of paper, it's assembled. So the thing that has always struck me as a person in the business of selling a home, we don't have to invent desire, it lives in everybody's heart. We simply have to connect to that desire and make a place for it. In our communities.
Tracy: I think that's so powerful because you're right. I mean, I spent 10 years in advertising, where I felt like I was inventing desire. And it never felt real. I mean, it never felt valuable to the people who were on the receiving end of whatever their product or service was. And, and that was why I really loved the work that I was able to do at IDEO, and now beyond, which is to listen to people, and simply make it easier for them to access those things.
Sandra: That same place in Salt Lake City, or whole Daybreak, I was working with one of the builders who sell homes there. And he said to people, we were sitting around, you know, having dinner and conversation. He said, What are the three reasons you bought here? And they immediately went into focus group mode, they said, price square footage, floor plan. So about 15 minutes later, I said, what are the three things you would tell your friends about your neighborhood, and one of the three was at night when they walk as the sun's going down with their kids and their dogs, the mountains glow, a kind of pink, beautiful light. And that's not the kind of thing you're going to get. If you don't listen to people and allow them to not fit into a box of conformity. When they come in to find a house. They're disarmed by the corner house cafe in summer's corner, because they're offered coffee and the conversation when they go into a sales office in Irvine, California, they immediately go into a three-bedroom house. This is my price range, how quickly can I get away from you, the salesperson, and then go see the models.
Chris: Developers don't have the best reputation. And a critic might say, okay, I get it, you know, developers want a great community. But ultimately, the end goal incentive is to make a lot more money. So is the community really an authentic community? Or is it just a quick way to make more money? So I'd be curious, you've worked in this industry? Can you shed a little bit of light into that? And is the modern developer a more noble role than it has been historically?
Sandra: No. The modern developer does something noble, that it has to do with energy savings and doing really smart buildings. So in that regard, I would give almost everyone in the business credit for building better homes that are more energy-efficient, that live better and cost less to run and, and floor plans are more efficient. So in that regard, they are good. And they are driven by their public builder. They're driven by, you know, the quarterly reports. The interesting question or the conundrum is, if you want to go faster, for you know, closing more houses more quickly, that is not necessarily going to develop the best community or get the best return on the land, which you're consuming. And once it's consumed, you don't have anymore. So the interesting question would be if you were deeply thoughtful about this place you're creating, and you did it really well. And you did it with patients. I would think of the seaside in Florida, the panhandle of Florida. In the end, you're going to have something truly remarkable and there are even public builders who are doing good work on that, um, Rio Tinto, Daybreak is really quite wonderful. But it's hard because you're pushed by wall street and you're pushed by quarterly results and you're in numbers. And, in fact, people would be paid more if they were pushed by what true community is. Look at Apple. Look at that product. I remember when the Apple store opened in Santa Monica and the iPhone was for sale. And I asked the salesperson there who's buying these? He said we had a big surprise. And I said, what's that? And he said a whole lot of people can barely afford a phone. A ton of them came in and bought phones. And I said so it's not just the rich people. And he said, no, it's the people who see this as a tool to everything they need in one device in their hand. And I had another one of these big aha moments, Chris was at Grand Central Market downtown, a couple of weeks ago. This is a place that's 100 years old, and you can get a $2 taco or a $7 Coffee under the same roof. So everybody is convened at this table in LA. And I was standing in line for the $7 coffee. And behind a guy who ordered a $4 coffee. And I started chatting with him and said, Where do you work? He worked at the bridal shop a couple of blocks away. And I said, Do you come here every day? And he said, just for the last five months? And I said How's that? And he said, my grandfather always told me great coffee doesn't need sugar or cream. And one day a guy who works in the bridal shop with me went to get us coffee, I gave him a $5 bill, he came back with this cup of coffee and $1 change. And I'm like, hey, man, McDonald's does not charge that kind of money for a cup of coffee. And the guy said, oh, I tried out this new place in Grand Central. And this guy who worked at the coffee shop said I've never gone back to McDonald's. Sometimes I think we underestimate what people want. Because we look at what they can afford. And I'm not talking about a terribly expensive house. I'm talking about a community where people are given the option of having treats. Whether it's the iPhone, or it's a cup of $4 coffee at GMB.
Chris: That's an amazing year as you were telling that story. I couldn't help but think that if a developer could be discerning around who came in, and that there was a community contract that people had decided to sing, they were actually going to do their part, a friend of mine, I was having coffee with them yesterday, he said, I have been cramming all my community hours into the school this week, because we're supposed to commit 30 hours by the end of the year. And I said is that? Is that a private school? And he said, No, it's a public school. And I said the public school demands that every parent commits 30 hours? And he said, yeah. And my first question was, how to enforce it. And he said I don't know. But there's this social contract. And there are all kinds of things you can do. And every parent gets involved because this school has a contract. And I thought, How cool is that? And what if you had that commitment, we know when you went into a neighborhood that you are going to contribute a certain amount of time to it.
