Going On The Road To Meet With You
We’re interested in learning more about how people build stronger neighborhoods and what prevents others from joining in the fun.
We’ll be exploring this topic by hosting small group discussions in Washington DC, New York, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Austin, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon in March and April. We hope to gain new insights about programs Craigslist Foundation can develop to support community-building and ultimately, what you would want those programs to look like.
We’d love for you to join us, especially if you’ve had any of these experiences:
- You’re actively engaged in a project to strengthen your neighborhood.
- You’ve participated in such a project in the past.
- You’d like to change something in your neighborhood, but something’s blocking you or you don’t even know how to start.
Interested in participating? Know someone who might be? Send a note to Arthur Coddington (info@craigslistfoundation.org) with a few sentences about your personal experiences. We’ll keep you in the loop as the discussions are scheduled. Space is limited so please respond as soon as possible.
We also invite you to share your experiences and perspectives online at http://craigslistfoundation.uservoice.com.
Please spread the word – we know there are plenty of brilliant community leaders we aren’t connected with yet.
From Community Activist to Builder
Blue Avocado has a great newsletter for the nonprofit community, and they have a great article by Bay Area community activist Brenda Crawford, discussing how she’s gotten “old and wise” and plans to use her long career in community activism to convene and strengthen her local community.
At Craigslist Foundation, we are passionate about the type of work that Brenda is undertaking and believe strong communities and neighborhoods are the cornerstone of civic society. During Boot Camp, you’ll find lots of ideas and resources for building consensus among community members and strengthening neighborhoods.
I love that she writes, “my younger self might say I’ve gotten soft and tired. No: I’ve gotten old and wise.”
5 Ways You Can Support Your Local Parks
I recently attended a SF Chamber of Commerce forum with Rec & Parks Director Phil Ginsburg. Phil shared the impressive work of he and his staff to keep our city’s parks and recreation programs from crisis.
The bottom line: San Franciscans LOVE their parks, but federal, state and local budget deficits trickle down to mean millions of dollars in cuts, meaning fewer gardeners, plantings, and programs and a lot less maintenance.
In a dense urban environment, our parks are our backyards. Our parks are where our children play and learn to ride their bikes, our dogs frolic, and we jog, skate and hike. The Rec & Parks Dept. is responsible for maintaining and improving San Francisco’s numerous parks (most notably Golden Gate Park), and for recreation programs that serve as after-school care and summer camp programs for thousands of our city’s youth and families.
photo by the_tahoe_guy
Our community would be missing a RICH resource if these classes and camps were cut or the parks were closed or unusable.
Here’s how we could all help:
- Give your time. Volunteer with one of several programs listed below to beautify our parks.
- Give your money. Join a local org that resonates for you and your family, such as Trust for Public Land, City Fields Foundation, Friends of the Urban Forest or Neighborhood Parks Council. Money from these programs secure land for future parks, build sports fields, plant trees, and care for parks in our neighborhoods.
- Show up and speak up. Often the only people who show up at Rec & Park Commission meetings and Board of Supes hearings are NIMBYs and those in opposition to any new ideas. If you love our parks, show up and tell those in charge what you think!
- Share our ideas. Parks are funded in part by revenue raised from recreation programs, picnics, concerts, etc. Phil’s staff are coming up with great new revenue ideas and are learning from best practitioners like NYC’s Central Park Conservancy. If you have others, and you support these, share them with his team and tell us what they are.
- Enjoy and use our parks. Attend a concert, bring visitors to the botanical gardens, sign up for a team sport, and send your kids to summer camp!
A bonus idea: 6. Stay informed. Keep up with Phil Ginsburg and The San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department on Phil’s blog. And please share with us:
- How do you enjoy and use your local parks?
- What ideas do you have for improving our parks while generating revenue to keep them going?
Our New Home at 6th & Market
Craigslist Foundation has a new home and some fabulous new neighbors. Last week, we moved our offices to Market Street into a shared space with liveBooks, a design company that produces award-winning custom and pre-designed websites. Not only is the new space beautiful and spacious but liveBooks threw a welcome happy hour in our honor on Friday which was a blast. Thank You liveBooks!
We have been busy unpacking and getting our cubes jazzed up. Send us your ideas on how we can make our cubes more personal. Here is a photo album about our move on Flickr including (a la craigslist) pictures of a desk set that we are selling and a free mini-fridge that we are giving away.
As community builders we are excited to be part of a new neighborhood which is part of the Central Market Community Benefit District. The neighborhood is definitely changing and new development seems to be occurring daily. Here is a recent SF Examiner article about the alley behind our new offices. Best of all there is great food nearby including the delicious Tu Lan and the new, tasty ShowDogs. Yum.
Trees and Communities Need One Another
Over the weekend, Rosa Parks Elementary, a school in the heart of the San Francisco’s Western Addition, hosted a group of volunteers who planted trees alongside th
e school. The SF Chronicle highlighted the good work of Friends of the Urban Forest, the efforts of neighbors to beautify their streets, and the power of volunteerism to transform communities.
Three years ago, as part of Leadership San Francisco, I got to be “Principal for a Day” of Rosa Parks at a time when the school was anticipating the changes that would come from merging with the Japanese immersion program — it’s great to see it’s thriving and that families are committed to this gem of a school.
Does your neighborhood need more trees? How can we all do more to plant roots in our communities?
How SF Neighborhoods are Improved by Cross-Sector Engagement
AIA San Francisco Gallery, 130 Sutter St., Suite 600, San Francisco, CA
Craigslist Foundation believes that strong communities and neighborhoods are the cornerstone of our society. Community Benefit Districts (CBDs) are one tool that San Francisco and other cities can use to strengthen, lift up and improve their neighborhoods. CBDs require cross-sector cooperation, making them a sophisticated and engaging way to ensure lasting success.
