Whitneyville Cultural Commons Inc

Our Materials and Information Library program allows us to offer a curated repository of items and information for managed public use, both onsite and offsite. It includes books, tables, chairs, multi-media equipment, office supplies, kitchen tools, lawn care tools, and more. It also includes our databases of information about the historic property, Whitneyville, and Greater New Haven, allowing us to slowly build a representation of our community that can let us help people find services and resources that they need that we don't provide. We also document our successes and failures as a social enterprise nonprofit transforming communal, historic space from just its traditional uses to alternative, expanded, and inclusive uses that conserve and preserve the traditional uses and spirit of those uses, while also including new styles of use -- the documenting of this material has allowed us to grow partnerships with organizations around Connecticut where we help them adapt our successes to their own situations, avoid our failures in those situations, and assist them with implementing the adapted plans so their institutions and facilities can serve flourishing community. This year we provided information curation services around nonprofit formation and development to The People's Place of Waterbury, a nonprofit community resources center. Helping them find their first physical location for establishing the physical plant of their community resources center, and helped them launch programs like ours, as well as adapting them to serve their community in novel ways. We are also developing a shared library of documentation of this process, so that both organizations can continue to share with others the successes and failures of the social enterprises. We also provided information curation services around historic property adaptation to First Church of Christ Woodbridge, the sister church of our property, constructed by the same builders from the same plans in 1832. We assisted them with the adaptation of the historic day care operating in their Parish House, developing plans and strategies for expanding it from 32 to 96 children, and finding a daycare partner to help them operate it, such that their historic property can become accessible and sustainable into the future.

Our assembly space program continued to allow use of the historic properties in our trust for broad use for community events, nonprofits, and social gatherings. The Red Cross of America ran Mobile Blood Drives, weekly and without fail, at our facilities throughout the year -- we serve as the New Haven Chapter House of the Red Cross. Social gathering incrementally grew from the previous year, but continued to be our most requested program service proving the vital necessity of social infrastructure for our community through high demand. We hosted roughly two thousand community, nonprofit, and social gatherings during 2024.

Our Coworking Program provides a dynamic shared and private working environment that brings together startups, seasoned professionals, remote researches, freelancers, and solopreneurs, in a public space where they interact more regularly with each other and their community with lower overhead to insure viability of their small businesses, and to give new entrepreneurs a chance to make it in and a reason to stay in our local economy. Our Partner Coworking Organizations: CEIO, Public Allies CT, Black Infinity Collective, Prison2Public Policy, Students for Educational Justice, Real Clear Foundation, Stop Solitary, Interfaith Volunteer Caregivers, and our solo-preneurs, did coworking actiivities in our facilities utilizing both communal spaces and private offices. We also hosted many daytime seminars and presentations from organizations needing short term large spaces to supplement their small offices or work from home teams.

Our Arts and Culture Program provides studio space for artists, venues for performances and showcases and cultural events, space for arts classes and rehearsals, and tools for artistic productions, produced both in partnership with artists and offering our services as tools for artists to produce their own events. It also provides home for culturally significant programming from sub-cultures across Connecticut, including Christian worship & artistic services across denominations, including Pentecostals, UCCs, Episcopalians, Evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and more, and other significant worship and cultural services from across faith and traditional backgrounds. This year, both our churches and arts programming exceeded pre-pandemic levels proving the vital necessity of social infrastructure for arts & culture in GNH.

We produce, on our own and in partnership with members of the community and other organizations, a small number of classes and workshops designed to offering education to the community at large, in any topic or area of interest that serves the benefit of our community members. And we added on incubation and acceleration services for nonprofit development, utilizing our vast experience with many kinds of organizations through coworking, our partnerships with other organizations, and by collecting and synthesizing our own lessons learned as a startup nonprofit social enterprise, to help other individuals and organizations starting and operating nonprofit projects to benefit from the lessons of our coworkers -- we've been doing this in partnership with The People's Place in Waterbury to provide these services directly to their fiscal sponsees at TPP. Additionally, one of our sponsored projects, The Winnett Food Forest, became a free standing 501c3 organization and we regranted its remaining assets on our books to it.