Sometimes the slightest shift in perspective reveals the presence of stunningly beautiful interweavings that moments earlier hadn’t been obvious between various elements of our lives. That moment came for me this morning while viewing a colleague’s newly-posted video on YouTube.
I became even more enchanted and emotionally moved when I shifted my perspective slightly so that the connections between Liz’s work and other elements of my own current explorations in online and blended learning as well as with building abundant communities became obvious. What made me see that video in the larger context of creative interactions, collaborations, and community-building was the fact that that Liz, as one of many who are pushing this volunteer-drivencommunity based effort to create a second set of ceramic-tiled steps along with gardens and murals in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District, had perfectly captured the playful spirit and energy of the Hidden Garden Steps effort. There was also the simultaneous realization that Liz, in the context of documenting successes for the Hidden Garden Steps project, had produced a wonderful example of digital storytelling. By combining enticing music, wonderful images, a set of PowerPoint slides, and an engaging story into a video, Liz had, all at once, produced an attractively positive story of how members of communities work together to bring dreams to fruition; an update to current and prospective project supporters; and a great example of what thousands of us are currently studying in #etmooc, the Education Technology and Media MOOC (Massive Open Online Course)organized by University of Regina professor of educational technology and media Alec Couros and several co-conspirators.”
As I’ve documented in twointerrelated posts here on Building Creative Bridges, digital storytelling draws upon archetypal elements at the heart of vibrant, creative communities by enticingly documenting what is most important to us. And the experience of exploring digital storytelling within such a dynamically stimulating community as the one developed by those who have organized and are facilitating #etmooc has certainly been inspiring me to look more deeply about how the stories we tell are at the heart of nearly every successful effort that attracts my attention. I see this in my various roles as a volunteer, in the work I do as a trainer-teacher-learner, and in the writing that puts me in touch with creative colleagues worldwide through our promotion and use of social media tools—including those we routinely use to complete assignments within #etmooc and the Social Media Basics course I just finished facilitating again.
The more I think about the interwoven threads of these various stories that are unfolding in my life (the Hidden Garden Steps project, #etmooc and digital storytelling, the Social Media Basics course, my face-to-face and online interactions with colleagues at conferences and in social media platforms, and my ongoing efforts as a trainer-teacher-learner), the more fascinated I become at how the smallest part of any of them sends out tendrils along the lines of the rhizomatic learning concepts we’ve also been studying in #etmooc.
But then I also realize that I’m falling into the trap of making all of this too complex. What it really comes down to is that we’re incredibly social and interconnected people living in an incredibly interconnected onsite-online world. We live socially, we learn socially, we dine socially, we thrive socially, and we build socially. And, at least for me, one of the key pleasures comes from the leaning that occurs in each of these personal and shared short stories that become the extended stories—the novels—that we are creating by living them.
With that act of circling back to learning as a key element of our individual stories, we find one more thread that ties this all together. Given that learning is a process of responding to an immediate need by engaging in positive transformation, we can all continue learning—and creating the stories that give meaning to our lives—through our involvement with challenges along the lines of nurturing the Hidden Garden Steps project, finding community in #etmooc, and becoming active participants in a variety of other collaborative and community-based efforts. The more we look for and document interweavings between these seemingly disparate endeavors, the better learners—and storytellers—we become.
N.B.: This is the seventh in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc and the fifteenth in an ongoing series of articles to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco.
Our next big step forward, at this point, is less than two weeks away: our two artists (on Saturday, December 1, 2012, from 1-5 pm), will lead the first of three community workshops for anyone interested in making hands-on contributions to the construction of the mosaic.
This will be a celebration of community and collaboration in action within a local church meeting hall (Christ Church Lutheran, 1090 Quintara, San Francisco). It’s a chance to learn how projects of this magnitude are literally pieced together. An opportunity to work side-by-side with neighbors on a process that not only will produce a new community gem but also contribute to the already strong sense of community that exists within the Inner Sunset District. And a pre-holiday chance to reflect on what our work together over a three-year period has created and continues to create.
