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Tag: san francisco
A Little Birdie Told Us That a Tech Giant is Building a Nest to Help the Poor
As we’ve said, income inequality in America is perhaps nowhere more evident than in San Francisco, where a renewed tech boom has dropped the unemployment rate to 4.8 percent, compared to the 6.3 percent national rate. Meanwhile, median rents have skyrocketed to a 40 percent share of the median income, leaving the one in five Bay Area residents who live in poverty sometimes literally out in the cold.
The stark differences between the lives of the tech-employed-haves and the have-nots have led some frustrated people to stage protests near the shuttle buses that ferry workers to Google and other tech companies. In contrast, however, is the action from one of the giants in social media.
Twitter has announced it’s going to reach out to the homeless and low-income families in the Tenderloin, the long-impoverished neighborhood near its headquarters. The company plans to collaborate with Compass Family Services (CFS), a nonprofit serving 3,500 homeless families, to create and run a family learning center called the Twitter Neighborhood Nest, which is projected to open in the summer of 2015. Company executives have pledged to chip in more than $1 million to the project.
The center will provide low-income people with access to computers, Wi-Fi, and other resources; volunteers from Twitter will teach technology classes to homeless families. Erica Kisch, executive director of CFS told Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle, “This will be a major breakthrough for our families. To make it in the world today, just to make it through school, you need these skills.”
Twitter’s new nest certainly has the potential of helping low-income residents of San Francisco cross the digital divide. But we have a hunch that to be successful, they might need to use more than 140 characters.
MORE: San Francisco’s Tech Talent Lends A Hand to Help the Homeless
What Cities Can Learn From San Francisco’s Newest Public Housing Project
The extreme wealth of Silicon Valley has catapulted real estate prices in San Francisco into exorbitant territory, all while the cost of living continues to rise — reinforcing the City by the Bay’s reputation as one of America’s priciest urban areas.
In fact, a recent study by the Brookings Institute (a nonprofit, independent research organization) found that San Francisco ranks number one for fastest growing income inequality gap in the United States, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
In an effort to keep its low-income residents, city officials have launched the Hope SF campaign, a public housing revitalization initiative to rebuild five of the worst welfare housing sites, turning them into mixed-income communities.
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Their hope? To provide existing residents a chance at staying put rather than taking a voucher and moving out of the community. Hope SF residents have the option to live onsite during construction and are guaranteed a place in the new housing.
Hunters View is the first site to be redeveloped, according to Fast Company. The project’s design calls for 267 public housing apartments, 83 subsidized units and 450 market-rate homes. Officials broke ground on Hunters View in April and have already completed construction on 107 affordable apartments.
The site initially consisted of 260 units built for shipyard workers after World War II. Although it was eventually transferred to the housing authority, Hunters View was never intended to last more a decade. The new apartments, however, are built to last 75 years.
Rich Gross, the president of Enterprise Community Partners, a company involved in the campaign touts Hope SF as the “single most important urban initiative in the country.” But public housing is just one component of Hope SF’s mission to close the inequality gap. The project is also raising money to fund job-training workshops, community gardens, healthy eating classes and other beneficial programs for residents. For Hope SF, the goal is to give existing residents, who take home an average income of $12,000, a boost to catch up with the rest of the city.
“This is different. There’s a commitment to work with current residents,” Gross said. “This changes a long history of urban renewal.”
A Blended Classroom That’s Yielding Exceptional Results
Every child deserves the best possible education. Of course, not every child learns the same way, which is why it’s not unusual schools separate their students — from gifted to special needs — into different groups. However, one school in San Francisco is testing out a one-size-fits-all approach, and it’s bringing surprisingly positive results.
As NPR reports, for the last two years, Presidio Middle School (where 10 percent of the students have some kind of learning disability) has been experimenting with a somewhat controversial model of integrating their special education students with some of their general education classrooms.
Here’s how they do it: To cater to every child’s needs, these classes are team-taught by two teachers, with one that specializes in learning disabilities. And because each of these students have their own school-issued laptops, customized learning software allows teachers to tailor their lessons using technology. Students are also encouraged to turn to their more gifted peers for help. The idea is to make these special needs students feel more included as opposed to creating feelings of separation or difference by sending him or her off to a special ed class for instruction.
