Background
A life of advocacy and activism. Carole Zoom began her energetic career as a community organizer based out of Austin, Texas. With a passion arising from her own experience of growing up with muscular dystrophy, she served as the executive director of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities and voter access organizer for Lane Independent Living Alliance. She was also the associate organizer for the Industrial Areas Foundation and Oregon organizer for Stand For Children. Zoom received training in organizing from Aspen Fellow and MacArthur Genius Ernesto Cortez of the Industrial Areas Foundation, founded by Saul Alinsky.
Health crisis and a search for professional alternatives. In 1994, Zoom moved from Austin to Eugene, where she continued her organizing, founding and serving as the program director for DIVA, Eugene’s Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts, which aimed to revitalize downtown Eugene using the arts as a catalyst.
In 2001, Zoom experienced a life-threatening emergency and began a three-month intensive care stay, during which her medical team performed a tracheostomy that permanently equipped her with a ventilator breathing aid. When her ICU stay ended, Zoom realized that her health would not allow her to continue the demanding career she had maintained as a community organizer. As she says about her early retirement from professional organizing, “65 came at 36.” She decided to sell the house she had owned in Austin since the early 1990s (and maintained as an income property after her move to Eugene) and look for a way to use the proceeds to generate personal income while advancing the democratic community values she had pursued in her long and energetic professional career.
Developing Eugene’s Midtown Arts Center
A need-finding mission. Using her skills and experience in organizing, Zoom interviewed over 40 Eugene nonprofit leaders to understand the needs within the community. Through these interviews, she learned that the Eugene Ballet was housed in a desirable part of town but that, due to rental costs and space constraints, it was unable to direct its resources in a way that would allow it to grow as desired. As an organization, it had reached a state of maturity that made it ready for the stability of ownership but unable to bridge the transition to ownership without assistance.
Working with the ballet, Zoom offered to buy a building that had previously housed a Goodwill store and a furniture outlet. In it, the ballet could expand and, under reduced rent with an option to buy, acquire an asset. After the completion of a donor-funded build-out and a two-year capital campaign, the ballet purchased the remainder of the building from Zoom. Today, the building is known as Eugene’s Midtown Arts Center and houses the Eugene Ballet and other nonprofit organizations.
From Social Equity to Financial Equity
Latino, pacifists and working poor evicted in Austin. Even prior to the development of the Eugene project, Zoom had observed firsthand the daily struggle nonprofit organizations face when trying to advance their missions in the face of persistent risk of displacement from the spaces they occupy. While living in Austin, Zoom had admired a building in the Texas capital’s downtown, where Latino and peace organizations worked alongside a daycare facility for Austin’s working poor. After Zoom left Austin, she followed the fate of the building during the real estate boom and was saddened to see it torn down, the nonprofits evicted, and a hotel designed for the site. However, due to the collapse of the real estate bubble, the development could not secure funding to proceed. As a consequence, the site remains vacant, generating a meager stream of income through surface parking, while the programs provided by the Latino and peace organizations have had to disband and look for space anew.
“How does this possibly work?” Through her work as an artist, Zoom also recognized that artists often face the same displacement pressures as nonprofit organizations and too often find themselves in sub-optimal space. She once interviewed a group of recognized Portland dancers, presented by major presenters throughout the United States, and learned they were rehearsing in space with no heat in which they could make no noise during the work hours. “How does this possibly work for dancers?” Zoom asks.
Finally, during the real estate boom, Zoom observed how developers would cultivate artists to build social equity and establish the desirability of a neighborhood, only to be displaced once development interests sought to harvest the economic value in the neighborhood. Rarely does this financial return make its way to the artists who created the social equity on which successful developments are based. In an era when civic stakeholders talk extensively about engaging artists, artists respond that they cannot participate in the economy without the tools to do so, such as affordable workspace, with basic amenities such as heat.
Something new in Portland
Community need-finding. In 2006, Zoom moved to Portland, immersed herself in the city’s arts community as a practicing print-maker and photographer, and began an information-gathering process very similar to the one she conducted in Eugene. Zoom was surprised by the level of interest generated by her first invitation to a need-finding forum: to keep the first event manageable, she had invited 16 organizations, but 30 showed up, representing a broad range of nonprofit, social service, social justice, art, theater and dance.
Following the first event, Zoom convened interested parties several times to report on her conversations with the community and to solicit interest in joining the building. For the first six months, she worked closely with those groups interested in owning their own space. The onset of the recession in 2008 precluded many nonprofits from committing to join the building, but after completing the sale of Eugene’s Midtown Arts Center to the Eugene Ballet, Zoom proceeded with the development in Portland. She knew that the demand remained for affordable, high-quality, properly equipped shared space and for equity for artists and nonprofit tenants. She purchased the building at 810 S.E. Belmont in March of 2009 and proceeded with the development, working with Brix Contracting and Boora Architects.
A need for wheelchair-accessible dance space. During this process, Zoom heard from many that there was a need for dance rehearsal space that was wheelchair-accessible (ADA), shared and heated. The ability to create such a space was a primary reason for her purchase of the building at 810 S.E. Belmont, a former Honeywell alarm sales and operations center. Creating this space was particularly important to Zoom, who has attempted to perform and attend performances in Portland, only to find the performance space or the venue itself inaccessible to people in wheelchairs. Portland has four dancers in wheelchairs pursuing their craft who are unable to perform in local venues due to access restrictions. [In response to Zoom’s advocacy for better conformance to accessibility laws, the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC) has begun an assessment of venues in the region, using accessibility as a criterion for RACC grantees while also encouraging performers to select accessible venues for their performances.]