It also is a visceral incarnation of the spirit of “making gifts visible,” as outlined by McKnight and Block in The Abundant Community (pp. 120-122): having members of a community teach and learn from each other; bringing together residents and local business representatives (a couple of our sponsors are donating refreshments for workshop participants); and attracting community members of all ages and backgrounds.
There is plenty to acknowledge and celebrate in projects like the Hidden Garden Steps. These community efforts help build connections between those of us who previously knew little more about our neighbors than what we garnered from hurried waves and cursory greetings as we raced from one personal obligation to another. They attract people from other nearby neighborhoods so that we develop an extended sense of community, support, and simple, pleasurable human interactions that often seem to reach no further than a few feet away from our own homes or apartments. They further connect us to those wonderful third places within our communities—the coffee shops, the libraries, the neighborhood farmers markets, and streets transformed into meeting places by community-operated street fairs. And they remind us—through the collaborations we establish with existing groups like San Francisco’s Inner Sunset Park Neighbors (ISPN), the San Francisco Parks Alliance (our fiscal agent), and the San Francisco Department of Public Works Street Parks Program (supporting our onsite work on City/County property)—that transforming a dream into reality doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to start from scratch in our efforts to organize for success.
“The expression of our gifs and their manifestation through association with our neighbors” is at the heart of abundant communities, McKnight and Block remind us in The Abundant Community (p. 109). “The challenge is to make these gifts visible among all in the neighborhood. These are the means for creating our social fabric. The task is to make more widely available these gifts in service of our core concerns for the child, the land, enterprise, food, health, the vulnerable, and our safety With the consciousness and ability to connect our gifts and make them practical and usable, we experience what we are calling community abundance (p. 120).”
And as Hidden Garden Steps current and prospective supporters move toward the day of our first mosaic-building workshop and continue with our fundraising efforts to bring this $300,000 volunteer-driven community-based effort to a successful conclusion, we all have plenty to celebrate—and to offer others in need of the inspiration we continually find from the families, friends, and other neighbors who are contributing to our own abundant successes.
It’s more than just the acknowledgement that we’ve raised enough money ($100,000 in cash and approximately $20,000 in services completed or soon to be completed) to begin building the 148-step ceramic-tile mosaic that is at the heart of the project. It’s the gathering of a community that through working on this project is even stronger than it was before, and will be even stronger by the time we finish this project that creates a second set of ceramic-tiled steps along with gardens and murals in the neighborhood. And the celebration itself was completely sponsored and hosted by one of our business supporters: the Crepevine at 624 Irving Street here in San Francisco.
I hope I won’t offend anyone if I offer the heartfelt hope that you’ll just sit on it. The bench, I mean. The one now at the foot of the Hidden Garden Steps, where Kirkham Street and 16th Avenue intersect in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District.
And while you’re sitting on it, I hope you’ll reflect on how that one little bench—one of more than a dozen now spread throughout the neighborhood—says so much about the spirit of community, collaboration, and volunteerism that is at the heart of any dream that starts with one or two people and quickly becomes a self-seeding endeavor that makes our world considerably better—and a lot more visually interesting and playful.
The innovators, in this case, are Adam Greenfield and Chris Duderstadt, two wonderful neighborhood activists who are key players in the Inner Sunset Park Neighbors; love the idea of nurturing public spaces and “maximizing personal interactions”; and are slowly but surely adding to San Francisco’s vibrant street scene though their playful Public Bench Project.
Their idea is simple, as they note on their website: “We will give a bench to anybody who wants to put a bench outside their building in the public realm. Contact us and we’d be happy to give you a bench.” The results are exquisite and inspiring; from the initial bench, which features a wonderful design by artist Devin Keller, to the latest bench, added this week and featuring a beautiful display of sunflowers, you can’t walk by without involuntarily having a smile find its way onto your face. And, more importantly, even the most hurried of us feel the invitation to stop, sit, and enjoy our neighborhood a bit more rather than simply racing through it on our way to our next appointment.
