Building community: Intentionally designed spaces set up nonprofits for success

Aug. 17, 2022

This paid piece is sponsored by Interstate Office Products.

Until its new downtown location opened early this year, the Sioux Falls-area Native American community had few places to gather.

That changed in a big way with the opening of a second location for South Dakota Urban Indian Health, which also operates a clinic at 1200 N. West Ave.

The new space in the historic Rock Island Building at 300 N. Phillips Ave. offers healing of a different sort, CEO Michaela Seiber said.

“There’s no direct patient care here, but it’s support of a different sort,” she said. “There hasn’t been anything like this for a long time.”

When she secured a lease for the space last year, Seiber reached out to Interstate Office Products for help designing and furnishing it. She had worked with IOP previously and currently is working with the team to furnish an SDUIC clinic in Pierre.

Designers Abby Tufvesson and Marcia Young worked with Seiber to create a vision for the downtown office and then bring it to life.

“It was a fast mover. They got the building and were ready to turn it around quick,” Young said. “They had a clear vision from day one that this would be a place to spend time and learn, and be an all-inclusive space for Native Americans as well as the broader community.”

The designers helped Seiber settle on a “completely unique vibe for the space,” Young continued. “And it’s a fun one. They used their colors of red and gold and black, which is symbolic of their culture, and we worked that into the finishes.”

Combined with the office’s hardwood floors, big timber beams and large windows, it created a welcoming and impressive environment.

“It has just been awesome,” Seiber said.

“All of it together with the colors and options for furniture, people love it and love the unique things we could get for furnishings. I just told Marcia and Abby we wanted a lot of seating and furniture that could be moved around in different formations.”

The designers helped select fun, comfortable, versatile furniture both for employees who are based at the office and the many visitors who come for events and activities.

“It allowed them to create different settings, groups of seating, because everything is movable,” Tufvesson said. “You’re not locked into any floor plan.”

South Dakota Urban Indian Health uses the space for everything from twice-weekly beading groups to language and parenting classes, board meetings and support groups for those in recovery from addiction.

“We’ve also hosted community events, an art show, a recent discussion with a USD medical student, and we’re looking at more youth programming,” Seiber said.

“Every person who comes in for the first time says what a cool space it is and that is has such good energy. They’re always surprised how functional it is, and people drop in every day because they see our flags, they see the name and want to see what we have going on, so it’s turned into a great space for healing and connecting.”

The space includes a small library, large pads of paper on some of the tables for drawing or brainstorming and private areas for work or meetings as needed.

“It’s a fun gathering space,” Young said. “We appreciated how they were open to new ideas and unique furniture and how excited they were to see it all come together.”

The process from design through opening was a fast-moving one that resulted in exactly what Seiber wanted.

“I knew I could trust them to come up with all these different options, and it was so easy and so helpful,” she said.

“It’s incredibly important as we continue to evolve how we use the space, which is why we worked with Marcia and Abby about what we see happening in the future, so we weren’t boxed in with furniture. We’re definitely set up for whatever we need to go going forward.”

Return to work, focus on rural communities drives office renovation

By its nature, Dakota Resources works across a broad geography, offering community-based solutions and services across South Dakota.

“Pretty much since our inception we’ve had people on our team who live across the state, so remote work wasn’t new to us,” said Ellie Naasz, director of community impact.

“When COVID came, we all worked from home. And while it worked really well for our team, and there wasn’t really a need to be in the office every day, we knew we needed office space.”

As the pandemic allowed for more of a return to work, Dakota Resources decided to take a fresh look at its office in Renner.

Here’s a sense of what it looked like:

“We needed a new home for our team,” Naasz said. “We have a finance team that needed to work there and people from all over the state who do work at our office when they’re in town. So we knew we needed a space where people could work on a semi-consistent basis and really on a collaborative basis.”

Dakota Resources’ mission is to connect capital and capacity that empowers rural communities. As a community development financial institution, it works with economic development organizations statewide, assists with capital needs through direct lending and builds capacity in communities through leadership development and organization strategy.

“We needed to change the functionality of our space, Naasz said. “Instead of having a bunch of individual offices, we wanted a place where people could step in and have a meeting or collaborate while they were in town – something that was a welcoming and inviting place.”

With that in mind, Dakota Resources walked into the downtown Sioux Falls showroom of Interstate Office Products, where designer Erica Whalen helped create a plan.

“She’s a big thinker,” Naasz said. “We didn’t give a lot of direction, we just showed her our brand and said to think big with us, and she met that request, which was awesome.”

Whalen immediately connected with the organization’s mission.

“I live in a small community not far from Sioux Falls, and my dad is a farmer, so I understand the importance of rural life. And what’s most rewarding to me in working with them on this space is that the people working there are working for the good of South Dakota,” she said. “I want them to have a space that makes them want to go to work for these communities.”

Inspired by the bright colors used in Dakota Resources’ branding, she set out to create an office that was welcoming and inviting.

“We did a lot with a small space and really wanted it to become an attractive place,” she said. “In addition to two individual offices, there were two distinct areas for meeting and collaborating.”

In the entry, a couch and flex-frame piece allow for shelving that incorporates the brand and invites visitors into the space.

A larger area used as a training room now includes movable tables that can adjust for groups.

“We have a lot of collaborative meetings, and often we’d have to go off-site to find a space that could accommodate it,” Naasz said.

“With this, the tables and chairs are on wheels, so we can move around and configure the space, and there’s a large TV where you can meet online or in person, and we’ve used it for a virtual facilitator at one event, and it felt like we were all in the same space.”

Another space for meeting that functions as an “idea room” or “think room” includes more flexible furniture, including a Steelcase Media:scape multimedia conference table that allows multiple people to plug into the same monitor and swap whose screen is displaying.

“It’s just a matter of pushing a button to pull up a screen,” Whalen said. “So it’s flexible technology in addition to flexible furniture. You can be talking to someone on one screen and still have another screen pulled up, or you can have two ideas side by side, and you’re not minimizing one of them.”

The piece has been great for the organization’s in-person team, Naasz said.

“When we saw that table we felt like it was designed for us. It’s even in a semicircle, which is how we do a lot of our work,” she said. “We have the table on one side of the room and then a wall full of whiteboards on the other side, so we can easily share screens if you have virtual things you want to share.”

Brightly colored seating in the room also reflects the Dakota Resources branding.

“This was a fun one,” Whalen said. “You don’t get these projects every day ,and when you do, it recharges the creative battery a little bit.”

Working with Whalen and the IOP team was “amazing,” Naasz added. “Erica was able to take our values and the things that matter to us and really incorporate it into the design. She had great choices, and the whole team had great customer service and was so responsive to what we needed. I would work with them again in a heartbeat.”

The office now reflects what the organization represents, she continued.

“Our organization is very innovative. We’re always doing things differently, and our office didn’t reflect the kind of thought we put into our work. Now, our staff said it feels like a place they can invite people that shows the values of our organization, and it’s no longer a space to just drop stuff but a place they want to come work.”

Even with her own work, “before, our office wasn’t a space where I felt inspired or like I could get work done,” Naasz said. “And now, I’m excited to go there and it feels like a space where I want to spend time or invite people to join me.”

Are you ready to give your office the fresh look it deserves? Visit i-o-p.com, or call 605-339-0300.

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Building community: Intentionally designed spaces set up nonprofits for success

From a nonprofit with a new downtown location to an organization focused on supporting rural communities with a much-improved office, these designs are ones to see.

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