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While integrated classrooms aren’t working for every single special needs students at Presidio, this method is definitely bringing positive results to others. “I had one kid last year, one of my favorites, very high on the autistic spectrum, doesn’t talk, and that kid is one of the top performing students academically in the whole school,” Presidio teacher Grey Todd told NPR. “And yet he probably wouldn’t have had that opportunity had he been sent to a special day class because he has difficulty communicating with other people, and when he’s able to be accepted for that and not ostracized or sent to a separate room, I think it makes him more viable to himself and to the community.”
Integrated classrooms also allow children to have an increased familiarity and better attitudes about those with disabilities.
However, not everyone is in favor of mixed classrooms. Critics say that they put gifted or talented students at a disadvantage since teachers need to cater more towards the special needs students. The results from Presidio Middle School demonstrate that inclusive classrooms can work well when they’re done correctly.
To learn more about integrated classrooms, you can listen to the full broadcast here.
These Programs for the Poor Preserve Dignity and Demand Accountability — and They’re Working
Programs to help the poor are often top-down initiatives, created and implemented by more fortunate people. But there’s a movement building across the country to empower the low-income people these programs benefit by letting them choose the specific help they need, welcoming their feedback about the effectiveness of the programs that serve them, and holding them accountable for improving their lives.
2012 MacArthur Fellow Maurice Lim Miller founded Family Independence Initiative in 2001 to study how best to help low-income families break out of poverty. FII’s “Opportunity Platform” issued San Francisco families laptops, instructed them to set goals for themselves, and invited them to track their own progress, which resulted in a 23% increase in income and a 24% increase in savings. Now Lim Miller is developing a computer platform through which low-income families can rate and offer feedback about programs and services they’ve used, like Yelp for social services.
Low-income people are rarely asked for their input on how services are working, as they are seen as recipients rather than consumers. But Lim Miller thinks using techniques from political polling and marketing studies can make services helping poor people more efficient and effective so they ultimately lift people out of poverty. The feedback users provide will help nonprofits and government programs determine how to improve, and allow foundations decide which programs are best to fund.
Erika Flint, who grew up poor as the daughter of a single mother, is another reformer whose work at Watertown Urban Mission in New York goes along with this dignity-driven approach to helping the poor. It’s run by a consortium of churches, who pool resources to help the poor with a variety of needs. They don’t give out checks or food vouchers—instead representatives from Watertown Urban Mission meet with families individually and give them the specific things they need to solve their problems—such as diapers or counseling, while setting up a plan to achieve self-sufficiency. For example, the Mission buys used cars and sells them to low-income parents at a steep discount, for $600, payble in monthly installments of $50. “We could just give the cars away,” Flint told Nicole Caldwell of Truth Atlas. “But instead, we enable people to buy their own.”
Flint said the idea behind everything the Mission does is to support people as they help themselves, “in order to maintain a sense of pride.” And with pride intact, the people they serve just might lift themselves out of poverty.
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How a San Francisco Mom Feeds Her Family With One Teeny, Tiny Farm
Urban farmer Heidi Kooy is proof that you can grow food anywhere—even bustling cities like San Francisco.
As TakePart reports, Kooy and her family dine on onions, tomatoes, lettuce and other fruits and vegetables grown right from the 250 square foot backyard of their Excelsior District home. They also eat eggs from their two chickens, Sweet Pea and Coco Puff, and drink milk from their miniature goats, Lucy and Ethel.
Kooy’s enthusiasm for urban farming all began after a frustrating trip to the grocery store to buy eggs. “I would stand in front of the egg case for 15 minutes trying to figure out which were the best or most healthy eggs to buy. With all the different kinds of labels—free range, cage free—I was just confused,” she says in the video below. “And if I was this confused, I didn’t know how I was going to make good choices for my daughter. So I became obsessed with getting my own chickens and raising our own food here in San Francisco.”
The most amazing part is that Kooy didn’t necessarily come from an agricultural background. While she grew up around farms in her hometown in Nebraska, she wrote in her blog that she’s never lived on one itself. She was also an anthropologist before her current job as a small crafting business owner. So while she might not exactly have farming in her blood, she’s willing to put in the extra effort it takes to feed her family fresh (chemical-and-GMO-free!) foods.
