Come Dream with Me

I've told the couch story here before, but it belongs at the front of this one.

My mother bought a couch that would not fit through the door, no matter how we turned it. We tried every angle. Finally she said, take it outside and put it through the window. We thought she'd lost it. But we did it, and it fit.

I've been putting the couch through the window for eighteen years. Working with kids about to get kicked out of school for skipping class to shoot photos downtown. Getting our young musicians into a real studio next to Grammy-nominated artists. Collecting oral histories in neighborhoods the rest of the city had already moved on from. I didn't always know the shape of what it would become. I just knew it belonged, and I found the window.

A curved boardwalk path leading through newly landscaped grounds toward the WOW Heritage Center at Rosewood Courts. — This is the walk up to the WOW Heritage Center at Rosewood Courts. New trees, fresh sod, a path that wasn't here a year ago.

Now there's a building at Rosewood Courts, and the shape is clear. The WOW Heritage Center opens this fall into a full program season, with young people already in the work. But a building is not a finished thing. It's a room waiting for the people who'll help decide what happens inside it.

An Emancipation Park interpretive kiosk at Rosewood Courts, with archival photographs of the Emancipation Park Association and an early Juneteenth celebration. — This ground was Emancipation Park. Austin's Black community gathered here for Juneteenth generations before we ever broke ground. We're building on land that already remembers.

So I'm opening my calendar. I'm calling them Dream with Me Sessions. Thirty minutes, in person, at the Center. Just you and me.

Here's how it goes. I'll walk you through where we're taking our programming and what this place becomes when it's fully alive. Then I want to hear you. React to it. Push on it. Tell me where you see yourself in it. The best things we've built came from people who didn't watch from the outside, they got their hands on it early.

The interior of the WOW Heritage Center during setup, track lighting installed and flooring materials still stacked on the floor. — An empty room is just a room. What goes in it, the programming, the direction, the priorities, is the conversation I want to have with you.

I'm being intentional about who's in these rooms. If you've walked with us before, or you've been watching and wondering what your place might be, this is the conversation. I want the people who help carry this forward to have their fingerprints on it from the start.

My mother also taught me that we've always made lemonade. The hard parts don't get sanded down, they get made into something worth tasting. That's the work now, and I'd rather do it with you in the room than for you at a distance.

Glass entrance doors of the WOW Heritage Center looking out onto the East Austin neighborhood across the street. — East Austin, right through the front doors. Come sit with me for thirty minutes and help shape what happens on this side of the glass.

Thirty minutes goes fast. Come with your questions and your instincts. I'll bring the vision. We'll see what we can build together.

If you'd like a time, reach out and we'll get you on the calendar.

Carl

E4 Youth builds a K-24 creative and technology talent pipeline anchored at Rosewood Courts in East Austin's African American Cultural Heritage District. Learn more at e4youth.org.