Episode 31: The Crucible

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A transcript, lightly edited for clarity and length, follows.

Show Guests: Susan Mernit, Executive Director and Janet Hayes, Teaching Artist & Instructor, Glass, Flame-working of The Crucible

Voices of the Community Introduction: Welcome to voices of the community which explores critical issues facing Northern California communities. We introduce you to the voices of community thought leaders and change makers who are working on solutions that face our fellow individual community members neighborhoods cities and our region. This is George Koster your host. 

Series Introduction: This episode is part of our series exploring COVID-19’s impact on nonprofits and small businesses in San Francisco. We started the series back in April 2020 during the height of the first phase of the Covid 19 pandemic and the Shelter In Place requirements. Over these past nine months, the Covid-19 pandemic and economic meltdown have wiped out millions of jobs in both the nonprofit and small business sectors as well as shuttered tens of thousands of small business operations.

The goal of the series is to shine a spotlight on the nonprofits, small businesses, and their staff who are struggling to deal with the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic on their operations, services and sustainability. The series of interviews we conducted features voices from a cross-section of organizations that make up the fabric of our community.  Each of them brings a unique perspective on how they and we are dealing with the issues facing our community during the global pandemic and economic depression.

Show Guest Susan: I think that we've really found each other. What we've seen is that holding together as a community is really, really critical and that making an investment in the people in the building so that they can stay in the area and do their artwork is really part of fulfilling our mission. It's about supporting young people and supporting access to the arts and careers, but it's also about the people doing the teaching.  

Episode Intro - Show Host George: IIn this episode, we are focused on our Making Community and our featured voices are Susan Mernit the Executive Director of The Crucible along with Janey Hayes a Glass Artists who is one of the Teaching Artists and Instructors at The Crucible.

The Crucible is a unique platform that enables the Maker Movement which is made up of tens of thousands of Bay Area students, hobbyists, artists, and enthusiasts to discover and pursue their passion for the Industrial Arts. During the Covid-19 pandemic the need for Making and the community it helps foster are even more important to our sense of belonging and supporting the post-pandemic recovery

Show Host George: I'm joined remotely via zoom by Susan Mernit, the Executive Director of The Crucible and Janet Hayes, a Teaching Artist and Instructor in the Glass, Flame working department. And Janet is also a glass artist at The Crucible. Thanks for being here, Janet and Susan.

Susan let's start with, what is The Crucible and how does the crucible work with artists and manufacturers and, you have a wonderful program tied into Oakland Unified Schools?

Show Guest Susan: Susan: So, The Crucible is an industrial arts, nonprofit. We are at the corner of union and seventh in West Oakland. We've been there for almost 20 years [00:01:00] and we have all of the exciting arts like welding and glassblowing and Foundry and flame working as well as things like ceramics and textiles and leather. Our digital fab. It's a rich community of many kinds of artists. And our mission is to make the industrial arts accessible to everyone, regardless of income.

So, it's both a place where people have come in as hobbyists and become professionals and a place where young people come in more than 5,000 every year, pre COVID and get exposure to these arts and have a chance to take camps and classes where some of them really, this becomes their thing. We have, forty-five schools we've worked with every year, including a number of title one schools.We get funding from the City of Oakland to help support field trips and visits, which we're now turning into virtual visits. And we see a lot of young people come in as teenagers who end up going into the trades, becoming makers and becoming connected to us as staffers, instructors, and volunteers.

George: So much of what you also do with the schools, is you have that a really wonderful summer program as well, you’re also working on, trying to set up internships or apprenticeships with employers and really trying to reboot, the idea of apprenticeships and trades. Can you talk a little bit about that?  

Susan: Absolutely. So, The Crucible has a very, solid youth program called the Fuego Youth Leadership program for young people, ages 15 to 18, who were interested in the industrial arts can really do a deeper concentration for summer. We pay them both to teach other young people and to learn. They do projects, it's a two-year program where they really get to take an interest in a discipline like jewelry making or welding or blacksmithing and really go deep with a mentor and learning the skills, but then also teach that to other people. In the second year of Fuego they actually do a commercial commission. So, we've done artwork for places like Schnitzwer Steel for their lobby, or for CASS Metals for their offices using scrap materials and designing and building pieces. So, we've had this discussion for a long time. How do we take that work with people that age? And turning into more of a career pathway for older youth. 

