If you step into the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity (the Hive) on a bright Claremont afternoon, there’s a hum that feels distinct from any other space at the 5Cs.
In the Toolbox, students are building something from scratch. In the Sewing Shed, laughter spills over the sound of fabric being cut. A new podcast episode drifts out of the Soundbox studio. A few steps away, someone is sketching a poster for a friend’s game; another group is bending discarded silverware into handmade rings. Perhaps there’s a club meeting in Studio 1 or a class in Studio 2.
True to its nickname, the Hive buzzes with creative activity. Though located on Pomona College’s campus, it welcomes everyone in the 5C community. Any student — whether artist, engineer, writer or entrepreneur — can drop in to use the Hive’s makerspaces, studios, tools and workshops.
These resources, which range from woodworking to audio recording to intuitive painting, serve the Hive’s broader ethos of “help[ing] students increase their creative capacity and practice collaboration across differences … transform[ing] the way liberal arts education is delivered.”
Yet, the Hive wasn’t always this alive.
It began as part of Pomona’s broader effort to invest in creativity and innovation across campus. Then-President David Oxtoby and a small group of faculty drafted an initiative exploring what might happen if the Claremont Colleges shared a space dedicated entirely to hands-on, interdisciplinary collaboration. That’s how the Hive started.
The space opened in 2015 after a $25 million gift from Rick Sontag HM ’64 and Susan Sontag PO ’64. What had formerly been the Seeley G. Mudd Science Library was rebuilt into a more flexible, lively space: open classrooms, endless supplies and corners turned into beanbag nooks.
The Hive was first imagined as an attempt to expand students’ creative spirit through a shared home. Here, students from across the 5Cs could collaborate across disciplines and experience hands-on education outside the traditional classroom.
“The Hive began as an experiment,” Fred Leichter, the Hive’s executive director since 2016, said. “We wanted a place where students could say yes to their ideas, where they could learn by doing and not be afraid to fail.”
This unique space unfolded into a memorable, much-loved stalwart of the Claremont Colleges community. Now, 10 years later, Leichter looked back not only at the building, but at the people shaped by it.
“What stands out to me most is the kinds of things that students have gone on to do now that we have 10 years to say, ‘oh, they did inspiring work as students and now they’re out,’” Leichter said.
These alumni, who range from healthcare designers to social innovators, stand as proof of what the Hive was built to do: create confident problem-solvers who lead with empathy.
“Our mission is to be a space that fosters creativity and collaboration,” Leichter said. “But we think of that on three levels.”
The first level is simple: walk in and make something. Students from all five colleges can wander in, grab materials and start experimenting, studying or collaborating.
This collaboration then extends to the second level: the rhythm of workshops and community events, the true heart of the Hive.
“The range is from making a ring out of a piece of silverware to hearing from an entrepreneur about how they did their startup and what lessons they have,” Leichter said.
The Hive’s programming spans the spectrum of curiosity. From Tiny Patio Concerts to startup salons and printmaking nights, it invites students to try something new every time and see what happens when they do it together. This same principle defines the third level of the Hive’s mission: the academic level, where innovation and creativity enter a classroom setting .
“We teach classes in human-centered design,” Leichter said. “It’s actually a Harvey Mudd [College] engineering class, but it has students from all five colleges with different majors doing projects for real-world organizations or causes and trying to make a thing and put it into the world and see how it works.”
Through Hive-led courses and collaborations, students have designed new forms of civic participation with the League of Women Voters, built prototypes to support communities after disasters and reimagined urban design concepts for Los Angeles parks. Each of these initiatives begins the same way — with empathy.
The Hive’s approach to creativity doesn’t tell you what to do. It just says “yes, you can,” as the many signs hanging around the building read.
“You will also see around the Hive a lot of signs that say, ‘yes, you can,’” Leichter said. “There are a lot of ‘no’s in the world and a lot of rules, but we say yes before we say anything else.”
