These didn't start as projects. They started as conversations where someone kept saying I can feel it but I can't name it. Then we named it. Then we built it. Then it ran without me in the room.
These aren't achievements. They're proof. That vision, held long enough with the right hands around it, becomes something people can walk into.
Not a straight line. A progression with hard turns, long investments, and a pattern that only became visible in retrospect.
Started in East Oakland as a spoken word performance company and creative youth platform. New Vision produced showcases, artistic development programs, and live events that gave young people a stage, a voice, and a vocabulary for their own experience. The work was cultural — but the infrastructure behind it was operational from day one.
The first proof that creative work could run on real systems — and that community could be built, not just gathered.
Launched iVisionary Academy to deliver youth leadership development programming across East Bay schools and community spaces. Secured $40,000 in grant funding, facilitated 100+ workshops, and grew a movement — #iVision — that reached 150,000+ young people across social and in-person channels. $25,000+ was distributed directly to youth participants through the program.
A replicable education model built on identity, vision, and leadership — that ran for years and left behind leaders, not just participants.
Formalized consulting work under The Cre8ive Genius LLC, advising founders, creatives, and community organizations on brand positioning, audience development, and operational systems. Applied the same systems thinking from education work to business strategy — building clarity and infrastructure for clients who had the vision but not the structure to move it forward.
25% average increase in client visibility; multiple local brands positioned for sustainable, self-sustaining growth.
Joined Impact Hub Oakland as Community Manager, building programming and operational infrastructure for one of the Bay Area's leading innovation and entrepreneurship hubs. When COVID-19 forced a shutdown in 2020, led the pivot to Evolve Oakland — a creator-focused production hub and business support model designed to keep local entrepreneurs earning when their physical doors couldn't open.
15+ businesses retained revenue through the shutdown period; a physical community became a scalable production and support infrastructure.
Co-founded BLOC Love Foundation in East Oakland to coordinate community care, resources, and mutual aid at scale. Built the volunteer infrastructure, event operations, and coordination systems that allowed a small team to mobilize 500+ volunteers across 100+ events while deploying $70,000 in direct community resources. Served as President and Board Chair from 2021–2024.
5,000+ community members served — a grassroots organization running with the systems discipline of something ten times its size.
Completed formal training through TripleTen's Business Intelligence and AI Automation program, then immediately applied it in production. Built end-to-end automation workflows using Zapier, Make, n8n, and Gemini AI — including a sentiment analysis pipeline that replaced a fully manual customer feedback review process and a data enrichment workflow that eliminated hours of weekly manual entry for a client's CRM.
The practice gained a technical layer — consulting that doesn't just diagnose the gap but builds the system that closes it.
After fifteen years of building the work under different titles, the practice got its name. Visioneering Audit launched as the signature diagnostic tool. BLOC LOVE formalized as the parent entity. The methodology that had been applied across four domains became something that could be documented, shared, and scaled.
The work stopped living in projects and started living in a practice.
Detailed work. What the situation was, what was built, and what changed.
Building the operational backbone of a grassroots community organization from zero to city-scale.
BLOC Love Foundation launched in 2019 to deliver community care and mutual aid in East Oakland. The mission was clear. The infrastructure wasn't. A growing volunteer base, an expanding event calendar, and real dollars moving through the organization — with no coordinated system to manage any of it. Operations were running on memory, group chats, and goodwill.
Designed and implemented a volunteer coordination system, event operations workflow, and resource distribution tracking process. Built intake and onboarding flows for new volunteers, established communication protocols that reduced day-of coordination overhead, and created financial tracking that made $70,000 in community resource deployment accountable and auditable.
500+ volunteers mobilized. 100+ events executed. 5,000+ community members served. $70,000 deployed directly to families in need. The organization went from reactive to operational — and the leadership team could focus on vision instead of logistics.
Pivoting a physical innovation hub into a revenue-sustaining creator economy infrastructure during COVID-19.
Impact Hub Oakland was a thriving physical space — coworking, events, community programming — when COVID-19 shut everything down in March 2020. The model depended on in-person presence. The members it served — founders, creatives, and local entrepreneurs — had no fallback. Revenue stopped. Community fractured. The question wasn't whether to pivot. It was whether the pivot could happen fast enough to matter.
