COMMUNITY BUILDING

Founder, Roseville UX
2019-2021

Founded, launched, and scaled a design community, helping advance the careers of over 600 designers.

The opportunity

In June 2019, I moved away from the Bay Area and found the design field less saturated with designers. Working remotely, I sought to find a Sacramento UX group and discovered the ones that had existed were no longer operational. 

I built my network of coworking space owners and professors at UC Davis, Sac State, and City College of Sacramento who helped me get the word out. Soon enough, I had a strong team of 6 volunteers, a website, and a regular meeting cadence.

The pandemic

During the pandemic, we shifted gears to virtual sessions, receiving sponsorship from Sketch and gaining larger audiences every month. We grew over 4x, from 100 to over 600 members during 2020. At that point, our operations and yearly speaker series ran efficiently, and we consistently got positive feedback for our events. 

Joining forces

After the pandemic, there was a heart-to-heart with the core community group to bring back local events, and several folks were also part of different creative orgs.

Due to a regional grant and that we can go further together, I merged Roseville UX with three other local creative orgs to form a regional non-profit called the Capitol Creative Alliance and served as the Board Vice President for two years, ensuring continued user experience content as part of our speaker series, and developing our new volunteer onboarding process.