LaunchPad's Mission:

LaunchPad creates itself - a sustainable engine of change - by forging links between three communities: artists, social activisits, and its local neighborhood. Educational space is provided for diverse activities, experiment, and useful cross-pollination across divides between creative people working in various disciplines, between artists and activists, across cultural and economic divides, and ultimately between the vanguard of change and the mainstream.

LaunchPad encourages creative, healthy, sustainable lifestyles, with special emphasis on individual responsibility for direct communication, because this essential basis of viable community is undersupported by the American mainstream.

As an alternative to closed, underground communities where the converted preach to the choir, LaunchPad is committed to being aboveground, visible to the mainstream so that others may learn from our experiments - the successes and the failures- a beacon to others who yearn for sustainable change.

LaunchPad is an experiment, in three ways:

1) physically, LaunchPad's present 12,000 sq ft grounds allow for very diverse projects to rub elbows - encouraging cross-pollination across a spectrum too rarely bridged, between the arts underground and the eco-activist community. On one corner of the grounds is a building with former residential/retail space, re-designed using experimental community-oriented and creativity-oriented design including:
  a) straight lines and squares are broken up. conventional, starkly delineated floors and box-rooms are shifting to less constrictive, more organic spaces.
  b) spaces are planned to both utilize and encourage sustainable practices.
  c) personal spaces all open, at various elevations, onto a common space, centralized in 3 dimensions.
  d) common spaces are multi-use, requiring creative modular solutions and space-use efficiency much like that on a ship.

2) Ideologically, LaunchPad is a loose intentional community whose intentions balance respect for artistic freedom and for eco/political awareness and for healthy lifestyle choices. LPad creates itself and creates the world it wants to inhabit by creating bridges:
  a) between artists and political/eco-activists.
  b) between forces of predominantly white & asian gentrification and of predominantly black & hispanic poverty & street culture. Engagement not Displacement is one of the phrases on our wall.
  c) between the underground and the mainstream.
  d) finding a harmony between the values of individual freedom/indomitable spirit and community awareness/conscience/cooperation.

3) Organizationally, LaunchPad is a not-for-profit community resource, made up of semi-autonomous working groups, each of which has a mandate and two anchors - a project coordinator and assistant, or two co-bottom-liners, or however they wish to organize themselves. At least one of these two people is present for any council meeting. With so many diverse activities happening under one umbrella, micromanagement is not practical. Our minimal approach to regulation and emphasis on agreement as the basis of management is summed up in another phrase thats on our wall: Culture not Rules.

Some of the space operated by the board is residential, inhabited by a co-op SAWG called the Gantry. Residents of the Gantry have their needs and preferences heard and respected within the framework of the LaunchPad Council, a decision-making structure that balances these needs with those of the overall project. The building that LaunchPad currently operates is temporary; the long range plan is to buy property. We are an experiment in community fully conscious of and providing for its transitional nature.

Our loose intentional community is committed to the encouragement (but not coercion) of healthy sustainable lifestyles, in terms physical and emotional:
 1) taking responsibility for our own direct communication - speaking clearly for ourselves on our own initiative. This is the absolutely essential basis for healthy community - and sadly unsupported by the American mainstream. it is necessarily priority #1.
 2) acting on our own initiative, and also in a way thats respectful to others in the community.
 3) working toward living off-the-grid in ways like:
  a.growing our own food
  b.generating our own power
  c.using water efficiently
  d.composting, recycling
  e.learning, using, and teaching green building methods
 4) supporting activities that contribute to holistically healthy lifestyles.

LaunchPad is a canvas.

LaunchPad is covered with muralspace and displayspace, inside and out. A quarter of our grounds are devoted to sculpture.

As a living & working space, LPad reflects the belief that art is an attitude, a state of mind. that any act can be art - whether carefully crafted or playfully randomized. LaunchPad needs no artificial separation between life and art. All aspects of life can be art, and art need not be reserved and preserved, frozen under glass (altho we respect all approaches to art, and we also have traditional displays - murals, installations, display space).

We see that our consumerist culture has made many skills & crafts into rare, dying arts. Every aspect of our living and working space, the way we conduct our projects is open to examination and application of artful values. We create space for a bit more care or a bit more spontanaeity or a bit more humor or a bit more -X- to be put into creation of otherwise mundane things and events.

LaunchPad is a classroom, on several levels.

  1) We plan a broad range of classes, to serve both the broader arts and activist communities, and the needs of the immediate neighborhood.
  2) many of our teachers are new teachers, people who have skills but never realized they could teach before.
  3) many of the people heading up LPad projects are doing so for the first time, and all of them are being stretched by the hybrid nature of our structure, measuring ideology with practicality,  balancing co-op residential needs with those of a nonprofit committed to serving the community.
  4) its a 'classroom' for us all to discover how to balance all of these goals and interests to create a sustainable force for change.
LaunchPad is a showcase.

At launchPad, We apply many principles primarily seen in underground, radical groups and spaces, and as an alternative to creating a closed, hidden community where the converted preach to the choir, LPad is committed to being aboveground, visible, open to the greater community so that others may learn from our experiments - the successes and the failures- a beacon to others who yearn for sustainable change.