Knight Pulse has partnered with GOOD Magazine to tap six community leaders in L.A. who are building community through five different projects (a recent LAist post on these projects gives more details).

The six community leaders, who will host events later this year (more information on Pulse and the GOOD blog soon) are:

Alissa Walker, Design LA (Pulse project page)

Eric Steuer, Communicating Creative Commons (Pulse project page)

Sonja Rasula, Community Service Fair (Pulse project page)

Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, Local Living Workshop Series (Pulse project page)

Edgar Arceneaux, Watts House Project (Pulse project page)

Thoughts on these projects and other ways to engage the L.A. community?

Video transcript

Knight Pulse/Good leaders

Max Schorr, Publisher and Founding Editor of GOOD magazine
We’re recognizing five initiatives here in Los Angeles that are kind of quietly beneath the scenes making our community better, and I think we all know initiatives like this, and I think actually many of you are involved in initiatives, but tonight is really a great opportunity to kind of hear from what’s happening on the cutting edge. And these movements are all really, really cool, and that’s why I think you’re going to enjoy hearing from them.

Alissa Walker, Design LA
… the last few years for design. Because now, all design is good design, and all designers have taken on this kind of socially responsible causes in their work, and everybody is trying to make the world a better place as designers. So let’s think about designers as people who solve problems. I think that’s a big thing that people get worried about, especially in the design world—that they make beautiful things, that they make $1,000 chairs. And I really want you to think about designers as problem-solvers. That’s a great way that we can use designers for the things that we need to do. And that’s good, because we have a lot of problems. So it’s solving community problems—yes, we all agree. Locally-acting, action-oriented. Civic service through design thinking. So this is your way that you’re supposed to give back to your community. I don’t want you to give money to other people; I don’t want you to go volunteer at a place where your skills aren’t needed. You need to use your design skills. Full contact engagement with local government, which means knowing how it works, which I don’t yet—I’m trying to make sure I learn. And collaboration with people who can make solutions happen.

What if we connect a bunch of designers from different disciplines and ask them to solve these problems of LA? And then what if we went to the governments and said, what do you need us to do? What problems need solving?

Eric Steuer, Communicating Creative Commons
One of the things that’s really great about the organization is that there is a very enthusiastic community of people around the world who are very excited about these issues. They’re interested in technology and culture and education and all these things. So we get people giving us ideas, making videos about us and sort of helping us with that messaging; we don’t even have to actually put out a call for it very often; we just have this community of people that does it for us. But I want to try to figure out ways harness that better and actually deliver, leverage this community and find ways to take those stories and turn them into stories that sort of everyone can understand on a more basic level.

Sonja Rasula, Community Service Fair
People in this city, I think we spend so much time in our cars; we’re desperate for community interaction. I believe that. I was incredibly inspired by the fact that he [Obama] was a community organizer, a community leader, and the fact that he was not taking all the credit; he was putting the onus back onto the community by saying, it’s not just me that’s going to get into Washington and change things; it’s actually you, and you, and you. So my plan is to have a giant fair in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago this August. Every location will have over 100 non-profits and community groups. And it’s going to be one day that allows the public to come in and discover where they can volunteer. City Labs, Community Service Fairs—they will happen this summer.

Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne, Local Living Workshop Series
Erik Knutzen: There’s a group in LA that we hope to partner with, which we’re a part of, the Backwards Beekeepers. I could talk for hours, but we don’t have hours—the implications of backwards beekeeping are quite profound. It’s going back to a way that beekeeping used to be done.

Kelly Coyne: Basically, it’s collecting feral bees from the neighborhood and organizing them and keeping them in your home. And even if you just have a rooftop, your grandma’s back yard, a side yard, you don’t need space to keep bees. And I know you’re all, eh, why should I keep bees? But you should keep bees, and we can talk to you about why afterwards, but bees are the new chicken.

Edgar Arceneaux, Watts House Project
I’m the director of the Watts House Project, and I’ve been involved with it, along with my team, who is peppered throughout the audience, for about 13 years. We started in 1996, and we describe the Watts House Project as ongoing collaborative art work in the shape of a neighborhood redevelopment. We’re located in Watts, working with the residents on East 107th Street—that’s directly across the street from the historic Watts Towers. We’re calling the renovation phase, which is the transformation of the interior/exterior front yard and back yard of all 20 properties on East 107th Street. And the way in which that is going to occur and has been occurring since the end of last year is a collaboration between an artist and an architect with the residents to imagine what those changes could be. The street actually has no storm drains, either; when it rains, the street totally floods. So we’re doing a pilot rainwater swell system hopefully in the beginning of May. So we as artists are not dropping in just like an alien spacecraft into the neighborhood. There have been people there for more than 40 years trying to do this work.