After a huge sinkhole opened up in San Francisco’s Richmond District, city officials knew they had to come up with a way to sell residents on a massive upgrade to the city’s outdated sewer systems.
The Sewer System Improvement Program is a 20-year, multi-billion dollar project to update the ecologically unsound and dated treatment plants, while shoring up the whole system from the threat of future earthquakes. But officials at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission worried that a boring PSA wouldn’t be sufficient to communicate the urgency of the undertaking.
In October, the Commission launched a new advertising campaign that used humor to inform San Franciscans about the sewer project. The ads read as notes from the San Francisco Sewer System, and included text such as “Your #2 is my #1,” “No one deals with more crap than I do” and “You can’t live a day without me.” They worked. The Commission’s social media reach has expanded and conversations have started on Twitter and Facebook about making the city’s major watersheds more green. Attendance at the department’s public planning forums is up too, with roughly 80 people attending, and tours of the city’s treatment plants booked months in advance.
“It’s about how you approach the problem, not about how much money you have,” Tyrone Jue, the Commission’s director of communications, told Fast Company. “The advertising campaign, yes, it costs money. [But] it’s a choice every agency has to make, whether you’re small or large. You engage with people in different manners … People want that transparency and openness out of their government; it creates community.”
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Tag: san francisco
How Meditation Is Bringing Calm to San Francisco’s Toughest Schools
When the bells sound twice a day at Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco, students who used to be too rowdy to even sit still close their eyes and spend 15 minutes clearing their minds. They’re practicing transcendental meditation in the classroom. Visitacion Valley is one of a handful of Bay Area schools that has instituted a Quiet Time program as a way to reduce stress and help kids focus. At this school, which is in an area that boasts the second-highest crime rate in the city, and where gunfire can be heard throughout the day, the program has worked miracles.
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“When I arrived at [Visitacion Valley] 13 years ago, it had the highest absenteeism rate, the highest suspension rate, the highest teacher turnover rate, and the lowest academic achievement rate,” says James Dierke, the Visitacion Valley principal who brought the program to life in 2007. Less than a year after starting Quiet Time, which is in part funded by the David Lynch Foundation, attendance rates at the school climbed to 98.3 percent. The number of suspensions fell by 45 percent. And standardized test scores and grade point averages increased significantly. Administrators credit meditation with some of those gains.
“The research is showing big effects on students’ performance,” Richard Carranza, San Francisco schools superintendent, told SFGate. “Our new accountability standards, which we’re developing in tandem with other big California districts, emphasize the importance of social-emotional factors in improving kids’ lives, not just academics. That’s where Quiet Time can have a major impact, and I’d like to see it expand well beyond a handful of schools.”
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Can a New Kind of Sidewalk Save Lives?
In San Francisco, up to 50% of all traffic fatalities are pedestrians, nearly four times the national average. In fact, three pedestrians are hit each day, accounting to a yearly average of 20 deaths. With statistics like these, it’s obvious that something has to change. So why not the streets?
An architecture firm from the Bay Area has come up with an idea that will not only help make pedestrians more visible to drivers, but also turn street corners and medians into useable public space. The design, which was dreamt up as part of a project by pedestrian advocacy group Walk San Francisco, creates “bulb-outs” — curb extensions that make sidewalks bulge into the street, increasingly the visibility of pedestrians who are waiting on the corner. These extensions have high ridges that not only protect pedestrians from drivers, but can also be turned into planters for community gardens.
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“We didn’t want a strict dichotomy between street and sidewalk,” says Zoe Prillinger of Ogrydziak Prillinger Architects, the firm that created the plan. “We’re interested in ambiguity, the idea of sharing and negotiation — between park and city, street and sidewalk, and cars and pedestrians.”
The firm’s design is part of a larger project called WalkFirst, a collaboration between San Francisco agencies — including the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the Planning Department, the Public Health Department, and the City Controller’s Office — that will prioritize capital improvements over the next five years to make the city a safer place to walk. The hope is that projects like this one will decrease pedestrian injuries and fatalities by 50% over the next seven years.
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The Only Time You’ll Want to See Graffiti All Over Your Neighborhood
Graffiti usually involves defacing a clean surface. But for a growing number of street artists, a dirty wall is a blank canvas just waiting to be washed. Instead of tagging city walls with spray paint, these artists are power-washing dirt, grime and dust from outdoor surfaces, while using stencils to create stunning works of art. The trend, dubbed reverse graffiti, has gained popularity in recent years, thanks in part to Paul “Moose” Curtis — the unofficial “godfather” of this style of street art. A native of England, Curtis has created some of the most iconic pieces of “clean tagging” in the U.S. In 2008, he was commissioned by Green Works, the maker of plant-based cleaning products, to wash a 140-foot mural onto a filthy wall in downtown San Francisco’s Broadway Tunnel. Curtis chose images of plants that were once indigenous to California to give the project a theme of green living. “Every mark is an environmental message, in whatever I do,” he told Modern Hieroglyphics. “It’s written in our dirt so it has a resonance to it, like the truth appearing semi-ghostlike from the fabric of the city.”
