From a 10-year search to a living platform that connects residents, visitors, and local organizations with everything happening in this culturally vibrant Southern California city.
Sixty miles east of Los Angeles, Redlands sits at the crossroads of California’s past and future. Founded in the 1880s on a citrus heritage and later settled by Midwesterners seeking temperate weather, the city has preserved its Victorian architecture, open green spaces, and tree-lined streets with intentionality.
Today, Redlands is also home to Esri, the world’s leading GIS firm, creating an unexpected blend of deep history and high technology. The University of Redlands, a private liberal arts institution, adds another layer, hosting the acclaimed Redlands Symphony in its century-old Memorial Chapel. The result is a city where a professional cycling race born from the spirit of the 1984 Olympics coexists with CERT disaster training, council meetings, and a classic film series.
Carl Baker, Public Information Officer for the City of Redlands, has spent 37 years telling this community’s story; first as a journalist, now as the city’s voice across city, police, and fire communications. When it came to the community calendar, his challenge was never a shortage of events. It was finding a platform equal to what Redlands had to offer.
Carl had been looking for a platform like BeWith for over a decade. The city briefly tried building its own solution but found it prohibitive with existing resources. In the meantime, they linked to a local tourism entrepreneur who curated events manually on her own website; a workaround that left the city with no direct relationship with event organizers and no ownership over the experience.
Staff turnover internally and at external organizations complicated relationships, processes and consistency of adding to the calendar. Building systems that outlive any one person has been part of the ongoing work.
“This concept of a calendar where organizations can populate it, and the city’s kind of the facilitator of that — that’s something I was looking for at least 10 years ago. And we weren’t finding anything at the time.”
CBCarl BakerPublic Information Officer, City of Redlands
Rather than launching empty, Carl and the BeWith team timed the calendar's debut to align with the Redlands Bowl Summer Music Festival, a free outdoor concert series drawing visitors from around the world for over 100 years. “I saw that as an opportunity to launch with a little bit of a bang,” Carl said. “I worked with the director over at the Redlands Bowl, got her on board, and she was very excited about it.”
When Recreation's volume threatened to crowd out other content, BeWith's multi-hub architecture offered a clean fix. A dedicated Recreation and Senior Services hub was created, giving those events their own home and freeing the main calendar to showcase the full breadth of Redlands community life.
Staff throughout the city were given posting permissions, with an approval workflow that routes submissions through Carl when needed. The Library, Development Services, Emergency Operations, and the City Clerk's Office all now contribute, alongside external organizations from the Bicycle Classic to the Redlands Airport Association.
The Redlands Bowl, Redlands Bicycle Classic, and Symphony each received dedicated feature buttons on the calendar, making it easy for fans of specific traditions to find what they love without scrolling through everything else.
“The level of customer service that we’ve received and continue to receive has been astounding to me. I’m not accustomed to that with these kinds of platform solutions. There’s a sales job, and there’s a setup, and then generally, you’re kind of on your own.”
CBCarl BakerPublic Information Officer, City of Redlands
By timing the launch to the Redlands Bowl Summer Music Festival, a 100-year institution drawing thousands each summer, the calendar debuted with content residents already cared about. Adoption had a natural head start.
The Redlands Bicycle Classic, the premier professional cycling event in the United States, is now fully represented on the platform, every stage, every detail. What started as a vision sparked by the 1984 LA Olympics is now one click away on the city's website.
The Library, Recreation, Emergency Operations, the City Clerk's Office, the Airport Association, and more now contribute directly to the calendar. Each organization controls its own submissions within a workflow Carl can monitor and manage.
“When I learned about this platform, that's exactly what I was thinking we wanted to develop a decade ago,” Carl said. “It was nice to find that it actually exists.”
“I sound like a broken record here, I keep saying it over and over, but the thing that has really stood out to me and set this apart for me is the level of customer service.”
CBCarl BakerPublic Information Officer, City of Redlands
Carl’s success metric for the next year is breadth. “I’m looking at the diversity of the organizations posting,” he said, “because I think we’re still just getting a narrow swath of what’s happening in Redlands.” Theater groups and additional cultural organizations are next on his list. He’s also working to integrate the city’s permit process, so that event organizers applying for city permits are introduced to the calendar as part of that workflow.
For Carl, the calendar is an extension of the same work he’s done for over 30 years: connecting residents with the community they live in. “I’ve really become part of this community, and it’s part of me,” he said. “I hope the calendar helps people find their belonging here, residents and visitors alike.”
Whether you’re managing a rich events calendar for a mid-sized city or trying to centralize community life for the first time, BeWith was built for exactly this.