Recently in Space Category

In 2010, the day of the first annual Huss Future Festival dawned with a downpour, but this year, a warm, orange glow greeted our waking and last-minute preparations on Saturday morning. While Adam put up the art tent, Kate got the coffee on. Artists from Three Rivers to South Africa set up their wares while Deborah and Christina put out the street signs, Emily did some last-minute stitching, Julie got volunteers to their assigned destinations and Kelly sorted more donations for the clothing sale.

The clear morning did not lie: Future Festival 2011 was a great success, thanks in large part to our wonderful committee members and interns who each picked up pieces of the collaborative event. While we're already talking about things we might do differently next year, we're still basking in the glow of an event that brought delighted smiles to about 300 faces.

New this year was a full slate of intergenerational activities that included art and craft projects, a community mural, lawn games and bike tune-ups. Twelve-year-old Alex led the kickball game and Kelly took a break from the clothing sale to become the star pitcher (she's no belly itcher). In the meantime, Alex's dad Doug worked on people's bikes and his mom Julianna coordinated the Triple Ripple Community Garden's sale of baked goods, produce and locally made sausages. It was a family affair for the Saubers!

In addition to the deliciously fresh goodies from the garden group, the Three Rivers Area Faith Community organized a fish fry to benefit the annual Back to School Celebration, a family event that provides 650 backpacks with school supplies to local children. Rounding the parking lot next to the fish fry was our neighbor David and his amazing homemade apple barrel train. We heard from more than one parent that their kiddos loved the train ride so much, they didn't want to leave!

Another new feature this year was the Imagining Space photo booth, which featured a hand-painted cloud backdrop and hand-sewn cloud pillows, along with a number of props. Keeping tabs on the photo booth were our featured artists, as well as the coordinators of the upcoming Culture Make Sale, an online sale of goods and services to benefit the preservation and renovation of Huss School as a creative community space.

Live music floated down the hallway all day from the coffee house room, where an array of amazing, donated baked goods joined fair trade coffee and tea in perfect synergy...in addition to a huge cooler full of fresh basil from Bluebird Farm! Bluegrass, folk, rock, indie--there was quite a variety of music and a ton of talent. Folks who wanted a quieter experience could wander the self-guided tour on the second floor, viewing displays like a sample apartment and service group photos, while contributing their own ideas for Huss School and Three Rivers.

While we didn't do a gigantic rummage sale again this year, we did hold a used clothing sale and we invited the Three Rivers Artists Guild to take over the gym where they sold their own garage sale items and deeply discounted original artwork. Some of the shirts from the clothing sale made their way out onto the side patio to be spray painted with a special handmade Huss Future Festival 2011 design.

As you can tell, some of the themes that grew out of this year's event were participation and creativity. People from across a wide range of ages, colors, backgrounds and abilities came together to play, create, listen, talk and contribute. It feels really good to see that, even though the Huss School property is waiting on a lot of resources in order to be fully developed (heated, even), it's still possible to live into the vision for a space where all are welcome and challenged to use their imaginations in all sorts of ways. Thank you to ALL of the people who made this wonderful event possible, from those who had official roles to those who simply wandered in because they saw a sign on the corner. If this festival represents the school's future, I'm so glad you'll be there with us!

*cino needs YOU to vote each day in December to help us win a $50,000 grant to renovate the old kindergarten room at Huss School! Why vote? Read on...

Reason #2: Huss School is a meaningful, historic space for Three Rivers; renovating the space and bringing it back to life is important to the community.

On the same day we made our offer on the school, the local paper announced that the city had plans to tear the 90-year-old building down. Since *cino purchased the school, many local citizens have expressed how disheartened they were to hear of the demolition plans and how glad they are that we're preserving the building. We've had dozens of visitors walk through the building with us, sharing memories of their time as students, teachers and administrators. When we removed the carpeting from the kindergarten room, an elderly mother and her daughter stood by with tears in their eyes to see if the circle was still painted on the wood floor. There are many deep, meaningful memories connected to the building--some good, some awful and many mixed. The school is an important artifact and we hope to take good care of it, continuing its legacy as a place of learning and love.

You may have read somewhere already that *cino is going for a $50,000 grant through the Pepsi Refresh Project, which is giving away $1.3 million each month to organizations selected by popular vote. So what are we going to do with $50,000? Well, here's what we're thinking.

We're big believers in the idea that new spaces create new possibilities. Obviously, 27,000 square feet is A LOT of space with A LOT of potential, but the problem is: at the moment, none of that space is heated and therefore, the water is shut off to avoid broken pipes and the like. What we have now is essentially one heck of a tent. And that tent's going to take money somewhere in the millions to fully restore and renovate for the big purposes we have in mind, which is a full-blown community center shared by multiple non-profits serving local youth and families, as well as a residential off-campus program for college students from around the country.