Which is exactly what we’re hoping will happen with the bench now at the foot of the Hidden Garden Steps—and which will become even more colorful when a group of our supporters return to make the bench even more colorful by connecting it visually to the mural painted onsite by art instructor Angie Crabtree and students from the Woodside International School. Ever since we began making the onsite improvements that are creating the foundation for the 148-step ceramic-tile mosaic that will eventually cover the concrete steps, we’ve noticed more neighbors and visitors spending time lingering onsite rather than hurrying past what was formerly a somewhat secluded and less-than-inviting space. The volunteers who gather on the second Saturday of each month from 1 – 3 pm to sweep the steps, continue adding to the garden that is beginning to take shape on a few parts of the site, and enjoy the growing sense of camaraderie, talk openly about how our work together is creating a greater sense of community. And the bench now provides yet another gathering place for conversation, idea exchanges, and friendship.
With the addition of the bench, we’re hoping you and many others will join us there. To help create the vision. To strengthen the sense of community that already exists. And to simply enjoy one of the many lovely settings that make life worth living.
For more information about the Public Bench Project, please contact Greenfield and Duderstadt at publicbenchproject@gmail.com. For more information about the Hidden Garden Steps project, please visit our website at
http://hiddengardensteps.org , follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@gardensteps), check out the videos on our YouTube channel, or look for us on the Steps.
N.B.: This is the twelfth in an ongoing series of articles to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco.
Hidden Garden Steps volunteer Sherry Boschert has once again outdone herself. Working with us to film a playful fundraising video that is now posted on Indiegogo, she is helping us make our current and prospective supporters aware of one of those routine yet essential elements of any successful fundraising campaign: attracting money for something as basic as a set of permits allowing us to carry to the project to completion.
After confirming that we would need nearly $8,000 in application fees from the City/County of San Francisco, Sherry and I met to discuss the latest hoops that project volunteers would have to jump through to create a ceramic-tiled mosaic similar to what exists on the Moraga Steps here in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District and surround it with attractive gardens and murals.
Appreciative for all the support we have received from colleagues in the San Francisco Department of Public Works as well as in the San Francisco DPW Street Parks Program, City Hall, and the San Francisco Arts Commission, we wanted to emphasize that this particular fundraising effort is grounded in a real need and in full partnership with our City/County colleagues.
“Our $8,000 goal will cover a $3,379 fee set by the San Francisco Planning Commission for permit applications as well as other Department of Public Works fees established by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors based upon the number of hours it takes to process applications for a project of this scale,” we explain on our Indiegogo site. “We don’t begrudge the City this money—we know that these departments provide valuable services, and we couldn’t do this without their help. A small portion of funds raised will go towards Indiegogo and banking fees.”
Efforts to seek fee waivers were unsuccessful—our colleagues in City/County government are, of course, facing the same financial challenges so many of us face—so we’re moving ahead to publicize this particular need in the hope that project supporters will step up to the plate and push us closer to our goal.
Campaigns like this one—drawing from any level of contribution our current and prospective supporters care to offer—obviously rise or fall on our ability to engage the level of community support and collaboration that has been at the heart of all our successful efforts to date. That clearly means we need help raising the funds within the next 60 days to meet our latest campaign deadline, to reach the widest possible audience, and to foster action by everyone who has been touched and inspired by our vision for taking simple steps to create another magnificent set of Steps here in San Francisco—an effort supported not only by neighborhood residents but by donors from seven states beyond California and, as of last week, our first donor from London.
We had the most wonderful of problems last week as we prepared for our monthly Hidden Garden Steps project onsite clean-up: the possibility of having more volunteers than could be effectively put to work for the two-hour Saturday afternoon event.
And we quickly found a winning solution for everyone by invoking one of our main vision statements for the project: collaborating with as many partners as possible to complete a $300,000 volunteer-driven community art and garden project.
Our monthly efforts to remove graffiti, sweep the 148 steps on 16th Avenue between Kirkham and Lawton streets, develop gardens with donated plants (please see our online wish list for more information about specific donations needed for those gardens), clean clogged gutters and drains, and prepare the site for installation of a ceramic-tiled mosaic similar to what exists on the Moraga Steps here in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District has steadily gained attention, support, and recognition since our first clean-up event was held less than a year ago and trees were trimmed free of charge by a generous donation of time and services from Tree Shapers, LLC.
