Architecture and Environmental Design: Serving Community with Open Educational Resource

Collaboration (partners are signed up and ready to hit the ground running!)

Paid internship program: students support students on ENCOUNTER Projects and products, maintains Student Store, virtualize LA neighborhoods.

Yes (benefits a region of LA County)

Using synergetic thinking: 1)To serve communities, neighborhood councils, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, businesses, universities, individuals and others with design, virtualization and mapping services. 2)To help design furniture, green living products, urban farming, urban interventions, energy/water solutions and green houses for local needs. 3)To provide experience and examples to catalyze Los Angeles as the best place to learn and live. 4)To establish a paid internship program for untapped talent to maintain a store 5) To virtualize some neighborhoods and the River in Los Angeles. 6) To serve partners through our ENCOUNTER Network

The project will provide participants the ability to create and transform the built environment, a human right, and connect users and space to create sustainable places destined for success and systemic sustainability. This type of learning applies Architecture as a social mechanism that stimulates the sensory system, affecting intellect and desire to create by means of spatial languages and computer technologies. The project provides innovative templates to create spaces, objects, and solutions for local needs and motivates the untapped talent of visual thinkers in our communities. It provides a nurturing environment where learning can happen in the context of doing. It provides safe, environmentally sustainable places in which to live, work and play; places to learn, worship, meet, govern, shop and eat. Private or public, indoors or outdoors, rooms, buildings or complexes this project’s built environment will include neighborhoods, towns, suburbs and cities. A key impact is, for the first time, more people will participate in the transformation and creation of the place they live, work, move, create. The Built Environment is the perfect canvas for learning. The study of Architecture has been very narrow and prevented people from learning and participating in the life cycle of our city, buildings, campuses and neighborhoods. Our students will apply the art and the science of creating such spaces and products. Basic and universal needs will inspire innovative designs and transform needs into evolutionary and participatory reality through the life cycle of the building from concept to construction, operation, maintenance and assessment. The project will be a parallel and collaborative effort to current practices in Architecture. The impact will be the inclusion of stronger social concerns and the ability to react to location and space. It will create, augment, and connect residents with a sustainable environment through more people participating in making and creating the built environment.

Higher education, socio-economic leaders and local communities will benefit from synergetic thinking and an integrated approach. Learning will transpire in the context of doing and purpose. Multiple efforts including National Intelligence, local neighborhood first response and Americans with Disabilities will benefit by having local models of how to connect higher education with their communities. Also benefiting will be all students and partners currently participating in our program and the ENCOUNTER Network. This new synergetic learning will catalyze our neighborhoods and our higher education system. With the new lenses of GIS/BIM and 3D modeling and visualizing, the area’s workforce will benefit by facilitation of an unprecedented analytical and comprehensive means of looking at human-made ecosystems. We will benefit by creating a sustainable workforce that will see patterns and relationships never before seen and they will help all sustain on the planet. Currently untapped members of the workforce will be helped via a butterfly effect to present, document, design, and ideate their contribution to the system. to engage, volunteer and participate in decision making. To empower our population, we need to help them contribute in meaningfully civic process with their own passion and purpose. I believe every person has a mission in life and my job is to help them find it and develop it. We need to help them present, document, design, and ideate their contribution to the system. The ENCOUNTER Network, a seminal founding energy, will propel these benefits into the greater population. The ENCOUNTER projects connect multiple existing organizations that will bring the project to the next level financially, technologically and academically.

To be clear with time, budget and scope with all our partners will be a key factor for success. World Peace One Education and Communities: This organization provides UCLA Extension courses to our students to help them go on to higher education with education that matters. We are developing an articulation agreement with them to take our students and our ENCOUNTER project to the next level of implantation with 'World Peace One Peace Projects. Los Angeles Worlds Fair: Theme of the Los Angeles World's Fair is "The Connected City" collaborating on supporting their goal of pavilion design, fair planning and urban design layout, with the possibility of engaging the students and our partners. The USC Institute for Genetic Medicine Art Gallery: We will continue to work with the Gallery to organize events and gallery exhibitions promoting integrated thinking and holistic approaches. City Council District 9 is eager to use our student work to prototype a City of Tomorrow. The Los Angeles Open Acres organization has a map with more than 500 open sites that we could transform or virtualize as possible urban interventions. Jobcreate: We are working with this local organization that has the management skills and training guidelines to take our models and graduated interns to implement their goals. Additionally, ENCOUNTER Network such as Efrain Miramontes, Ken Wyrick, and others bring Journalism, Design, Computer Networking, and other services to the project. Power Of Green: This is a program of Five Points in the U.S. consults for countries on Sustainable Technology, Green Architecture, and Renewable Energy. Their services and knowledge will augment our interns' opportunity for growth and collaboration. PV Jobs, the e7 Architecture Studio, and their networks provide an immense amount of knowledge that will support virtualization and simulation for this project. The GBI Global Business Incubator a non-profit research organization “think and do tank” that catalyzes the business development process of launching an idea, a business and a community through growing collaborative business incubator cluster models that grow companies that create jobs. Gregory Wright is working students and faculty to visualize, design, and promote "Sun/ShadeWalls" The Black Caucus California Community College will continue helping us outreach to people of color to be active participants in the built environment as designers, architects, engineers, scientists and leaders.

We have the know-how of the technology and an existing network of partners and collaborators who are ready to take action. We have identified the needs of the community and we will have a state-of-the-art laboratory that can be used after 2 pm on to 9 pm daily, and all day on Fridays and Saturdays. Through a LA2050 LEARN support grant, the Synergy Serving Communities will be L.A.'s 'Best Place for Learning' in a very short period of time. LA 2050 LEARN support towards Synergy Serving Communities is a culmination that will be explosive; we have the passion, additional resources, the community, and a diverse group of students as drivers of change.

This program will become self-sustaining after the grant, since it will generate its own money through the student store. The biggest challenges are to institutionalize the paid internship program and to provide an easily accessible and understandable transparent allocation of funds. The good news is that our College and District are moving towards open government and transparency in all their procedures, and our new president Larry Franks is very supportive of innovative thinking, the local workforce, and improving students' lives.