Center for Creative Land Recycling

Center for Creative Land Recycling
2012 - $5,000 San Francisco Blue Greenway Project
2010 - $5,000 San Francisco Blue Greenway Project

Critical Mass

Critical Mass
2012 - $5,000 20th Aniversary Celebration

Critical Mass got started in September 1992 in San Francisco as a way to bring cyclists together in a festive re-claiming of public space. Beginning rather under a less catchy name—the Commute Clot—the ride drew an initial crowd of 60 cyclists, and these numbers doubled for several months following.

Critical Mass has continued and grown in San Francisco, drawing hundreds from month to month, with typical rides around 1,500 to 2,000 (an all-time high on the 2002 10th anniversary is rumored to have been 10,000 cyclists!), but it has spread to over 300 other cities as well. For example, two dozen Italian cities have vibrant Critical Masses now, with Rome leading the way. In 2012, bicyclists in Brazil staged Critical Masses in over 20 cities to dramatize a surge of cyclist deaths in that country's car-centric streets. With independent rides springing up all over the place, Critical Mass has begun to take on the character of a large scale, decentralized grassroots movement!

September 2012 celebrates 20 years since the first Critical Mass took place in San Francisco.  A week long series of events and rides are planned.  The Seed Fund grant will support documentation of the events including a publication and original poster and sticker art.

sfcriticalmass.org

Greenhorns

Greenhorns 2012 - $5,000 Seed Circus The Greenhorns is a grassroots non-profit organization made up of young farmers and many collaborators. Their mission is to recruit, promote and support the new generation of young farmers. Using radio, blogs, film, and live events, the Greenhorns build agrarian culture by connecting young farmers with information, land, and each other. America wants more young farmers and more young farmers want a piece of America. We know it will take millions of these rough and ready protagonists of place to care for our ecosystems and serve our country healthy food in the years to come. The Greenhorns enable this critical meeting between minds, bodies, and land by helping young and aspiring farmers to navigate career paths, build skills, and connect with each other. Our multifaceted approach includes on-the-ground organizing of events and workshops, media production, and online coalition building. The Seed Circus is a series of cultural events engages attendees in tactile, sensual, and cacophonous experiences containing elements of country fair, circus, adult education, and child-centered sport as entry points into advocating for an alive and vital farm economy.  Its purpose is to build capacity on farms for functionality and agrarian celebration.  More widely it is meant to trigger greater understanding of the young farmers movement.  It functions as a series of multi-stage performances, interactive work stations, public acts of improvisation, lectures, films, and interpretive agricultural exhibits.   Seed Circus' have taken place in New York and Oakland, CA.  Plans are in the works for a Seed Circus in Washington DC in September 2013. thegreenhorns.net

Headlands Center for the Arts

Headlands Center for the Arts
2015 - $15,000 Climate Change Summit
2012 - $10,000 Architecture/Environment Resident, Mathilde Cassani
2011 - $10,000 Architecture/Environment Resident, Liam Young

Headlands Center for the Arts (HCA) provides intensive residency experiences to an international community of artists working across artistic disciplines. The peer-to-peer learning model made possible by the communal nature of Headlands programs aims to create a dynamic, creative environment that inspires the generation of new ideas, collaboration and new works of art.

HCA supports and invests in individuals at the cutting edge of their fields, whose work will impact the cultural landscape at large. They provide these artists with the support and opportunity to take their work to the next level and to explore and experiment, while bringing artists and thinkers into a dynamic community of local, national, and international artists.

Climate Change Summit
Headlands Center for the Arts is committed to facilitating cross-disciplinary connections in order to seed new projects and collaborations and foster public discourse on a wide range of relevant cultural, social and environmental topics. Over the course of four days in August 2016, fifteen artists, writers, policy makers and scientists were invited to participate in a live/work residency at Headlands where they presented, discussed, and exchanged ideas about many issues pertaining to climate change.  This culminated in a public program summarizing the key ideas, findings and positions local, national and international participants developed during the four day intensive.

