Black Flag Building Workshop

Common Grounds Studio

The work that happens off the clock: boards, the river, food, and getting people together outside.

Buildings are one way a community takes care of itself. Most of the rest happens in board meetings, on trails and riverbanks, and around a table. Common Grounds Studio is the part of Black Flag that shows up for that work, outside any contract.

Ongoing

Executive Board
Local Roots Market & Cafe Wooster's community-owned food cooperative.
Board
Friends of the Mahoning River Getting people onto the river as each new stretch of it opens up.
Resident Leader
Healthy Community Partnership Healthy Food Action Team.
Reviewer
Peer review A second set of eyes on other architects' drawing sets.

Gatherings

Walk September 2026

Mushroom walk, Poland Municipal Forest

A guided morning walk for Wild You, families and kids together. We looked at what grows on dead wood, turned things over, and talked through how you actually tell one mushroom from another. Everyone went home with a cup of living wine cap spawn and a card on how to plant it, how not to poison yourself, and where to go next.

Seen from behind, a group of adults and children walks a wide gravel trail under a green tree canopy, one adult carrying a small child.
Into the woods.
Bob crouches beside a child in a white shirt and small grey backpack, both looking down at a large tan mushroom in the leaf litter.
Eye level.
A hand holds a pale cream coral fungus, many short branches rising from a base still packed with soil, the forest behind.
A coral fungus, dug up whole.
A dark branch held out at arm's length, its bark covered in overlapping wavy orange shelf fungi, green woods out of focus behind.
One branch, covered.
A stack of books on a truck tailgate: a sketchbook, the Peterson field guide to mushrooms, Symbiotic Planet, The Mushroom at the End of the World, Staying with the Trouble and two books by Paul Stamets, with two dried bracket fungi in front.
The reading list, on the tailgate.
Printed card titled Wine Cap, Stropharia rugosoannulata, with six numbered steps for planting the spawn in a bed of hardwood chips and a warning never to eat a mushroom you cannot name with certainty.
Back of the card, titled Going Further: field guides, reading on fungi and ecology, and tools for identifying and recording what you find.

Next

Shared meals, talks and hands-on workshops, held wherever there's room. If you run a space, a garden, a kitchen or a stretch of river and want to host one, get in touch.