So: we're starting with one room. One room to rule them all (that was a Lord of the Rings joke--not a very good one). The room we've chosen is the old kindergarten room, a 1,600 square foot space on the north end of the main floor. Why this room? Well, it has a separate outside entrance, which is crucial for getting a standalone space up and running--that way people don't have to traipse through a construction zone to get in. Also, it has two attached bathrooms. In terms of visual interest, it features original maple floors and woodwork, with high ceilings. Plus, it's a neat shape--kind of octagonal on one end, with an old slate chalkboard. If you sneak a peak inside the storage closet, there's also a beautiful original built-in unit that was included on the original 1918 blueprints.

I bet your next question is: what will we do with this room? Having already watched a couple of films and hosted a few musicians there, we've realized it makes a very nice space for live performance and other arts activities for a relatively intimate crowd--up to about 100 people. We've also done some research about all-ages music venues and talked with some local high school students who are very excited about the possibility of running their own music venue. In a small town like Three Rivers, where the local teens often end up hanging out at Meijer on the weekends, some positive late-night activity seems like a really good thing. We have some wonderful arts organizations in Three Rivers--the Carnegie Center, the Riviera Theatre, the Three Rivers Artists Guild--and we'd love to cultivate a passion for the arts in local youth that will connect them to these organizations, potentially for the rest of their lives.

We're also excited about the potential of the room as a site for after-school and summer programs that serve the neighborhood kids and their families. The school bus already drops students off right outside the kindergarten room door. Wouldn't it be nice if there were some local senior citizens and other adults waiting for those kids with snacks to ask how their days went, help with homework and do crafts together? We think it would be great, for both the kids and the adults. Some of the kids have very strong families, while others could use a little extra care--all of them could benefit from healthy, inter-generational friendships.

In addition to providing a space for programming, we hope to create a room that has some revenue potential for additional renovations to the school. Maybe a church will want to begin holding weekly services there. Maybe a community organization will start holding meetings or conducting some of its programming there. Maybe someone will even get married there! A major goal is to make the space beautiful, whimsical, imaginative and elegant so that it can serve a wide variety of purposes, from very functional to highly ceremonial.

And let's not forget how the room will serve a need we've had for almost a year now: hospitality to service groups. We've had over 100 volunteers give over 1,400 hours of service at the school already, doing everything from routine maintenance to ripping out walls. At times, it was very cold work with no heat in the building. It would be nice to have a space to show proper hospitality to our wonderful volunteers in all seasons of the year.

Even though we'll be working with a strict budget, we want this room to be a life-sized model of what the lovely old school can become--a space filled with color and light and art, a space that inspires people to dream about what's possible beyond what is. We also want to honor the history of the room so that visitors who attended kindergarten in the space can still see their old classroom. The old circle on the wood floor has to stay, and hopefully the chalkboard as well.

We also want the room to be a model of the green building techniques we hope to implement throughout the building, so that it's highly efficient to maintain. Super-insulation methods will keep the heating bills low, while other elements like water-saving appliances and non-toxic building materials will be good for both humans and our local watershed.

Any questions? We're certainly open to your comments, ideas and inquiries. Please feel free to post things here or get in touch another way. We've been making some progress in the past year and a half, but we're excited for this next phase of the work. Help us re-imagine the kindergarten room for the future of the school building, the neighborhood and our city!

If you're in the Three Rivers area, drop by Huss School today for our first annual Huss Future Festival! The festival features a giant rummage sale, art vendors, live music, free fair trade coffee from World Fare and tours of the building. We've even got a ping-pong challenge and an apple barrel train!

We'll see you there!

I had a short, but good conversation with a local chef the other night at a party. I jokingly asked him when he's going to start a restaurant in Three Rivers, which I'm sure he gets a lot. Turns out, it's his dream (in retirement?) to start a free restaurant: customers will enjoy healthy, expertly prepared food in a beautiful setting and pay what they can. Turns out he's also considered Huss as a location. "This is exactly the kind of project we want to see happening there," I told Rob. It's so ridiculous, it just might work--which seems to be a running theme.

So during our board meeting last Friday, when board members scattered throughout the school to read and reflect and pray, I ended up in the room where we've imagined a community kitchen. I could hear dogs barking through the broken windows and an occasional "ploop" as water dripped through the roof and into a plastic bin. A red and black sign on the window reads PEEK TUO to me, but to those who "should" be on the outside, KEEP OUT. I long for the day a sign can sincerely say, PLEASE COME IN. Sitting on the formica-topped desk that is the detritus of an institution that no longer serves this neighborhood directly, under a roof that's determined to sag in all the wrong places, that day feels very far away. And yet, it doesn't feel impossible. A sink in the corner reminds me that this room was once alive, with a controlled flow of water--that substance that is such a critical source of life.