We really are well aware of how Oakland Unified and the Community Colleges have the intention of helping young people go into the trades, but they're not always that successful. And what we see with young people at the Crucible is when you learn how to weld, for example, by making art, you are, learning the same skills, that you can get paid for in, cutting metal or closing a seam or doing any kind of work.

But you have this contextual motivation where the art is so exciting and it's so powerful. It makes you want to learn. So, we've been engaged in this process for about a year of saying, how do we take that awareness and build a program. And George its actually interesting, because I think one of the things that happened with the pandemic is, we actually backed into an apprenticeship program without planning to, and that was kind of amazing. When we were looking at reopening to do youth programs in July, with the support of Alameda County Department of Public Health, we knew we had to really up our cleaning and our facilities management. We are a 56,000 square foot warehouse. So, spreading out wouldn't be hard, but really maintaining the level of cleanliness.

And the rigor of masking was something we knew how to put effort into. So, we created this new role called a Studio Operations Assistant. Which was a lower skilled studio manager, someone who might not know how to weld a box to store metal or didn't how to like to take off the dust out of the wood filters in the wood shop, but really could do well with things like cleaning. We ended up filling those positions with young people who were very interested in working with industrial arts, fields, a young person who took a leave from CCA, someone who was a glass artist, who was a former Fuego Youth, a longtime volunteer who wanted to get more into hands-on high-level maintenance work.  

And those people did so well that two of them converted to full-time staff positions. But we still needed to have the apprentices, help clean. So, we've restocked, and now we have three Fuego Youth who all are working as Studio Assistants. What we're doing now is we're training them and things like welding, like working in the machine shop and learning a lot of the shop ready skills. because it will both help them with future jobs and really enhance their capacity to do higher level work at The Crucible. And it's been really interesting because they kind of said, wow, like what if we more intentionally built this as a training pathway. Where they would train with us and get a certain level of facility with core skills and metal, wood, quality assurance and safety, and then we can place them with other employers. So, we're now about to start to, talk with the actual youth that we've been working with over the past six months, about what are aspects of the program you'd like to see us intensify and we've been working with some partners around the potential for placement. 

So, I think our goal for 2021 is to take this, Studio Operations Assistant role, and really turn it into an apprenticeship pathway. Because we've been able to retain the young people in these roles. for six to ten months, people have been very enthusiastic. We've promoted two people into full-time higher paying staff roles, and it seems like something that's really viable and they can meet a lot of needs for employers. The other thing we're doing, which is also a COVID pivot is, it's been very hard to have the pipeline of young people coming from the Oakland unified schools, the high school students who were coming stopped coming because COVID, but what we realized is that we had some areas that we could grow, where we could really work with community partners to reach the same youth even if they couldn't be delivered by their teachers, they could come in through community organizations.  

So, we've really made a big investment in our bike shop with the idea that a really important growth area for community economic development and entrepreneurship are bikes. Bikes, address, safety around COVID and transportation bikes, address issues with climate change mitigation and not using cars. Bikes address issues with transportation equity and The Crucible has over 75 bikes in our inventory at any given time. We have a bike repair program. We have an earn a bike program for young people from the neighborhood who come in and make bikes. So, we said, what if we actually made a career pathway out of bikes? 

So, during the shutdown, we moved our bike shop to a better location, expanded it. So, we now have five bike stations operating at one time. People to work being socially distant. And we're now really ramping up bikes and the summer when we do our Fuego Youth Leadership for the first time, we'll have two to three youth whose concentration is bikes. So, it won't be concentration welding building an art bike as a welding project. It will be, I want to work on bikes. We're partnering with groups like the Bikery and Cycles of Change and the Department of Transportation in Oakland to really kind of look at how we can do certifications around bike repair and by training, and help youth actually get placements.

So, this is going to be a 12-to-18-month project. It's not going to happen in the next six months, but we're really on our way. And we've started the youth bike maintenance workshops that we'll be teaching a young people 13 and up how to repair and maintain bikes. And that's really the first path toward then building this, bigger program. So, we're pretty excited about that.