“My urban farm is the way I provide for my family, the way I contribute to my family,” Kooy says.
We mentioned before that the urban farming revolution is happily catching onto sprawling cities around the country, from New York City to Detroit. This agricultural movement giving us fresh, in-season and nutritious food as locally as possible. And if one busy San Francisco mom can farm right from her own backyard, maybe it’s not so hard for more of us join the revolution as well.
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Why San Francisco Just Installed a Musical Bench on a Busy Street Corner
Next time you visit San Francisco, take a moment to play on a musical bench activated by handholding. Or stand in front of a “whispering dish” and listen to a friend’s audible whispers from fifty feet away. Or charge your cell phone by pedaling.
These are all part of San Francisco’s new “living innovation zones” (LIZ) program. A partnership between the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, San Francisco Planning, and San Francisco Department of Public Works, these installations are meant to encourage residents to use public space for creative interactions.
The first living innovation zone opened at Yerba Buena Lane and Market Street last year, and combines aspects of an art installation and a science exhibit. The zone is called “PAUSE” and was designed with help from Josh Bacigalupi, who works at the Exploratorium’s Studio for Public Spaces.
The Bay City plans to open 10 zones in total like this around town, according to The Architect’s Newspaper.
The innovation zone, which looks like a giant abstract art installation on the corner of a busy street, really does make you pause. And the LIZ program directors hope it will lead to new interactions in areas that aren’t usually used for community purposes.
Project manager Steve Genrich told Architect’s Newspaper: “We’re looking at how technology can be used to activate public space. San Francisco is the innovation capital of the world, [yet] walking down the street there are few monuments to that.”
Now there is — and hopefully there will be many more. As an innovation capital, ideas that begin in San Francisco often spread across the country. So maybe there will be innovation zones in New York City, Chicago, or Detroit soon.
Either way, next time you’re hurrying to a meeting in Silicon Valley, take a moment to PAUSE, and explore the San Francisco’s new space.
San Francisco’s Tech Talent Lends a Hand to Help the Homeless
Because they want to concentrate their funds and efforts on helping people, nonprofits often have little money or expertise to devote to developing sleek websites, mobile apps, or other tools that draw on the latest technology.
That’s why ReAllocate, a nonprofit that organizes San Francisco’s tech talent to volunteer for the city’s needy, set up its “Hacktivation for the Homeless” from March 28 through 30. Almost 100 software engineers turned up to work on the tech problems of 12 nonprofits serving the homeless of San Francisco.
Among the requests? Larkin Street Youth Services wanted a mobile app that would keep the homeless teens it serves up-to-date on services and allow them reserve beds in its shelter. The Homeless Prenatal Program wanted to enable patients to register online, rather than by filling out paperwork at the office. And the Homeless Employment Collaborative (HEC) wanted to be able to track the people it serves and measure the effectiveness of its programs.
HEC executive director Karen Gruneisen told Josh Wolf of Shareable, “After folks have graduated from our program and gotten a job, they are no longer part of our program and they don’t have a lot of incentive to stick around and stay in touch with us. A smartphone with continued data service in exchange for completing a quarterly survey with status on employment and housing can be just the incentive that we need.”
The nonprofits pitched their needs to the software engineers, then the coders got to work. This hackathon, however, had a unique twist: Instead of working nonstop (which is typical of hackathons), these tech workers were encouraged to take a break from coding and go out on the streets and talk to homeless people, filming their interviews if possible.
Illana Lipsett of ReAllocate told Nellie Bowles of Recode.net, “It’s about fostering a level of empathy between the tech workers, the nonprofits, the homeless. Often, it’s just about creating opportunities for people to interact.”
Organizers hope events like this Hacktivation will ease the growing tensions between tech workers in booming San Francisco and the poor people that the growth has left behind.
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Can a Safety Net Underneath the Golden Gate Bridge Save Lives?
It’s an iconic image for San Francisco, and arguably for the entire state of California, but the Golden Gate Bridge is also a magnet for suicides. Suspended 220 feet over the channel that connects the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean, its allure as a deadly jumping-off point has had people begging for a suicide barrier for 60 years.