Promotions through our San Francisco DPW Street Parks Program and San Francisco Parks Alliance partners (particularly Nancy Wong from DPW, who routinely delivers the gloves, tools, and other supplies needed, and Maria D’Angelico and Julia Brashares at the Alliance) help draw new volunteers to us each month. And a photo and blurb in San Francisco City/County Supervisor Carmen Chu’slatest newsletter inspired Elvina Fan (pictured here) and her fellow Lincoln High School Change SF members to contact us less than two days before the March clean-up to see how they could help.
This created a bit of a dilemma since nearly 10 members of Better Homes & Gardens Mason-McDuffie Realty here in San Francisco (pictured above, left) had already promised to join us for work that required no more than 15 people. But it was a dilemma quickly resolved through early-morning email exchanges with Andrea Jadwin, co-president of the Inner Sunset Park Neighbors board. She had a perfect project in place—and was willing to make arrangements with the Change SF volunteers on short notice.
“ISPN won a Community Challenge Grant in 2010 to make improvements to the parking lot in the heart of the Inner Sunset commercial district,” Jadwin recalled during a recent exchange. “The parking lot is home every Sunday to the Inner Sunset Farmers’ Market and other community events throughout the year. Volunteers planted native and climate-adapted plants and painted the surrounding walls with coordinating colors and a simple design. Community Challenge Grants award funding is based on volunteer hours, so we try to organize several maintenance projects throughout the year—cleaning trash, weeding, replanting, and covering graffiti”—exactly what the Change SF students were offering to do for Hidden Garden Steps.
“It was great to have the students from Lincoln High’s Change SF service club come out and provide some much needed plant care and graffiti abatement. The neighbors, merchants and farmers will be so pleased with the results,” Jadwin concluded.
We sometimes hear, from those who are misinformed, that people are too busy to volunteer and that organizations need to compete rather than collaborate in attracting great volunteers and other supporters. But we certainly aren’t seeing either of those issues here in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District. Volunteers from the Hidden Garden Steps project, the Inner Sunset Park Neighbors, Nature in the City’sGreen Hairstreak [Butterfly] Corridor project, and other groups are working together toward our common goal of nurturing a sense of community that makes our neighborhood a place where we all belong. And we have the volunteers and other partners to prove it.
N.B.: This is the tenth in an ongoing series of articles to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco.
We don’t normally think of a local department of public works (DPW) as a provider of learning opportunities. But that’s exactly what colleagues at the San Francisco DPW created late last month, and it’s completely consistent with what many of us as community-based volunteers here in San Francisco are producing.
Through a day-long Street Parks Program workshop, DPW and San Francisco Parks Alliance colleagues (Sandra Zuniga and Julia Brashares) created an opportunity for local volunteers to learn about funding opportunities and successful projects-in-progress. And, by educating us a bit about what is available in our own community, it inspired community-changing conversations that will continue much longer than the brief workshop lasted.
Designed as a collaborative learning opportunity for participants from the more than 140 Street Parks Program projects formally adopted up to this point by DPW, the workshop attracted a surprisingly small number of program representatives. The four of us from the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District made up around 15 percent of that group. And yet this wasn’t about numbers; it was a chance for that relatively small group of us to meet each other, prospective project funders, and others involved in neighborhood-based efforts to transform neglected, unsightly pockets of our city into beautiful community meeting places that further contribute to the city’s feeling of City-with-a-big-C.
And by the end of the day, we were already developing ways to nurture the connections the Street Parks program has created between us. We took steps to create our own onsite-online community of learning by setting up a LinkedIn discussion group and a Facebook group as ways to continue sharing resources, suggesting solutions to the challenges many of us face, and fostering an even greater sense of community than already exists here in San Francisco among those involved in Street Parks Program projects.
What really pushed the development of this new community of learning forward was the event organizers’ decision to feature a couple of projects as part of the workshop presentations. Turning to two of us from projects called “Street Park superstars” for our “creative fund-raising ideas” that are building and sustaining community support for greening projects, they asked us to describe the steps we took to reach the levels of success we have already achieved.