Embracing the ‘yes’ stands as the center of the Hive’s philosophy, which encourages you to accept that, by trying, you might sometimes fail. And that’s perfectly normal.
“The philosophy of giving people permission to fail is also hard,” Leichter said. “You didn’t get into these schools by failing very often. But that doesn’t mean you won’t learn even more if you give yourself permission to fail.”
He distilled the Hive’s decade into three words: “Empathy, creativity and action.”
“Failure is not a dead end. Failure is just a thing along the way to making things better. Be confident that you can try things that seem difficult and impossible and not play it safe,” Leichter said.
That same sense of possibility that he described — the invitation to say “yes” — lives most clearly in the people who find the Hive and stay. One of them is Salina Muñoz CM ’23, an alum who first discovered the Hive late in her college career.
“I didn’t know about the Hive at all until my senior year,” she said. “I thought it was just for Pomona students.”
That changed after she enrolled in an introductory course in human-centered design, followed by Design Activism with professor Albert Park.
“I just thought [the Hive] was a great study spot. It was really fun,” she said.
Now, as the Hive’s experience designer for communications, Muñoz spends her days shaping how students and faculty understand the space, including through The Buzz newsletter and the Hive’s social media. The longer she works there, the more she realizes how much existed beneath the surface.
“While working here, I realized we have this great catalog of classes that we offer,” Muñoz said. “5C professors teach classes here. We have student creativity grants, faculty course grants, we offer summer internships and we provide grant money. We’re focusing a lot on ways to transform student creativity into innovative reality or startups.”
These programs span disciplines and formats: from courses like Design Activism and Global Borderlands, to Living in a World of Numbers and Community-Engaged Planning for a More Just Public Realm. Others take shape as summer internships, like design research with nonprofits or product strategy for early-stage social ventures. Each opportunity gives students the structure and backing to turn their ideas into something real.
The Hive’s impact lies in how it changes students’ perceptions of creativity. She has watched people walk in with no art or design background and walk out surprised at what they can do.
“Sometimes students stay for a class and they change career pathways completely,” Muñoz said.
The accessible structure of workshops, tools and peer trainings makes experimentation feel possible — even for those who thought it wasn’t for them.
“There’s no mistake, there’s only make,” Wu said.
“Students may feel like there’s a bit more of a barrier to entry,” she said. “What you thought you couldn’t do, you can do after a two-hour workshop. It’s that simple, it’s that easy.”
It’s this openness that keeps the Hive alive. The idea that creativity belongs to everyone is visible in the stories of students who stumble in, stay longer than they expect and find themselves changed by the space.
One of them is Sophia Wu PO ’28, the Hive’s soundbox engineer, who first came to the Hive through music and quickly found a second home.
“I’m very passionate about music,” Wu said. “Last year, I was trained at the Hive on how to use the soundbox. It felt like a really welcoming community, which is why I really wanted to be there.”
She describes the Hive as a place where sound, art and motion overlap. Its mix of studios — the Sewing Shed, Print Lab, Toolbox and Soundbox — makes the Hive a vibrant and resourceful place for anyone interested in creativity.
“There’s no mistake, there’s only make,” Wu said.
Over time, that openness becomes something more profound.
“A lot of people found their sense of community here, especially during their freshman year, when they may not have found communities,” Wu said. “When people come together to make crafts, they kind of know other people.”
This community-oriented atmosphere captures what makes the Hive last, setting it apart from other academic spaces on campus.
“The Hive is just very vibrant and open in general by the nature of its design,” Wu said. “There’s less academic going on … the vibe just feels generally more welcoming and relaxing to whoever wants to be there.”
A decade after it opened, the Hive still hums with that same rhythm of making, trying, failing and starting again. In a world that often demands perfection, the Hive offers something rarer: a space where curiosity matters more than certainty, and where every “yes” begins the possibility of something new.
Facebook Comments