This year, those pleas reached a fever pitch. A record 46 people jumped to their deaths from the bridge in 2013, and another 118 were stopped before they could. These numbers give the Golden Gate Bridge the dubious distinction as one of the most popular suicide destinations in the world, along with the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Unlike those international landmarks, the Golden Gate’s orange-red span lacks a suicide barrier. But as soon as this May, that could change. The New York Times reported this week that directors of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District are expected to approve construction of a steel mesh net 20 feet below the California landmark’s sidewalk.
So what finally changed San Francisco’s trademark “live and let live” philosophy (which so well applies to other aspects of city life) this year? For one, suicides off the Golden Gate Bridge are trending younger. That means there are more parents taking up arms against the bridge’s seemingly easy exit strategy. For another, the numbers just keep growing: The Bridge Rail Foundation, an advocacy group that publicizes annual bridge statistics and encourages a growing number of bereaved parents to tell their stories, counts 1,600 suicides since the bridge was built in 1937.
These days, there is a suicide or an attempt almost every other day off of the bridge. As advocacy groups like the Bridge Rail Foundation made their case more and more clear, the city finally took note. And their actions will likely have a positive impact. While critics of the plan point out that suicidal people will find another way to die if a mesh net foils their attempt, many experts note that suicidal impulses are usually ephemeral. The obstacle of a net may be just enough to change their minds.
“Scientific evidence says a barrier reduces suicides, because thoughts of suicide are transient,” Eve R. Meyer, executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention, told the Times. For years, she said, when she raised the issue of a barrier before the board, she was shunned. Now, her voice is finally being heard.
And as for those that worry a net or barrier will mar the bridge’s beauty, those concerns will likely be unfounded. According to the recent designs, the barrier will be invisible from most angles.
Bringing It Home: The International Org Now Helping U.S. College Students
Starting over isn’t easy for anyone, but that’s where Mary Skaggs found herself at age 69, after battling Stage 4 lung cancer. It was December 2006 when she got the diagnosis, and the doctors were doubtful she would survive. Against their wishes, she pushed to continue chemotherapy — a testament to her persistence — and after eight long months, she was in remission. But that wasn’t the end of Skaggs’ struggle. After 20 years as a truck driver, lingering ailments (including asthma, emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) forced her to give up the job she loved and, with it, the paycheck that her family desperately needed to cover medical expenses.
When it was time for Skaggs to find a new career, she knew she needed something with a flexible schedule, one that would allow her to work from home and provide for her and her husband, who is also ill. She started taking classes at Merced College’s Business Resource Center in Merced, Calif., to learn basic computer skills. There, in the fall of 2013, she met a representative looking for volunteers for a new, free program offering job-skill training, intensive computer instruction and a chance for a better life. She was immediately interested. “I thought, ‘This sounds great,’” she says. “By the time I graduated, it had opened my life enormously. My whole life had changed.”
That program, SamaUSA, is a branch of San Francisco-based Samasource, an innovative social impact organization that connects people living in poverty around the world to work on the Internet. Headquartered at Samasource at 16th and Mission, SamaUSA focuses on helping folks earn money at home through online work so they can supplement their income and eventually graduate from college, leading to higher lifetime earning potential.
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“Education is often cited as the solution to alleviating poverty or breaking the cycle, as people with college degrees earn up to $1 million more in their lifetimes than those with just a high school diploma,” says Leila Janah, founder and CEO of Samasource and SamaUSA. “Yet 80 percent of students drop out of community college.” Most of these students are forced to quit for one reason: money. According to a Public Agenda report for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 71 percent of college dropouts said they had to quit school in order to go to work. Of those who attended school, but never graduated, 63 percent of students said balancing school and work was just too stressful. And nearly two-thirds of dropouts said they would like to finish their degrees. “At SamaUSA, we are aiming to change these statistics by providing low-income students access to a new economy and an opportunity to move above the poverty line,” Janah says.
SamaUSA is also job training at its most cost efficient: It currently spends about $3,000 per trainee, as much as $20,000 less expensive than other comparable job training programs. Initial funding was provided by the California Endowment — a private statewide foundation that expands access to health care and other needed services — but SamaUSA is currently seeking new financing to expand its impact.
