The Stocker Street Creative project is funded and run by a Chicago-based company called 4S Bay Partners LLC. Their goal is to build a community-focused creative campus consisting of entertainment, technology, and TV/film production studios for Black creatives.
Another goal of theirs is to create and boost the ecosystem for the surrounding Black communities as this campus is to be built right on Stocker Street.
With the help of the Pan African Film Festival, Pantheon Business Consulting LLC, among other partnerships, 4S Bay created a team of diverse Los Angeles natives to spearhead the project.
“I am president of Pantheon Business Consulting, and we focus on community opportunity, and we work with corporations,” said LA native Stan Washington. “They are interested in partnering with our community. We started working with 4S Bay Partners, whose primary focus is giving back and supporting communities of color.
The development team in charge of this project are all people of color and LA natives. The process of building this team was intentional to develop communities of color.
“This warranted us utilizing people in the community, and I’m excited to work with several talented individuals from Baldwin Hills, View Park, Crenshaw, and the surrounding areas,” Washington said. “We did not want to make the same mistake as other developers who came here. They don’t engage with the community until it’s time to check that box. We wanted to build a process that was inclusive and allowed us to earn the right to move forward with the project.
“Our objective has been to drive economic development through the entertainment industry as there is a significant amount of creatives in our community,” he said. “We want to have a part in driving the creative economy in Los Angeles and build a place for our creatives to thrive and develop their talent.
“This will be a working studio with 50 thousand square feet of sound stages that can be broken up to make smaller sound stages,” said Washington. “We will be allowed to do major Hollywood work, screening, and major work like the big studios.
“We envision a campus that is in strong collaboration with Hollywood,” he said. “Again, our goal is to have a major studio partnership that is in tune with our community needs. We would be talking about hiring, production support, training, funding, and other ways we can support the filmmakers. We want to be a leader in this space and how this discussion can continue in Hollywood.”
The Stocker Street Creative project is scheduled to be completed in 2024.
