Molten Metal and Fire Replace Trust Falls in Today’s Team Building Workshops.

If you’ve ever found yourself in even a semi-corporate environment, chances are you’ve done a few team building excercises. Ropes courses, bowling nights, company outings… Building a cohesive team is important to any manager, and innovative San Francisco Bay Area businesses are increasingly turning to the Industrial Arts for team building activities. Instead of the standard positive games and happy hours, participants in team building programs at The Crucible complete tangible projects using molten metal, open flame and orange-hot glass.

In today’s fast-paced work environment, bringing diverse teams together in ways that build trust while stimulating creativity and problem solving can be a challenge. The Crucible, a cornerstone in the West Oakland Industrial Arts Corridor, offers corporate team building experiences that defy standard practices. By providing workshops in the Industrial Arts, participants are exposed to welding, foundry, blacksmithing, glassblowing, fire eating, glass fusing, jewelry and neon, many of which are techniques typically reserved for industrial projects.

“Our team wanted a hands-on learning experience as a part of our 3 days leadership retreat to facilitate our development.” Said Brianna Larkin of the Oakland School for the Arts. “Because we are an arts school, we thought The Crucible would be a great opportunity to learn through doing art, and would give us more of a connection to our school’s mission. It was also an affordable option and the location across from BART and within a couple miles of our school worked well.”

The list of progressive companies engaging their teams using the Industrial Arts is impressive, including the likes of Salesforce, Ubisoft, Square, Jamba Juice, Kaggle, Kaiser Permanente and Cliff Bar. In most cases teams have elected to create an installation piece that they’ve taken back to their offices: the Salesforce team built a fused glass sectional table featuring their signature “no software” logo; the Ubisoft team fabricated a wrought-iron throne. Each workshop is tailored to match the interests of the team members with the goal of inspiring, encouraging teamwork, and adding a fresh approach to problem solving through creativity and design.

“We love the fact that we’re working with dangerous materials, and everyone is starting from ground zero as far as experience.” Said Kaggle’s Ramzi Ramey. “Regardless of management structure, we’re all starting from scratch. That opens the door to a kind of problem solving that you don’t get when everyone is sitting around a table.”

Corporate team building workshops are typically booked for celebrations, launch parties, product development, holiday and end of year events. The Crucible offers flexible event planning options and can fit most group sizes and budgets, with 2-hour mini workshops starting at $800. Design & Build packages, including lunch and a wine-and-cheese art reception, start at $3,500.

For more information please email us at
teambuilding@thecrucible.org , or call (510) 444-0919 x102.

Summertime at The Crucible brings one of our most popular youth programs, the Youth Summer Camps. Aaron Mason sat down with Carla Hall, The Crucible’s Youth Program Director, to talk about the program in process. Photos by Troy Mickins and Aaron Mason.

AM: Let’s start with a little background first.

CH: Sure! My name is Carla Hall, and I’m the Youth Program Director, amongst other things (laughing) here at The Crucible.

AM: And right now our big youth project is the Youth Summer Camps?

CH: That’s correct. Right now we’re in our fourth week of our Youth Summer Camp program, which I like to call “an industrial arts day camp.”

AM: How long do the camps run, and what do they provide?

CH: It’s five weeks of week-long day camps that give students a hands-on learning experience in industrial arts. They’re either full or half-day camps, depending on what the students have signed up for, but in either case young people get the chance to participate in huge range of classes including welding, blacksmithing, glass blowing and glass flameworking. This week alone we’re running 22 different classes.

AM: How many young people are we expecting to have through the program?

CH: We have a little over 600 students coming in over the five-week span. Traditionally the camp would span four weeks, but this is the first year we’ve had this level of interest and expanded into a fifth week of our most popular classes.

AM: Which parts of the program have been expanded?

CH: Glass blowing is the program that’s had by far the most growth. Last summer we ran a pilot program for just one week; this summer we’ve done glass blowing in four expanded weeks, and all of those classes have filled. The art bike program has continued to be popular as a day-long program as well. This is the first year we’ve also had the immersion program, which is a day-long experience with beginning and continuing skill level classes in arc welding, glassblowing, glass flameworking and blacksmithing. Those programs also filled pretty early in the registration process, and have seen increased popularity compared to last year

AM: And all of these are programs are for young students? They sound very adult.

CH: Yes! Once a student turns twelve they can come in and get hands on experience with flame or fire arts classes. The eight to eleven year olds participate in programs like clay, kinetics, wood carving, which are generally more age-appropriate.

AM: What do you tell people who are concerned about youth in this environment?

CH: We spend a lot of time transforming the shop into a youth-friendly, youth-safe space, including hiring a program staff who deal with supporting student needs, supporting instructors, providing a central meeting space, a break area, recess space and snack time. They’re doing a fantastic job providing the infrastructure that makes the camp so successful.

We also work to promote maturity and responsibility

West Oakland Industrial Arts Corridor

by Steven Young

I recently participated on a panel discussion at SPUR in San Francisco about the West Oakland Industrial Arts Corridor.  My fellow Panelists were; Leslie Pritchett, Public art consultant and Crucible Board member; Sean Orlando, Lead artist and co-founder of the Five Ton Crane Arts Group and Karen Cusolito, founder of American Steel Studios. We were invited to speak about the growing arts community in West Oakland and why it is important.

We presented a number of slides to illustrate the scope and scale of what is being done in and made in Oakland, specifically along the Mandella Parkway corridor. We highlighted a number of art spaces such as Bruce Beasley’s art park, Lost and Foundry, The Crucible, Kinetic Steam Works, St Louise Studios and American Steel Studios.  It was immediately apparent that West Oakland hosts an amazing variety of art spaces, a rich mix of artists and craftspeople and as a community, we create some of the most impressive collaborative and large scale work being made.

One of the goals of our presentation was to shine a spotlight on this creative and productive community and to reach some of the decision makers who actively work to shape our cities.  SPUR, or San Francisco Urban Planning + Research Association, is dedicated to good planning and good government in the San Francisco Bay Area and plans to open a SPUR office in Oakland.  Their lunchtime forum is regularly attended by Architects, Planners and people who are interested in making our cities better places to live.

My portion of the talk was dedicated to the idea that access to art and artful experiences is vital to our ability to have a healthy community and that Oakland should embrace what is happening now, here in Oakland as part of their planning process.

Why is access to the creative process transformative for the artists and for the greater community?

Artful experiences and making foster personal growth, create a sense of confidence and inspires creativity. Participating in the creative process also helps to create connections to others.

There is a great deal of interest in the national conversation about this notion. The James Irvine Foundation has re-tooled their art funding strategy.

Their new strategy focuses on expanding opportunities for the people of California to participate in a vibrant, successful and inclusive society. Part of that inclusiveness is access to artful experiences, especially, experiences that involve participation in the creative process. Their new goal is to promote engagement in the arts for all Californians, the kind that embraces and advances the diverse ways that we experience the arts, and that strengthens our ability to thrive together in a dynamic and complex social environment.

The Irvine Foundation seeks to increase arts engagement in three ways:

• By concentrating on undeserved communities
• By encouraging work at non traditional venues for arts experiences
• And by supporting programs that offer interactivity or participation

They believe that in order to meet the needs of the future we have to prepare people now. Two reports on the role of Career