Sandra: I love that I'm going to steal that idea immediately to knit marks, and that whole notion of gifts, you know, people feel better, they're happier, they've gotten better well being the Happy Planet Index would say yeah, given the opportunity, and a little bit of obligation to do it. I love that idea.
Chris: The notion of community in a modern technical age, what are you seeing that gives you a lot of hope, where your work meets technology, in terms of community.
Sandra: As we said earlier, all people are too busy. Technology lightens that load. It's just a much more efficient way to get out of the HOA and share news and connect people for the basics of what it's like to be in the community. It's easier in some ways to buy a house, it's you know, he's there before people even arrive in our communities they know so much before they even get there. And usually, they've read the mommy blog, and they've looked at social media and Instagram and they're coming in more informed. It allows them to make a quicker decision if they are ready to, you know, move their family. So there's just a ton of ways in which it's really terrific. They can do their shopping online in terms of picking stuff at the design center for their home, you know, the countertops and the flooring and lighting. It just gives them time. And that's pretty awesome.
Tracy: Totally going to switch gears just because I'm super curious about this. I saw that you became a looper for the X Prize. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that. Sorry, my nerd side is totally on display.
Sandra: Yeah, well, you'll love how I randomly did it. I went to work for the people who did the Hercules campus with them on this cruise hangar and they did The YouTube's face at Playa Vista in LA. And I went to a community gathering because I just flat thought, wow, every Friday afternoon, from four to six, you can go to YouTube and you can hang out with people, you just have to sign up online and you can come. And so that might loot the X Prize, people were there. And they had this unbelievably cool airplane. And if you signed up that night and became a looper, you got the airplane on. It was like a static airplane, and my husband flew fighter jets. And I'm like, that is the coolest present I could ever get for Dan. So I signed up two years ago to be a looper and randomly I got the plane. But the insight into X Prize has been believably priceless. Because they have workshops, they teach us how to do you know, challenges, X Prize challenges you meet like physicists from Caltech, it's again, that notion of how do you get out of the neighborhood in which you live and work and get into the broader diversity of a city like LA and just celebrate what's right there? If you just go a slightly different path. So I love the looper thing. It's, it's been wonderful.
Tracy: I'm so glad I asked. Sorry, and it totally connects to our topics. It sounds like you're in the complete right profession.
Sandra: Well, I love what you guys do. And I have been deeply influenced by him and learned so much from Chris and working with him. And he's tough. That's one of the things I think it's important in this notion of building a community. It's not easy, it's tough. It's demanding. Ideas are cheap. He got to figure out how to do stuff, not just talk about it. And Chris has just been amazing working with a ton of the people I work with and helping us get there.
Chris: And the whole podcast is about this notion of wouldn't it be cool if you could flip design skills and apply it to your own individual life? Do you do this at scale? Right? If you think about community, it's ultimately helping a lot of people unite and live better, as you referenced, you know, the five ways to achieve wellness, etc. Through your experiences and life, is there advice you would give our audience that is getting after it and trying to optimize their lives for wellness? Are there any parting thoughts you'd leave them with?
Sandra: I feel like I'm still designing. And I wish somebody had told me a couple of things earlier. So yeah, I think that travel is just inherently amazing. And I don't mean you have to go to Europe. I mean, you can travel on a car trip, I just think travel takes you away from your daily work, to see people in different situations. And I think Airbnb is pretty interesting in terms of allowing people to travel into neighborhoods, you'd never get to see otherwise, stuff like that. So travel would be one thing. I am a huge believer in reading and reading widely. And then it took me getting fired from my job at age 38. To really stop fearing failure and risk. If I hadn't been fired from my job at age 38, I think I would still be sitting in that office out there in the valley, working really hard. And not have had such an amazing life as I've had when I was fired. My boyfriend, now husband, said to me, you know, if you think about it, when you were a school teacher, you ran your own business. So perhaps you should do that again. And it has been amazing for me to pick and choose who I would work with. I mean, now I have the luxury of totally doing that completely. But finding anybody I worked with when I first started my business, my first job was in Las Vegas, a town that I'm not particularly in love with. But there's always something interesting everywhere you go. And just open your heart and your mind and your brain to new experiences and just go for it. There's one last book I'd like to recommend for people. And it's called Orbiting the Giant Hairball. This is perfect. This is a guy who was the creative director for Hallmark cards in Kansas City for 48 years. And when he retired, he wrote this book, if you buy that book, it'll give you 10 more ideas about how to orbit in your life.