George: So essentially sounds like two career paths have been birthed out of the COVID-19, shutdown.  Over the decades, The Crucible's been, the core center if you will, of the manufacturing community, what do you feel has been the biggest impact the Crucible's had to makers manufacturers, these, traditional industrial skills, training programs for Oakland and the San Francisco Bay are you community?  

Susan: I think without ever intending to The Crucible has such a long history as a place where people have learned to work with fire arts in particular, with welding, with fire performance, building fire effects like flame throwers in a safe way, doing blacksmithing pouring metal in the Foundry. These arts in particular are so unique that you look at so many of the Burning Man artists who have burst into prominence in the past 15 years. And you look at a lot of the LED light artists who started with actual fire and then moved to LED, and most of them have some pretty substantial connection to The Crucible. 

They learned that The Crucible, they had a mentor from The Crucible, they studied at The Crucible, they were part of The Crucible community and those ripples have really expanded, outward. And that's really kind of our legacy from the past 15 or 20 years. I think in the past 10 years, there has been a much greater intentionality of how do we help young people in Oakland and people who are not part of the Burning Man community also have access to these skills and learn these skills.

And I think that what we see with that is with the 85, Fuegos we've trained, there's a really substantial proportion who've gone on to work in local shops doing cabinet work, work as welders in small independent shops, doing fabrication work as blacksmith assistance, helping people who are doing things like making railings for a winery. So, there's, this whole artesian layer of craftspeople in the Bay area, who we have a very steady procession of people who learned skills and training, and then go to those shops and become trained further. 

And that's where I think there's really a potential for us to grow that pipeline because typically those kinds of shops have a huge shortage of workers. And they're looking for people who have low to mid-level skills, not high-level skills, and often they can't really find them.  

George: So here we are at the end of the year, people who are watching or listening to this, how can they help, The Crucible, I know you guys do your annual gift fair coming up. Talk about that a little bit. Do you have, a special, end of the year fundraiser that you're running? How can people help?  

Susan: So, one of the things that The Crucible loss that was very painful was our annual soiree, where we raised $150,000 each year for youth scholarships. Up until COVID 64% of the 5,000 young people participating in our programs, got a financial subsidy. We're very, very much about not letting income be an obstacle to participate in our programs and without the soiree, we've lost all that money. So, we're very, very interested in fundraising to get that money back so that we can really bring youth into our programs this summer. We're running youth programs right now, a lot of kids, are doing a remote learning only and are coming to The Crucible for really badly needed safe group experiences. And our capacity to give scholarships has become more limited because that pool of money has become more limited. 

So, we're launching our fundraising campaign for end of year on November 30th. And we would love for people to think about making us one of the organizations that you give to. Fifty Dollars can make a huge difference in buying equipment and PPP materials. Two Hundred and Fifty Dollars can really help subsidize a blacksmithing class or a neon class or a welding class, which are some of the more, expensive materials wise for a young person. Once we get a young person into our programs, we try to keep giving them repeat scholarships. So, some of the people who are on staff with The Crucible now, who came in as youth, literally took 13 to 20 classes for free during their high school years. You know, this was a place where they found themselves and it was transformative for them. 

And now they're working artists and working fabricators. So, helping us to fund that is very much, what we say is the heart of our mission and going to our site and clicking on the donate links. that would be fantastic. Another thing we're doing, which is something very important to me is we're trying to help the artists in our community, not be pushed out by gentrification displacement, and the really brutal impacts of COVID on their jobs and their income. So, we've also launched a food bank, a community relief fund. And now we're doing a virtual gift fair called GIFTY. So, a lot of the artists who would come every year and be in our big building, be selling we've now moved them online and they're selling online. You can support them directly by buying from their shops.

We also have a program that we're doing called Giving Back at GIFTY, where many of the artists have donated an item to The Crucible. And if you buy the item in Giving Back at GIFTY, a hundred percent of the money will go to The Crucible. So, it's another way to shop for holiday gifts and also support one of the organizations that not only is one of the largest employers of artists in the Bay Area, but really dedicated to helping working class artists. Survive thrive and not get pushed out.  

