Project Type: Spaces for Survivors, Youth Spaces, Education Spaces

Client: Community Works, a non-profit organization that interrupts and
heals the impact of incarceration on individuals, families, and communities.

Status: Design/fundraising

Designing Justice + Designing Spaces Team: Lucia Castello (Project Architect)

Designing with and for Community Works: more than just an office

Community Works seeks to transform justice through programs and policy rooted in humanity and healing. They honor as expertise the lived experience of survivors, incarcerated people, and their communities. Their programs are culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and rooted in Restorative Justice and the Arts.

After 25 years of providing services in the Bay Area, Community Works has for the first time secured a leased office space in San Francisco. This hub serves as a recharge station for Community Works, a safe and accepting place where staff and program participants can feel comfortable, welcome, and nourished while accessing a variety of resources.

DJDS is providing architectural design services to create a healing-centered office space for Community Works’ staff and the community at large.

With the information gathered from our Visioning Workshops with staff and program participants, DJDS has summarized and compiled the main themes that we heard as priorities for the design of the new space: freedom in nature, uplifting creative expression, home-like comfort, and multi-functional/adaptable spaces. We synthesized these themes into an overall concept and illustrated how this concept translates into a spatial and aesthetic design of the various spaces.

Following this initial phase of work, Designing Justice + Designing Spaces aims to continue providing design development, permit drawings, and construction administration services to Community Works until the tenant improvement project is completed.