Led the operational redesign from physical hub to Evolve Oakland — a creator-focused production and business support model. Built programming infrastructure for virtual events, digital content production support, and peer business advisory cohorts. Redesigned community engagement workflows to sustain connection and value delivery without a physical location.
15+ member businesses retained revenue streams through the shutdown period. A community that would have dissolved held together — and in some cases grew — because the operational model adapted faster than the crisis.
Replacing a fully manual customer feedback process with an end-to-end automated sentiment analysis and routing system.
A client was manually reviewing every piece of incoming customer feedback — reading, categorizing, routing, and responding to hundreds of data points per week. The process was slow, inconsistent, and impossible to scale. Analysis that should have been informing decisions was arriving too late to act on. The bottleneck wasn't people — it was a system that hadn't been built yet.
Built an end-to-end automation pipeline using Zapier and Gemini AI. Incoming feedback triggers automated sentiment analysis, which classifies tone and urgency, then routes responses to the appropriate team member or queue based on predefined rules. High-urgency items surface immediately. Routine feedback is batched and summarized. The human stays in the loop for decisions — not data entry.
Manual feedback review eliminated. Response routing time dropped from hours to minutes. The team shifted from processing information to acting on it — and the client gained a real-time visibility layer into customer sentiment that hadn't existed before.
Shorter-form work — programs, builds, and engagements that don't need a full case study to speak for themselves.
Youth leadership development program serving East Bay schools and community spaces. Facilitated 100+ workshops, built the #iVision movement, and reached 150,000+ young people across in-person and digital channels.
2011–2017Spoken word performance company and creative youth leadership platform founded in East Oakland. Produced showcases, artistic development programs, and live events that built a pipeline from street-level creativity to structured leadership.
2009–2014East Oakland community care and mutual aid organization. Mobilized 500+ volunteers, executed 100+ events, and deployed $70,000 in direct resources to 5,000+ community members.
2019–PresentMulti-year citywide platform showcasing emerging Bay Area artists and youth creatives. Built the event infrastructure, artist pipeline, and community partnerships that made it a recurring platform rather than a one-off production.
2013–2019Black entrepreneur business incubator and co-working initiative supporting early-stage founders in Oakland. Designed the operational and programming model that gave entrepreneurs a structured space to build.
2022–2023End-to-end automation replacing manual customer feedback review. Incoming data triggers sentiment analysis via Gemini AI, then routes by urgency and category — high-priority items surface in minutes, routine feedback is batched and summarized automatically.
2025Specific wins. Stated plainly.
Secured $140,000 in grant funding to sustain iVisionary Academy's youth leadership programming across the East Bay. $25,000+ was distributed directly to program participants — youth doing the work. An additional $40,000 went to creative entrepreneurs — not overhead, not administration. Into the hands of people building something real.
2012–2018Built the volunteer coordination and operations infrastructure that allowed BLOC Love Foundation to mobilize 500+ volunteers, execute 100+ events, and get $70,000 in resources directly into the hands of East Oakland families — with a small core team and no large institutional backing.
2019–2024Through iVisionary Academy workshops, the #iVision movement, and multi-year touring programming, reached more than 150,000 young people across in-person and digital channels — building leadership identity at scale before "reach" was a metric anyone was counting.
2012–2018Through strategic brand positioning and audience development consulting, drove a measurable 25% average increase in visibility across client engagements — founders and organizations that had the work but hadn't yet built the infrastructure to be seen for it.
2016–PresentBuilt an end-to-end automation that replaced a fully manual customer feedback review process. Incoming submissions are analyzed for sentiment and urgency by Gemini AI, then routed automatically — high-priority items surface within minutes, routine feedback is batched and summarized. Zero manual sorting required.
2024Led the operational redesign of Impact Hub Oakland into Evolve Oakland during the 2020 shutdown — building virtual programming infrastructure, digital production support, and peer advisory cohorts that kept 15+ member businesses generating revenue when their physical operations were shuttered.
2020–2021Whether you're considering an engagement, reviewing this for a hiring decision, or exploring collaboration, the next step is the same.
Eugene "Ace" Johnson · [email protected] · East Oakland, CA