George: So, Susan, where can people go to participate in the virtual GIFTY show?  

Susan: Everything is linked on the front page of our website. If you go to the crucible dot org you'll get to our main page and you'll see the links for GIFTY our virtual gift show, Giving Back at GIFTY and our end of year campaign. We're also running classes. So, if you're interested in taking classes, whether it's a three-hour taster, just trying something out or it's a longer class, you can also sign up for classes and you can also sign up to be notified if there's a class that you want later in the year, find out when it becomes available. 

George: Final question, out of the pandemic economic meltdown, what are some of the positive things that you can see coming out of that that would really help support, all of our makers and manufacturers and working artists, that make up the ecosystem of The Crucible? 

Susan: I think that we've really found each other. What we've seen is that holding together as a community is really, really critical and that making an investment in the people in the building so that they can stay in the area and do their artwork is really part of fulfilling our mission. It's about supporting young people and supporting access to the arts and careers, but it's also about the people doing the teaching. 

And I think that things like having a food bank and a food program for people who teach at The Crucible, I hope we never stopped doing that. I hope we never stop supporting people who might have to make a decision between paying their rent and eating ramen noodles. Everybody should have access to healthy food, and everybody should not have to fight for that. 

So, I think it's really changed the consciousness of a lot of people, at The Crucible about how we need to care for each other and how we need to really support each other, not only through COVID, but, in all the rapidly changing landscapes we see in the Bay area.  

George: Thank you. That was great. I'm going to turn to Janet a Teaching Artist and Instructor in the Glass Flame working department She's also a glass artist at The Crucible Janet, if you could please provide the audience a little background on yourself as an artist and maker, and then how you became a teacher at The Crucible?

Show Guest Janet: Thanks George. It's great to be here. I'm one of many artists at The Crucible who, made a mid-career switch out of office work into artwork. And I never lived anywhere in my life and I lived all over the world. Never lived anywhere where there was a facility like The Crucible. Where you could work with metal and glass and ceramics and learn things that require dangerous, super-hot tools and facilities that have to be maintained by people with professional expertise.

When I went to summer camp, we did tie dye t-shirts and chalk drawings. So, I never imagined I could do something like, anyone in the greater Bay area could do. If they come to The Crucible and take a class. When I was in my early forties, I had a premature baby, and I had a very stressful job and my child needed to be home full-time and either I or my spouse needed to be with him to support him as he was developing.

We lived in Boston. It was a very brutal winter and, kind of like what we're all going through with COVID. We were really isolated. And at the end of this year, I left my job we moved to California, but it's tiny child who was suddenly beginning to grow and we had confidence. He would survive and be okay. And I was pretty much in an anxiety nightmare. And after, being isolated for a year except for doctors and hospitals, I really just kind of didn't know who I was anymore, except this person who took care of this tiny life. And my husband about exactly 10 years ago in November kind of forced me to do something on my own for a weekend.

And that ended up being a glass blowing, working class at The Crucible. And I was so worried about leaving my tiny child. My mental health was so fragile at that point. I actually sat in the parking lot at The Crucible in the rain, and I cried for half an hour because I couldn't imagine spending a weekend away from my baby. You know, he might die the house might burn down something terrible would happen. So, I decided I would go in, I take this crazy class and I leave at lunch, I just say I wasn't feeling well thanks and I just go home, and I would kind of satisfy my husband's, need to get me out of the house. So, I dried my tears I went inside, I started learning this amazing craft. And I thought maybe I can make it until the rest of the day was done, then just maybe not have to come back on Sunday. So, I stayed for the rest of the day. I started learning something that was both really hard and really relaxing because when you're looking at a 3000-degree flame, nothing else can fill your mind.

You are focused on the work directly in front of you. And suddenly in the midst of all of this uncertainty, something starts to take shape and it might be something wacky and drippy and sloppy. It might be something beautiful and wonderful. But from these elements that maybe you never thought of, how they were shaped or formed or colored or stretched or turned into something exquisitely, delicate and beautiful just through this effort of will something happened. And I came back the next day for the second part of the class and I never stopped.