Tracy: I love it. Thank you so much. You've given us so many great resources to reference for people. So I really appreciate that in particular. I usually will collect all of the things that people talk about an episode and list them on the website. And so thank you for all of the generous ideas.
Sandra: You're welcome. And thanks for your ideas, Chris. I'm gonna use that one immediately engaging people in our community contract. That's awesome.
Tracy: Yeah. It's like Burning Man. Right? Like, yeah, everyone has to give Leave No Trace.
Sandra: I love it.
Tracy: Sandra, thank you so much. This has been amazing. You're lovely. And I love what you're doing so much.
Sandra: Thanks, Tracy. Thanks, Chris.
Chris: Thanks, Sandra. Great talking with you. And we'll see you soon.
Tracy: Okay. Bye, bye. That was great.
Chris: That was fun. She's, she's just a bundle of really positive energy and, and backs it up.
Tracy: Absolutely. I mean, I just when you first told me about the work she was doing in Todo Santos in particular, I was attracted to her story, just because I'd been down there. And it's this really lovely small community with a big art scene and obviously rich Mexican culture. And just knowing that people were considering the community that already exists as they're building this new future. It was amazing to hear about it.
Chris: Yeah, we didn't talk about it much. But the way that those projects are designed is that the local fishermen and farmers have as not as much weight in the development as any, as any hotel or, you know, the serious investor would. And so it's a way to keep everybody both engaged, but also to keep the developer from, you know, resisting the temptation of just following the short dollars that ultimately will kill the community, as we talked about. So there are great stories like that, unfortunately, I wish there were a lot more of them.
Tracy: Well, it's nice to have some shining examples to point to, exactly. It's possible. I mean, I think that she's sort of an example of, you know, the design thinking process of talking to an expert, or to an extreme. She's thinking about the community on this extreme level, like you were saying, at scale. It's so different from how people think about it in their daily life. But there are wonderful lessons to be learned from her example.
Chris: Yeah and I, having watched her in action in what she said today is, she just has a great job of having people reframe the question, they're asking about what it is. So I really liked her builder example is, you know, so tell me, I'm the builder, what, why'd you pick your house and they say, square footage, and, you know, efficiency or whatnot. And so the idea that to ask the bigger question, which is, you know, what would you tell your friends about living here, those things instantly drop, not that they're not important, but that you have to create and design with the right questions in mind. And so I think she has a good job of getting people out of their normal mode and asking the bigger question, and then elicit interesting, more emotive responses. Great.
Tracy: Absolutely. And it's not even that giant a shift from the question, but that nuance makes all the difference.
Chris: Yeah. And I think that that unravels all the way down to the individual level, which is, some of us might be asking the question, how can I carve a walk into my early morning to deal with my workday and maybe the right question is, why is my work? So deflating? Perhaps I should be rethinking this? Right. So I think those meta-questions also apply at an individual level that you really do have to step back and ask yourself the big ones at least every couple years, otherwise, you're on a crash course towards really regretting it later. I do like there's a pattern in the people we're talking to that they all share that whether Kyra and her journey when she went to Harvard, or we heard about David Kelley and his deals with God, that he couldn't remember later. These are, these were big moments that really shifted those folks. But I think the difference is these guys acted on it. And that was pretty cool. And the thing that I'm liking about what we're hearing as well is that it's not that they were all in this really privileged place to act upon. And I love Sandra's example of breaking the myth that it's only the wealthy that can afford something like a good community. And so that was my favorite part about her example is that people, people crave it at all levels and there is a way to produce it in a way that's worthwhile for everybody.
Tracy: Yeah, I remember, I was really surprised by that example, I'm not surprised that lower socioeconomic communities have a strong sense of community. But just that she had experienced that and was sharing it more broadly. Because I feel like I mentioned to her that as a society, we kind of other eyes, people, and especially people who live in poverty and like to think that they're less than human in certain ways. And I got a chance to visit Cape Town in South Africa. And, you know, they do these tours where you can go meet with people who live in the, in the slums outside of Cape Town, which I kind of was conflicted about going to seems like a strange offering, but because it helps support the communities, I thought I would, I would do that. But what I found interesting was just the deep, interconnected sense of community there. And one story kind of stood out to me, the woman who'd given me the tour, you know, she was talking about how, maybe in her neighborhood, there's only one woman who owns a bathing suit. But if she was going to the beach that day, she could just go into her house and borrow the bathing suit, and didn't need to ask because it was shared property. And there was this understanding, if the woman who owns it isn't going to the beach, then somebody else should be able to enjoy it.
Chris: Great example. I love that.