In this room, hope is being able to peel the paper off the windows because we want people to see what's inside. Hope is a rooftop greenhouse where children and adults alike can learn how to grow fresh food year round and be nourished by the fruits of their labor. Hope is a vision of abundance for those in this neighborhood who rarely set foot in a kitchen because there's simply no food there to cook, much less eat. Hope is a multi-colored image of people from various economic backgrounds sharing conversations over a meal that satisfies all five senses. Hope is as small as a drip of water that, beyond our efforts can become a rushing stream...and hopefully, it won't be coming through a hole in the roof.

God help us.

One of our projects for this spring and summer has been figuring out how to convert a portion of the four-acre property around Huss back to wild space. We've tried to delineate the area with clear boundaries so that our neighbors won't just think we're neglecting the land, but even then, we're still getting some quizzical looks: so you're not going to mow it?

Well, we are mowing a portion of it. We have a path that goes around the entire back property for walking, an area carved out for a fire pit and a large lawn in the back corner for softball, soccer and other activities. We're also mowing the front yard and around the community garden.

But there are many advantages to letting a portion of the property go wild, including...

• Creating a habitat that's friendly to small animals, birds and insects (including butterflies!).


• Using less fossil fuel and time to maintain an area that wouldn't get adequate use as a lawn.


• Cultivating a beautiful space with visual diversity full of wild flowers, grasses and trees.


• Reducing erosion and runoff from the property with plants that have adequate root systems to absorb rain water, improving water and soil quality.


• Improving our link to the past at an historic property that would have been oak and hickory prairie centuries ago.


• Establishing an outdoor classroom where people can learn about native plants, including edible species.


• Accessing grant programs that support native plant projects and education.

We realize we'll need to be intentional about communicating our intentions in a culture where trimmed lawns are the norm, but we look forward to building relationships around innovative possibilities for a neighborhood that straddles rural and urban environments. We also look forward to the unique teaching space such a landscape will create, helping us all learn how to better care for and appreciate our native environment in an area so rich with beautiful plants and waterways.

Resources for Michigan native plants:

• Michigan State University Native Plants project


• Native Plant Species and a Landowner's Guide from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment


• Michigan Native Plants Database from the Native Plant Nursery in Ann Arbor


• Wildflower Association of Michigan

Last weekend, we walked through Huss School with an architect (a friend of a friend) to get an informal but professional opinion of the building. The good news: the building is structurally very sound. The bad news: the building needs new mechanical systems and presents a number of architectural challenges. We learned a lot from the visit and it was good to have our overall suspicions professionally confirmed.

The biggest mechanical item that we'll need to replace is the 90-something-year-old boiler. Replacing the heating system for a building as large as Huss will be a significant expense and will take quite a bit of planning. We also will need to address the current electrical system--which has been cobbled together over the years and stands in need of updating. Another big ticket item will be replacing the windows and creating a better envelope for the interior (so heating and cooling won't escape as readily).

So ... those are the big things we're going to need to address in renovation. Before we can get started, we need to have an official feasibility study done to determine potential and concrete next steps. Unfortunately, a feasibility study will cost a good amount of money in itself. We're working to find grants that might cover the costs of the study; in the meantime, we need to get the point where we can pay our monthly expenses.

What happens when you get a couple of brilliant, creative, visionary community organizers together around the kitchen table for tea? Great things begin to grow--literally! We are so thrilled to welcome the efforts of Julianna and Brenda to the Huss School property for the coming growing season. It was a delight to walk with them through the first couple meetings about a community garden and we look forward to seeing where they take the project as they run with the idea on their own. The basics: plots will be tended by neighborhood youth and adult mentors, using sustainable agricultural methods like compost tea, organic pest control and rainwater collection. This project has enormous potential to tie in with the vision for the school property in a myriad of ways and bring an abundance of hope, creativity, beauty and good food to the neighborhood. Watch for more reports on the gardens soon...and get in touch if you'd like to be involved!

On the way to work this morning, we heard two stories from Michigan Public Radio that sparked connections for me with the Huss School project. One was about an old school building in Detroit that's being converted into artist studios, retail space, offices and more. The other was this week's edition in a series of interviews that Christina Shockley is doing, with each interviewee suggesting three things they think could be done in Michigan to help get the state back on its feet. I especially liked how hip hop artist Invincible, this morning's interviewee, suggested that creativity needs to be woven into our problem-solving in order to expand people's imaginations and push the boundaries of what's considered possible. Makes me even more excited to try to recruit local artists to submit renderings of the space's potential...

Kirstin offers a few ideas in her catapult magazine editorial for what she'd love to see at Huss School as we move forward with the Imagining Space project. Check it out and then add your own!