A Hundred Years of Laguna, Kept for the Next Hundred
A proposal to record our town's voices, finish its living map, and put a beautiful atlas book in every Laguna home for the centennial.
The Atlas tells the stories of the remarkable people who built this place on magic, creativity, and love. Part encyclopedia and part map, lagunaatlas.com is already alive with walking tours, stories, and open exploration. This proposal funds the final push: recording the people who lived these stories, completing the platform, and printing the Centennial Atlas book.
And let's say it plainly: this is fun. It is a birthday present for a town. It is grandparents telling stories that end up on a map. It is families on treasure-hunt walking tours, neighbors finding their own street in a book, and a hundred years of Laguna's mischief, art, and heart, out where everyone can enjoy it.
The Atlas is made for everyone, and especially with our elders, whose stories come first.
Already built and working
You are not funding an idea. You are finishing one.
The Atlas is already a working platform: documented places written to a museum standard, lives traced across town, walking tours you can take today, and data stories drawn from the public record, all on open formats built to last for decades.
The plan
Timeline of Activities
The voices come first
Recording interviews with our eldest storytellers. Scanning family photographs and documents into the archive. Signing rights agreements with families and local institutions. Opening the community contribution tools so anyone can offer a memory.
The stories take shape
Writing and fact-checking the entries. Producing the story films and recordings. Building new walking tours from the gathered material. Designing the book: layout, custom map plates, editing, and proofs to press.
The Centennial Atlas arrives in stores
A designed atlas of a hundred years of Laguna Beach, in local shops in time for the celebration, with launch readings and signings around town.
The full maps go live for the city's 100th birthday
Every map, tour, and story complete and free at lagunaatlas.com, with centennial walks, tours, and community events through the summer.
The budget, plainly
What the money does
Recording the stories
Recorded interviews with our storytellers, photos and documents scanned and preserved, a researcher to verify the facts, and beautifully produced story films and recordings.
Finishing the platform
Development to complete the maps, tours, and contribution tools, plus making everything easy to use for every age and every phone.
The Centennial Atlas book
Professional book design, custom map plates, careful editing, and a printed edition in stores by May 2027.
Plus $26,000 for administration, insurance, and a modest contingency.
Modern tools have made much of this work far cheaper than it was even a few years ago, and this budget passes those savings on; what never gets cheaper is sitting down with a neighbor and earning their story. A complete line-item budget is available on request.
Why this matters
A platform that starts with Laguna.
Every California town is losing its memory at the same speed: the storytellers are leaving us, the buildings are turning over, and the record scatters into shoeboxes and hard drives. The Atlas is Laguna's answer, a way for a community to hold what it knows about itself, verify it, and hand it forward in forms people actually use: a map, a walk, a book, a story told aloud.
And the answer travels. Everything funded here, the methods, the tools, the editorial standard, is built to be adopted by the next town: Ojai, Topanga, Bolinas, any California community ready to keep its own hundred years. Laguna Beach becomes the first atlas in a constellation, and the model for how California preserves the cultures that made it.