Join City Hall Fellows and Craigslist Foundation as a panel of experts explore what implications CBDs may have beyond streetscape improvement and beautification.
You will hear insights into the various types of districts employed in the city, the impact of CBDs on the urban social environment, and CBDs’ role in efforts to target economic clusters.
Presented as part of Next American City’s URBANEXUS Series
- Lisa Pagan, Project Manager, Office of Economic and Workforce Development, City and County of San Francisco
- Robert Stokes, Asst. Professor of Urban Environmental Studies, Drexel University
- Kate Sofis, Executive Director, Urban Innovation SF
You’re in Charge: Run The World!
This week the micro but mighty team at IfWeRanTheWorld.com launched their microactions site at TED2010. Our friend Cindy Gallop debuted the site in its alpha state to an audience whose likely seen it all.
IWRTW promises to keep track of all those little things we want to do for the world and connect you to other like-minded individuals, organizations and brands.
In their own words…
“We want to tap the single largest pool of untapped natural resource in the world: human good intentions that never translate into action. We need adventurers like you to generate actionplatforms and microactions, and then invite people to microact.”
Last week, I had the privilege of getting a sneak peek of the site by the IWRTW team in their NYC lab. The product tour and our conversation was a great lesson to me in humility and transparency practiced by a group who’s looking to help you change the world.
Please help Cindy and her team build a macro-ecology based on microactions.
You’re the expert the world is looking for — now go get involved!
Boot Camp 2010: Who Do You Want to Hear From?
Craigslist Foundation is in the process of developing the program content for Boot Camp 2010, will take place August 14 on the UC Berkeley Campus.
I’m Paige Buck, the new director of events at Craigslist Foundation, and I need your help. I’m developing all the sessions, speakers, networking sessions, tools and takeaways that will help people strengthen and grow their local neighborhoods and communities.
That’s an expanded focus for Boot Camp, which used to focus on nonprofit capacity building only. Now, we aim to build the capacity of, cultivate conversation among and inspire community leaders from all sectors, including corporate, government and nonprofits. More on our theory of change.
Imagine 1,500 passionate people gathering together to change the world. That’s Boot Camp — a fun, intensive one-day gathering where people learn how to bring their ideas for stronger communities and neighborhoods into reality.
(Michael Krasny, Craig Newmark, Rich Harwood and Arianna Huffington, Boot Camp 2009 All-Star Panel)
Boot Camp 2010 topics will cover
- cross-sector collaborations;
- success stories in communities that can be replicated in others;
- civic engagement on the hyper-local level;
- Bay Area regional challenges and tools to address them;
- national solutions that inspire local action;
- and topics from the elements that compose a civil society from individuals to government, volunteerism, arts, culture, and more.
Please share your topic and speaker ideas! Comment on this post or download and submit a VERY short request for ideas.
I look forward to hearing from you — your help is invaluable as we build an exciting, diverse program.
To learn more about Boot Camp, visit the 2009 event website or listen to Boot Camp podcasts.
The Simple Wisdom of Asking for Help
Last week, Ami Dar of Idealist/Action Without Borders sent out a message that surprised many. Idealist is feeling the financial pinch so much that its existence is threatened. For those of us who are huge fans of Ami, his team, and their work, this was really bad news.
In his message, Ami offered a transparent view of how economic and business conditions had challenged Idealist over the past few years and how they had adapted to survive – and how that hadn’t been enough. In the end, Ami realized that Idealist’s future lay in the hands of its community, a community of passionate people who might be able to help Idealist find sustainability again, and more importantly a community that could spread the word and find more communities of support. And so he asked for help.
From the buzz in the social media, it looks like people are spreading the word. Looks like it is translating into a huge outpouring of support. So far, people have chipped in more than $140,000 to help Idealist out.
Asking for help can be a profoundly confronting thing. It can uncover all sorts of organizational dynamics and personal insecurities. If I ask for help, do I give up my ground as an expert? What if no one wants to help? No one else is asking for help – am I the only one struggling?
An authentic appeal for help can surprise us and prove those worries unfounded. Asking for help opens up new possibilities, it shifts our relationships, it creates new upsides. And it’s one of the hardest things to do.
You will notice Craigslist Foundation asking for help often in 2010. We are thinking about how our community building mission translates into a new program slate. We are constantly reinventing Boot Camp and need to know what’s going on in the field. You hold the answers. Our job is to listen. Our hope is that through listening, we will translate our call for help into services that can offer meaningful help for those who want to strengthen their neighborhoods and communities.
NYC At Your Service
The folks in Bloomberg’s office are doing great things to lead a prominent service initiative as part of the nationwide Cities of Service effort. We love this because it’s so closely aligned with our Foundation’s ongoing participation and support of AllforGood.org.
“Last spring, Bloomberg introduced NYC Service, an office that coordinates 38 separate initiatives that “aim to improve the city through service and volunteerism.” The initiative went largely unnoticed until last month when City Hall announced the launch of a Time Bank available to all New Yorkers who choose to take part in volunteer activities. New Yorkers will be able to create online profiles at www.nyc.gov/service where they can list their talents and abilities and trade them with other users. Registered users will receive a “time dollar” for every hour they spend volunteering their services; these “dollars” may in turn be used to “purchase” volunteer services from another user.”
Check out more on Oh My Gov!
If you know of friends, family or colleagues in the NYC area interested in volunteering, point them to: nyc.gov/service.
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