Pam Axelson, from the Athens/Avalon Garden project, recalled that the project started because of a murder in the neighborhood: “The crime problem was significant,” she recalled. “The site was a night-time hang-out—a total dump site” where mattresses and other objects were discarded. Neighbors began asking, “Why don’t we make that a better-looking site?” A core group of neighbors came together, found out who owned the property, contacted DPW for approval, and also gained support from a group of planning students at the University of San Francisco.
The short-term result, we noted, was an event that brought us $10,000 closer to our $300,000 fundraising goal; the more significant result, we added, is that we’re continuing to create a sense of community designed to rival the projected longevity of the Hidden Garden Steps themselves once they are completed. And the latest cause for celebration is this newfound opportunity to learn while working together with our Street Parks Program colleagues.
N.B.: This is the ninth in an ongoing series of articles to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco.
It’s magnificent to watch a community develop. It’s even more rewarding to be part of the group of volunteers contributing to that growth. So those of us involved in nurturing the Hidden Garden Steps project, designed to create a second ceramic-tile staircase surrounded by gardens (with murals thrown in for good measure) in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District, are feeling absolutely giddy at the sense of community that is springing up around us.
Working with an ever-growing group of individual and organizational partners including the San Francisco Parks Alliance and the City and County of San Francisco Department of Public Works Street Parks Program, we managed to obtain another $10,000 toward our $300,000 project goal during a two-hour onsite fundraising event that drew generous and enthusiastic supporters to the Steps last Saturday. We attracted our 100th donor (organizing committee member Barbara Meli, pictured here) contributing to the individual tiles that will be installed up and down the entire stairway. We have also received donations to support installation of five of the 22 multi-tile elements that are a key part of project artists Colette Crutcher and Aileen Barr’s stairs design, with another two sets of donors committing to underwriting additional multi-tile elements.
And, the day before, we met with our colleagues in Nature in the City’sGreen Hairstreak [Butterfly] Corridor project to explore ways we can work even more closely together to restore and extend a little of the area’s natural beauty and wildlife habitats throughout those Inner Sunset District hills.
Our monthly organizing committee meeting Saturday morning, furthermore, gave us a chance to catch up with each other briefly as we continued outlining our plans for more events, more onsite improvements, and additional steady growth toward completing the project. And we even took a few minutes to relish the increased sense of collaboration each new volunteer brings to this endeavor at long-term community-building.
Encouraging signs are springing up nearly everywhere we look. The trimming of the trees by Tree Shapers, LLC last spring and our efforts to remove considerable amounts of graffiti, debris and overgrown brush allowed us to begin installing the first a series of gardens combining California native plants, succulents, and other treasures. Our work is attracting an increasing number of birds and animals—including a squirrel that was sunning itself from the top of a telephone pole on a particularly sunny morning a few days ago hours after we added nearly two dozen Monkey Flower bushes–to that garden-in-progress at the top of the steps.
We’re continuing to work toward having structural repairs to the stairs completed as soon as possible so we can further prepare the habitat for the Green Hairstreak butterflies next spring and begin creating the tiles and tile elements that will adorn the steps. In the meantime, we continue to welcome interested members of our extended community to join us at the monthly plantings and clean-ups (second Saturday of each month from 1-3 pm if rain doesn’t prevent us from working), jump into the myriad volunteer opportunities available, or simply walk the Steps and join us in celebrating our accomplishments to date.
Last Saturday was no exception; a couple of new volunteers who learned about us through our participation in the Inner Sunset Street Fair in October and our latest reception at Crepevine joined us to weed around the succulents, California natives, and other drought-tolerant plants we’ve been putting into the ground as part of our effort to support Nature in the City’sGreen Hairstreak (Butterfly) Ecosystem Corridor project. And while all of us were having fun cleaning up and putting a few new plants into the ground—including a small freemontodendron that will eventually be one of the signature elements of the garden near the top of the stairs—more people stopped to chat, offer encouragement, and ask how they could become involved in painting those walls and fences, pulling those weeds, and adding more plants to the garden.
It really is exactly what we all hoped it would be: a community project that thrives on the generosity of other members of our extended community. The initial plantings have been a combination of donations from our colleagues in the Green Hairstreak Butterfly project, neighbors donating cuttings from their own gardens, and nature’s own donations in the form of natives coming up by themselves—ferns, a poppy that was one of the most colorful volunteers to pop up earlier this year, and a newly spotted lupine that broke ground within the past couple of weeks and will eventually add even more color and draw more wildlife to the site.
