Pueblo Studio has roots in a place where people used storytelling to name their realities, define what they want for their future, and challenge a planning system that too often denies community members that power.
OUR STORY SHAPES OUR APPROACH.
OUR ORIGIN STORY
The inspiration for Pueblo Studio began with a community coming together to protect its future.
In 2005, our founder Shalem was invited to community meeting in Niland (their home community), a rural town in California’s Imperial County. There, neighbors learned that a multinational corporation planned to build a sewage-sludge incinerator in their community, importing waste from across Southern California into a region already suffering from poor air quality, high asthma rates, and elevated cancer risks.
Rather than accept a decision made without them, community members organized. They listened to one another’s stories, clarified what they stood for, and defined what they would not tolerate. Shalem co-authored a ballot initiative and together with the community they knocked on doors, registered voters, and built a grassroots media campaign. What began with a handful of people became a powerful, volunteer-led movement, and against the odds, the initiative passed with 68% of the countywide vote.
The victory was transformative, but it revealed a deeper truth. The planning systems shaping people’s lives were often inaccessible by design, filled with technical language, distant meetings, and foregone conclusions. Communities were expected to live with outcomes they were never invited to shape.
Outside those systems, something powerful was happening. Through storytelling, neighbors named their realities, asserted their values, and built a shared vision for their future. It became clear that planning is not neutral, and storytelling is not optional. It is how people claim power.
Over the next decade, Shalem worked in the nonprofit sector supporting environmental justice, economic justice, climate justice, transportation justice, and equitable access to public space. Everywhere, the pattern was the same. Those most impacted were still the least meaningfully included, even though collective storytelling had proven its power to drive real change.
