KQED strives to create opportunities that build community, model navigating disagreement through dialogue, and help face the uncertain future by discussing our shared responsibilities toward the greater good. Our new headquarters will offer the opportunity to invite community members to be part of our work, use our public spaces, and utilize our media making tools. We’ve designed studios where the public can co-create content with us and meeting rooms and offices that we can make available to mission-aligned partners.
In our new home, we’ll build on the steady growth in audience involvement already underway, through programming such as Youth Takeover and Bay Curious and partnerships that drive event series such as On Common Ground. Even before the pandemic forced our staff to recreate live events as virtual gatherings, KQED was exploring what it meant to gather and create with like-minded organizations.
Director of Public Events Ryan Davis looks forward to creating lasting organizational partnerships:
“Right now we’re building these partnerships with other institutions like the urban planning think-tank SPUR, SFMOMA, public libraries, and so on, in order to dream up and create more programming together using our new space in 2021. We imagine policy makers, writers and artists in residence at these organizations coming to speak with our reporters onstage, to offer their perspective and engage in conversation with the public about how their work serves Bay Area communities.”
Essential to this objective is the creation of several community spaces in our renovated home. The Commons will be our largest multipurpose space where we’ll host live programs that entertain, inform and drive strategic conversations. But you won’t have to be physically in our building to engage with us. With added and updated technical infrastructure, we’ll be able to distribute that live programming via broadcast, podcast and TV so you can participate wherever and however you can. Davis explains how the name and design of this new space reflects our larger organizational values:
“The thing I love about the name The Commons is that it perfectly encapsulates what we are trying to do, which is to create and steward a space of shared interest, where our community can come together and negotiate how we define the common good—through exposure to new ideas through artistic expression and vigorous discussion.”
Learn more about how you can support community engagement and KQED’s Campaign 21.