The new Metropolitan Workforce Training Center for Portland Community College will be a community anchor in Northeast Portland’s racially diverse Cully neighborhood, creating opportunities through education and connections to family-wage jobs. This session will share how using a Critical Race Spatial Lens guided a socio-spatial inquiry plan and an inclusive, community-based design process as strategies to disrupt traditional colorblind practices. As we came to understand how participants experienced space culturally and emotionally, bringing their own unique histories and stressors, our process came to embrace a racial equity and Trauma-Informed Design approach resulting in warm, human-centered spaces that abound in daylight, biophilia, and the welcoming feel of a mass timber structure. Attendees will learn how building owners can better understand power-laden dimensions of space and empathize with their users so that the built environment is an expression of inclusion and authentic care in the community.