I continued to return. It became a joke in my house that it was cheaper than therapy and it was doing something really amazing to my sense of my identity and my mental health. And I suddenly realized that things that I thought were impossible were possible. And not only that, but there's an entire community of people who are interested in helping me and others make those same discoveries and there's an excitement and an energy around, people sharing techniques, sharing, material, sharing ideas, and some of the ideas are nutty completely nutty.

And you may have seen some of them at burning man or at other places, you know, huge structures or tiny, tiny little worlds inside a marble. And the world that I had been living, with just suddenly fell away and the things that I was so consumed with, you know, office work and deadlines and typos and things. were replaced by other concerns. And it gave me a sense of, possibility that I hadn't had before. So, I went from being a student to being a volunteer and then eventually being invited to serve on the faculty.  

George: Thank you. that was great. So how has COVID-19 impacted, your work Janet, as both an instructor, there at The Crucible, but as a working artist as well? 

Janet: Well, in March, when the entire County was shut down, very abruptly, The Crucible classes stopped in the middle of a Saturday afternoon and, many of us didn't return for months. So, what immediately happened was, the artists and the students stopped seeing one another in person. Many artists, immediately after that, we're struggling to make their art. A lot of us do art that can't be done, you know, at the kitchen table, we need access to equipment. We need to be able to be mobile, to go buy materials, to move the equipment, maybe from one big facility to another facility, some of us work in studios outside of our home in addition to The Crucible. So suddenly mobility stopped community kind of went online and, we're not the sort of makers who can make stuff on zoom. You know, I can't do a demo for you right here in my living room. So, it was a huge interruption. And of course, our students lost access to the classes, that were sustaining to them as well. And then our corporate community last access to the team builds and the other events that, kind of bring art into the STEM community, which has been another part of our work.  

George: Janet over the years being, part of The Crucible, teaching staff, would you share with the audience one of your favorite moments of both being an artist, but also, teaching? And what you feel has been one of the biggest impacts of The Crucible on the community?

Janet: Something happens, I think at a place like The Crucible, when you bring together youth, particularly, kids between around 12 to 18, who are the ones in my studio the flame working studio, they come from all backgrounds. They might go to a private school in Walnut Creek, or they might be from our West Oakland neighborhood community and they're going to be together in our studios. And if they're beginners, none of them know any of these skills or vocabulary or techniques, and they're all starting at the same level. It's radically equality. There are no advantages to having, you know, a French tutor because your parents can afford it.

There are no advantages to being a really strong jock when it comes to, you know, working in glass sculpture. So, the, sort of social hierarchies that teens might be familiar with just don't exist in the studio. And that I think keeping those diverse communities together allows them to see each other as unique and three-dimensional people. It allows students to experience, the thrill of expertise when they get something, when they learn a technique, when they're able to teach somebody else, and it might be somebody older than there, it might be a 12-year-old who's teaching a 16-year-old, or it could be someone from an affluent family who has to ask for help.

So, there's a real kind of equalizing force. It's true in all of our studios, whether it's blacksmithing or welding or ceramics, when you're doing something for the first time, we're all beginners and it’s just a beautiful thing to watch that, watch the children grow with the teens grow individually, but also as a community. I think my favorite experience was early on in my teaching career when, I was teaching a class that included an 18-year-old young man with autism. And he, was having difficulty communicating linguistically, but he was able to repeat all of my instructions to me. And he was able to understand all of the technical aspects of the craft far more than any of the other students.

And he created exquisitely beautiful artwork. And on the final day, we have a little gallery showing for the wrap-up of our youth camps. The last day of the week of camp, he brought his, social worker who's in charge of, you know, moving him around and driving him to his appointments. The social worker came and was blown away by the artwork that the student was able to do. And he returned several times for more classes after that. So, it was just phenomenal that to watch a world open up for this individual.  An opportunity that wouldn't have been possible without a place like The Crucible. It was the perfect combination of the technical scientific skills and information that he could grasp easily combined with, you know, manual dexterity that he was just discovering he had. And it was wonderful to see that blossom.