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The idea of creating clean art in place of traditional graffiti, which is often seen as destructive, has resonated with environmentally conscious artists around the country. In New York City, a trio of green activists launched the Greene Street NYC project in order to spread awareness about clean art. The project, which recently reached its fundraising goal on Kickstarter, aims to make clean art along Houston Street. And in St. Petersburg, Fla., artist Carrie Matteoli was awarded a $1,000 grant by Awesome Tampa Bay, a group of philanthropists, “to identify and transform dirty, dirty locations around the Tampa Bay area” through reverse graffiti. Her first piece was completed just before Thanksgiving.
While Moose says he’s been arrested a few times in pursuit of his art, he hopes it can change the way people think about graffiti. “I replaced the criminal element of graffiti with a positive process,” he says, “restoring a surface, rather than spraying and damaging it.”
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Meet the Venture Capitalist Who’s Investing in Redemption
Christopher Redlitz spends his life turning other people’s dreams into realities. Now Redlitz, a venture capitalist and cofounder of Transmedia Capital in San Francisco, is focusing his skills on helping a group that rarely gets a second chance: prison inmates. Through his nonprofit, The Last Mile, Redlitz and his partners select groups of qualified men and provide them with training in technology and entrepreneurship. Through six months of classes, participants learn everything from how to use social media to forming businesses and more, leading up to their very own Demo Day, where they present their business ideas to a select audience. The hope is that, upon their release, the men will have the confidence and skills to work in a paid internship program within the Silicon Valley technology sector, where they can gain real-life experience to aid in the transition from inmate to citizen. The program is already a success at San Quentin State Prison, and now it’s being implemented in an L.A. county jail, with others soon to follow.
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How One Skeptical Researcher Found an Unexpected Cause of Cancer
Skepticism might seem like an enemy of innovation, but when it comes to research, sometimes it’s the key. Dr. Johanna Joyce grew up in Ireland, earned her PhD at Cambridge, and used her “Irish skepticism” to create a major paradigm shift in cancer research at UC San Francisco and Memorial Sloan-Kettering. When everyone else was working to fight cancer by attacking the cancer cells themselves, they dismissed the white blood cells that surround tumors as “harmless garbage trucks.” But Joyce doubted how harmless they might be, and started critical studies in her lab to find out if attacking the white blood cells could treat the most common and most deadly forms of cancer. Joyce’s groundbreaking research turned into clinical trials that are attracting others to investigate similar methods. This bit of skepticism might just mark a major step toward curing cancer.
More Fun Could Fix Science Class
Parents want kids to learn more in science class, and students want school to be interesting and relevant. The solution? Make science more fun! Programs like the Mission Science Workshop in San Francisco give kids a space to explore, experiment, learn to think scientifically, and find subjects they can pursue further at school. It’s part of a new set of teaching guidelines called Next Generation Science Standards that get students to go beyond rote memorization and experiment like scientists, putting them in charge of their own exploration and learning.
The Surprising Way a Shower Could Save a Life
Like anyone who lives in a major city, Doniece Sandoval sees homeless people everywhere. Especially in her town: San Francisco. Until two years ago, though, she saw them out of the corner of her eye, as she bustled past.
Then came one particular cab ride through the city’s South of Market neighborhood. As the cab rolled through the area, a mix of hopeful startup employees and homeless people, the driver muttered something that stuck: “Welcome to the land of broken dreams.”
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When Nobody in Technology Looked Like Her, This Woman Did Something About It
Kimberly Bryant’s daughter was never “a girly girl”—instead she was interested in computer games, and aspired to become a game tester. Instead of just setting her daughter up with the latest gaming equipment, Bryant challenged her. Why not become a game developer instead of a tester? When she was studying electrical engineering in college, computers intrigued her, but none of the other people studying computing looked like her, a black woman, so she didn’t pursue that path. Bryant didn’t want the same discouragement to happen to her daughter. Two years ago she established Black Girls Code in San Francisco to introduce technology and software engineering to this generation’s girls. In this video sponsored by American Express, Bryant explains her mission and shows some future technology leaders in action. Black Girls Code has now expanded to eight cities and counting, so get ready for the next generation of software engineers.
Source: YouTube
Prepare to Be Insanely Jealous of the BatKid’s Eco-Cool BatKicks
So it wasn’t enough that little Miles (aka BatKid) had his Make-a-Wish dream come true with the help of thousands of screaming San Franciscan flashmobbers, the key to the City, and a special edition of the city’s paper. He also had insanely cool custom-made sneakers on his feet. Local startup footwear company Plae made them for Miles, with custom Ka! and Pow! details. Behind the Batman-themed exterior is footwear with kids’ health at its center. The shoes feature recycled PET (milk jug) uppers and environment-friendly leather, all manufactured in a solar-powered, fair-labor factory. Founder Ryan Ringholz previously worked for UGG and Puma, so he knows his way around a sneak. Lucky kid.