Tracy: Yeah. Well, and also, this was another part of it, which I think just points at the naivete that I have about an especially at that point in my life, because this was about 10 or so years ago, about what people living in poverty, like what their lives are like, but the woman who came to pick me up for the, for the tour, she lived in this area, and had grown up in this area. And she came and picked me up in this really nice car. And I was like, Whoa, this is crazy. She's done really well for herself. And she had asked me if after the tour was done if I wanted to go visit her house, and I said sure, of course, and so expected that we would drive back into Cape Town proper, where she, obviously with this nice car has advanced, you know, but she just drove around the corner from where do we've been and she had a larger house than the other people we were visiting. But she stayed in the community because that was her home. And I yeah, I hadn't considered that until that moment, the power of the people that you know, and that you've grown up with.
Chris: Yeah, it's amazing. It's hard not to feel a little conflicted just in terms of one on one hand community feels like it's a little lost, and people aren't looking out for each other. But then, you know, if you look in a very modern way, we're connected in ways we don't even realize now. And tools like Facebook are really interesting. That way, I'd see most of my friends. And I'm pretty caught upon them. Right seeing them and I can, one of the funniest sciences, I was on this bike ride. And I saw my friend Matt, and right just kind of hadn't seen him for a while. And right off the bat. I was like, so did you get the toilets installed that you were working on, you know, referencing Facebook. And you can kind of kick right back up. So I do think this hybridized version of, of online-offline, I think the part that scares me is when they're when the offline is just dead completely. And so this idea of leveraging tech, to kind of carry you in between the offline encounters feels like an amazing blend. So, yeah, yeah, so I'm excited about that. But what concerns me is that will, will fill our busy-ness time was only the digital component, and then you killed the offline. So I think we're kind of figuring that out as we go, given that so many of these tools are still new.
Tracy: Yeah. I mean, I definitely use next door to keep tabs on my neighborhood's what's going on and I like that, there hasn't been a tipping point with it. There are still people in the neighborhood who aren't using it. But that example of saving the farm really blew my mind. I have to say until the lot had been sold, I would walk my dog by the farm. I mean, I felt drawn to it's just an odd thing to have in the middle of the, you know, an urban environment. And it's really quite large and, and I just felt drawn to it. And I'd always stop when I'd walk the dog and kind of just take a deep breath and caused me this moment to pause. And so when it was in danger, I I felt really bummed about it. And then to see this total grassroots campaign come up and to see how many people not just were willing to put the signs in their window, but still, months later have them up, faded. And, you know, it's like people want to participate. That's obviously a low barrier to entry to put a sign on your, your, your window. But talking to Sandra really made me think well, what is something that I could do? That's maybe different from the typical political sphere of rail, calling my representative and voicing my opinion. I really liked her idea of just inviting the interested parties to come together and get to know one another. Because the shared values that we have, are probably all very similar. I mean, we're talking about a school in a garden, we're not talking about, you know, extracting oil from tar sands.
Chris: And fracking. You've reminded me though, one of the things I miss a lot, having in the Bay Area is coming from a region where we had real weather. Because weather would bond a community, if there was the big storm coming, everyone would hunker down and there'd be a snow day, and now the kids would come outside, and everyone would be out shoveling their driveways and whatnot. And you would bond through the triggers like those outside triggers. And we and you see that on a major scale one of it's always sad when you see natural disasters, but then you'd never want them to happen. But you do see communities rally together. And that's one of the beauties not of a natural disaster but a beauty of the outcome is that these communities bond and so sometimes these triggers can really be helpful.
Tracy: Well, even as Sandra is talking about what had happened in Charleston, and how, as awful as that was that it's actually been able to bring the community together and to allow people to heal together. Couldn't be more healthy.
Chris: Exactly, exactly.
Tracy: And when Sandra was talking about combining, you know, the younger kids with the older people, and I know that there's been a couple of stories about nursery schools where, you know, people who live in nursing homes kind of get put in the same environment and how truly beneficial that is. And they just say yes, goodness, that's such a great solution.
Chris: I know. Yeah, it's like if you're gonna build a senior center, always put a preschool downstairs.
Tracy: All right, that's a wrap. Thanks so much for listening. Our dream is to build a community of people who can create and take advantage of any opportunity that interests them. To do this really well. We'd love for you to participate. Try out and share back your own life design experiments. Or if you've already got a great story of how you've designed your life, we'd love to hear from you on our Facebook page, or resultsmayvarypodcast.com. Our website is also where you'll find show notes and links to all the things we mentioned in the episode. And if you wouldn't be so kind, subscribe to the show, and share your favorite episodes with friends. that'll lead even more people to start designing their own lives. A big thanks to the folks who helped us make the show possible. composer and filmmaker HP Mendoza for the Results May Vary theme music, graphic designer Annessa Braymer for our logo, David Glazier for sound mixing and team podcast for editing, and of course, thank you so much for listening to Results May Vary.