George: That was a really great story. I want to ask how can someone who's listening or watching this help artists such as yourself? Is there a place to donate?  

Janet: Well, for The Crucible in particular, there's so many ways to be involved. The simplest way is to become a member and that's an annual fee. We have membership levels from individual up to family and into a kind of donor tier. And it's very easy access for under a hundred dollars. You can become a member for a year and members get a lot of perks, like early registration access for our classes.

As well as wonderful email newsletters that has interesting information about The Crucible community, but also about the broader West Oakland community and the Bay Area Scene. I love our newsletters.  I would encourage people when they feel safe to take a class at the crucible or to gift a class, to buy a gift certificate for a loved one to take a class. That's how I got started, when my spouse gifted me with a class.

There's, also art for sale, we're having our virtual holiday gift shop, is online and its links to about 80 different artists. Not all of them are employed by The Crucible, but they're all part of our extended arts community. And many of them have been selling their art at The Crucible for the last decade or more. So that's a very meaningful way to support the arts community, the making community, and to bring something beautiful into your home, or have something totally unique in handmade to give us a gift.

George: I think one of the other really interesting parts of this whole experience is from an artist perspective, what would you like to see come out of the proverbial economic meltdown and pandemic, that would help artists and teachers such as yourself? 

Janet: Wow, there's so many things come to mind. I think that, throughout the Bay area, we've seen the kind of maker community get hit really hard in the last few years, economically with, displacement, with housing. Artists, have come from all different backgrounds, all different, we're all different ages we're all different identities, but we need spaces where we can come together in community and make art.

 And we also need to share our art forms. What I do Glass Blowing working is not something that I could necessarily, do in a public high school for example. So, we need spaces where they can be supported by the public where young people can come to learn so we can continue to pass on, these art forms.

I think COVID is helping us understand that we can do our work safely. And The Crucible has done an amazing job adapting, but it's difficult to do it sustainably because we have so fewer students in our classes, of course our overall building capacity is much lower, but we do have the ability to work very safely.

And I think, through some heroic efforts by our fundraisers and our programs team and our office team, and then most of all, the young people who actually clean and maintain our studios. We've been able to stay open and I think we actually have a lot to teach other parts of the community about how you can still come together safely in community, but at a distance, you know, socially distancing and being really mindful about, what we're doing and how we're doing it. 

George: Thank you, Janet. That was really great. I appreciate all of your insights and thanks, to you Susan and Janet for sharing The Crucible's work today, we'll make sure that all the viewers and listeners have your contact information website and social media, so they can continue to follow you and get engaged in supporting The Crucible's mission. Please stay safe and healthy out there as we work our way through the crazy new normal!  

Susan: The crazy new normal. I love it.   

Janet: Thank you, George. It was great being here and talking to you.  

Episode Outro - Show Host George: That’s it for this episode of voices of the community. You have been listening to the voices of Susan Mernit, the Executive Director of The Crucible and Janet Hayes, a Teaching Artist and Instructor in the Glass, Flameworking department of The Crucible

To find out more about the Crucible and to sign up for a class, along with participating in their virtual holiday gift fair Gifty and Giving Back at Gifty which goes until December 20th go to the crucible dot org         

Series Outro: We hope that you enjoy the insights, points of view, and personal stories from the voices of change-makers and their nonprofits and small businesses featured in this series. To find out more and get engaged with the nonprofits, small businesses and staff members, featured in this series please go to my web site george koster dot com and click on Voices of the Community to find links to the extended versions of these interviews and to listen to the entire series. After listening to these stories we hope that you will consider making a donation and volunteering to provide a hand up to your fellow community members.

Series Credits: I want to thank my associate producer Eric Estrada, along with Mel, Michael, and Lila at the San Francisco Public Press and KSFP. To listen to our next episode in this series and to our archived past shows which feature community voices working on solutions to critical issues facing Northern California communities, please go to george koster dot com. While you are on our website please consider making a donation to help us provide future shows just like this one. Please subscribe to Voices of the Community on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or where ever you get your podcasts. Follow us on twitter @georgekoster and please email us with feedback and show ideas at george@georgekoster.com. I'm George Koster in San Francisco and thank you for listening.

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