At Merced College, Skaggs listened to the SamaUSA pitch: During a 10-week bootcamp, students learn the skills they need to be successful freelancers in the online market. With the help of instructors, they then build profiles on websites like Elance, oDesk and TaskRabbit, where they can apply for jobs in areas such as customer service, marketing, data entry, research and graphic design. The program was exactly what Skaggs was looking for. She wanted in. “I had come to Merced College strictly to get some type of computer skills so I could get a job online,” Skaggs says, adding that her health problems would eventually make her housebound. “But I was not sure how I was going to get my skills from the learning stage to the usage stage.” For Skaggs and other students, SamaUSA can bridge that gap, either by teaching them how to earn supplemental income while in school, or providing them with everything they need to develop a new career.
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SamaUSA is based on a business model called microwork, a concept that Janah developed in 2008 with the founding of Samasource, which so far has helped more than 20,000 women and youth in areas such as East Africa, South Asia and Haiti lift themselves and their families out of poverty through digital outsourcing. The microwork model takes complex data projects from large tech companies in the United States like Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn and breaks them down into small tasks, which are then completed by workers overseas. Samasource has been so successful that the organization was awarded a $2 million Google Global Impact Award last year.
But fighting poverty in the U.S. presents unique challenges. The SamaUSA pilot program launched its first classes in March 2013 in the Bayview-Hunters Point YMCA, near Samasource’s offices in San Francisco. The area is just 40 miles from Silicon Valley, but it has a poverty rate of close to 40 percent. “Even though Bayview is within one of the largest tech hubs in the world, there are not a lot of technology jobs that are accessed by this community,” says Tess Posner, SamaUSA’s director. “There’s a huge digital divide.”
To get the program off the ground, the SamaUSA team also had to combat the misperception that online work is a scam. After all, who would come to this low-income neighborhood and offer free laptops and technology classes, along with a promise of limitless job opportunities? “We were a new program, and no one knew who we were or what online work is,” Posner says. “It took time to build credibility.”
The first course in Bayview was a success, with the average 2013 graduate earning $1,800 working online and 92 percent of students staying in school. At Merced College, SamaUSA’s second location that opened in the fall of 2013, full-time job opportunities in the area are few and far between: The unemployment rate is a staggering 15.9 percent. That’s why a program like SamaUSA is a welcome opportunity for Skaggs and other adults who are attending Merced College to change careers. The flexible schedule has fit perfectly into Skaggs’ life. She can continue to take classes at Merced’s Business Resource Center, keep an eye on her husband and earn a decent amount of supplemental income doing data entry and research. “[SamaUSA] has given me everything I didn’t know I needed,” she says.
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In January, SamaUSA launched a third location: Feather River College in Quincy, Calif., a rural area in the Sierra Mountains with a high unemployment rate and little industry growth. Alesha Lindsey, 20, is a student in the first SamaUSA course here and has been consistently working a variety of jobs — from the Quincy Pizza Factory to Subway — while putting herself through school. With about 30 credits to go, Lindsey has finally nailed down her major, in part because of her attendance in the SamaUSA program. She’s now seeking a business degree, with an emphasis on marketing.
At first, Lindsey, like many other SamaUSA students, struggled to understand the concept of online work, but she now sees the program as an opportunity to build a better life for herself — as well as help her neighbors. “A lot of rural communities focus on keeping the money in their own town, which means there’s only so much to go around,” Lindsey says. “If I’m able to do online work, then I can bring in new money. And I can go the coffee shops and cafes and keep those places in business.”
Though SamaUSA is still in the early stages of development, Tess Posner is excited about the organization’s future. “Some students started [building careers] online, earning thousands of dollars in different fields, and applying that money right back into their college education,” she says. Instructors continue to support program graduates by hosting weekly SamaCafe gatherings, where they get together to apply for jobs, ask questions and connect with their classmates. And as SamaUSA continues to grow — Leila Janah, its founder, hopes that the program can expand to other areas of California in 2014 before going nationwide in 2015 — so will the opportunities to share what they’ve learned. “When you’re empowered with technology, it stays with you for the rest of your life,” Posner says. “It changes everything.”
Additional reporting by Charlotte Parker.
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