We’ve had a spectacular year of successes, including $60,000 in cash support and more than $20,000 in donated and promised services to push us toward our $300,000 goal. A colorful mural has already been painted at the foot of the steps by artist/art and mural instructor Angie Crabtree and a few of her Woodside International School students and alums as an example of how the project will beautify the neighborhood. Substantial tree-trimming was completed free of charge by Tree Shapers, LLC to enhance the views toward and from the stairway. The clean-ups and plantings are already transforming the site in ways that are attracting birds, butterflies, other wildlife—we even had a black-and-orange-winged butterfly rest on the hat of one of our volunteers while we were working last Saturday.
Next steps in preparing to tile the stairway will be to fix an off-center section and adjoining small wall at the top of the steps; colleagues at the City/County of San Francisco Department of Public Works are drawing up plans to complete that work at no charge to the project. Then, under the direction of project artists Aileen Barr and Colette Crutcher, the mosaic tile designs will be constructed by volunteers. Under the direction of the artists, professional tile setters will then apply the mosaic risers and grey tread tiles to the steps.
And spending time this afternoon with Crabtree and Itzel, one of the student-muralists, reminded me once again why the entire effort to transform that set of steps on 16th Avenue between Kirkham and Lawton streets was honored with a “Best Community Art—2011” Award in SF Weekly’s 2011 edition of its annual Best of San Francisco issue. Hidden Garden Steps really is, as writer Joe Eskenazi wrote, a project that is “poignant in its sweetness,” and that sweetness was on display while Crabtree, Itzel, and a Woodside alum worked side by side today to continue bringing their colorfully playful mural to life.
Itzel—a Woodside high school student who lives in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, is about to begin her junior year at Woodside, and dreams of somebody becoming an obstetrician—initially heard about the project while completing her second year as a Woodside student in Crabtree’s mural class before beginning her summer break.
“I love painting. We did a mural at school last year,” she said during our conversation this afternoon. The chance to work on the Hidden Garden Steps mural was tremendously appealing to her, she added: “When you do creative things, you can express yourself through art…you can draw whatever you want. It reduces your stress. It takes all your problems away.”
And while Crabtree herself is already a working artist whose involvement extends to working through the nonprofit Root Division group dedicated to improving appreciation and access to the visual arts by connecting personal inspiration and community participation, she is also finding unexpectedly exciting opportunities in the Hidden Garden Steps mural.
“This is unusual for me in the Sunset District,” she noted. “The [Woodside] students do murals [including a set of five currently in progress on the Woodside buildings themselves to highlight scenes from various San Francisco neighborhoods], but they have never done a community mural.”
Support for her work has been strong at Woodside, she added. School headmaster John Edwards not only has supported the school’s involvement in the mural project since its inception, but also arranged for funding for the class, the materials needed to complete the mural, and the permit fees required to gain approval for the project through the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Transformation of the site along with marketing and fundraising efforts to complete the project, are continuing in collaboration with project partners from the San Francisco Department of Public Works Street Parks Program, who have been providing tools and support for monthly onsite clean-up sessions, and the San Francisco Parks Trust, along with an ever-growing of group of financial supporters and volunteers. The Woodside effort will continue on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 1 – 3 pm through the end of July 2011.
N.B.: This is the sixth in an ongoing series to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco. Photographs of mural design provided by Gilbert Johnson.
Community, collaboration, and creativity in a variety of venues seemed to be coalescing into an incredibly beautiful tapestry as I watched the video prepared by Hidden Garden Steps organizing committee co-chair Liz McLoughlin. I was initially captivated simply by what Liz had produced: a chronicle of the community collaborations between Steps volunteers, elected officials and civil servants here in San Francisco, and partners including the San Francisco Parks Alliance and the San Francisco Department of Public Works Street Parks Program; cash and in-kind donation successes; and community workshops designed to allow hands-on involvement in the actual construction of the mosaic that is at the heart of the project.
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