headlands.org

Jennifer Wolch

Jennifer Wolch 2012 Fellow The challenges of building healthier and more sustainable cities motivate the research of Jennifer Wolch, UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design (CED). Before coming to UC Berkeley to serve as CED’s first woman dean, Wolch directed the Center for Sustainable Cities at the University of Southern California, where she conducted research on urban sprawl, metropolitan planning, and access to parks and open space. Her work done in collaboration with colleagues, students, and community-based organizations, included investigations into urban homelessness; formulating alternatives to sprawl; analyses of park and recreational resource access and environmental justice; development of web-based geospatial planning tools for watershed health, habitat conservation, and park space projects; assessments of urban alleys as potential green infrastructure; and studies of how urban design influences physical activity and public health. In the Bay Area, Wolch continues to work on issues of how to utilize remnant urban land as green infrastructure and how park-adjacent traffic crashes and air pollution deepen environmental justice issues associated with parks and open space. She has also initiated investigations into issues of park access and urban ecology in Chinese cities. ced.berkeley.edu/ced/people

Livable City

Livable City
2013 - $10,000 Play Streets for All
2012 - $5,000 Permanent Sunday Streets Route in the Mission
2011 - $5,000 Permanent Sunday Streets Route in the Mission

Livable City is a sustainable transportation and land use advocacy non-profit in San Francisco that works to create a city of great streets and complete neighborhoods, where walking, bicycling, and transit are the best choices for most trips, and where public spaces are beautiful, well designed and maintained. They use an integrated approach to define livability that includes transportation and land use advocacy, development of policies for public space and best practices with a goal of creating a safer, healthier and more livable San Francisco.In 2008, Livable City partnered with the Mayor’s office and the Department of Public Health to produce San Francisco’s first two Sunday Streets events, which created several miles of car-free space for walking, cycling, jogging and organized recreational activities. Sunday Streets proved to be a huge success, and the program grew to six events in 2009 and nine events in both 2010 and 2011. Sunday Streets has provided recreational opportunities to tens of thousands of San Franciscans and visitors, focusing on neighborhoods that lack these opportunities. Benefits include local economic development, neighborhood commercial vitality, community building and neighborhood engagement, and a catalyst for neighborhood conversations about reclaiming streets on a temporary or permanent basis.Play Streets for All
Play Streets for All (PSFA) trains and supports local organizers to produce smaller open streets events - called Play Streets - in their communities. The idea behind this effort is to build local leadership and increase the number, location and frequency of car-free events in San Francisco.  PSFA program objectives are to (1) simplify the permit application process, (2) identify, contact and train PSFA organizers, (3) provide technical assistance to PSFA organizers during the event organizing process and (4) create a replicable PSFA organizing model that can be shared throughout the Bay Area.

livablecity.org
sundaystreetssf.com

Megan and Rick Prelinger

Megan & Rick Prelinger 2012 Fellows The Prelinger Library is a private research library open to the public co-founded by Megan and Rick Prelinger. It houses more than forty thousand books and other print artifacts on North American technology, regional & land use history, media & cultural studies, including a space history collection. Megan Prelinger is an independent historian and a lifelong collector of space history ephemera and science fiction literature. Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer and filmmaker. He also founded Prelinger Archives, whose collection of 51,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. Rick has partnered with the Internet Archive to make 2,000 films from Prelinger Archives available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. prelingerlibrary.org

Michael Swaine

Michael Swaine 2012 Fellow Michael Swaine is an inventor and designer working in many media. His work is collaborative in nature and has been included in exhibitions at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art; and the Exploratorium, San Francisco. He is currently building the Free Mending Library in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco.  It is a library for fixing the holes in our lives—a place to borrow thread and sewing machines and talk about life.  He has been sewing, hemming and mending for free in the Tenderloin on the 15^th of every month since 2001 – the year of his Generosity Project for the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. Swaine teaches at California College of the Arts, Mills College and the San Francisco Art Institute.

San Francisco Art Institute

San Francisco Art Institute
2014 - $5,000 Urban Studies Fellow, to Be Announced in the Fall
2013 - $5,000 Urban Studies Fellow, Pablo Helguera
2012 - $5,000 Urban Studies Fellow, Radhika Subramaniam
2011 - $5,000 Urban Studies Fellow, Geoff Manaugh

Founded in 1871 the San Francisco Art Insitute (SFAI) is one of the nations oldest and most prestigious schools of higher education in contemporary art. Poised at the forefront of socially conscious art movements, SFAI’s Urban Studies program is designed specifically to address the contributions of art, artists, and researchers to the urban domain.The changing dynamics of cities—most notably the problem of rapid worldwide urbanization—have demanded new ways of thinking about geography, citizenship, and community.  Through the two-year MA program, students strive to positively engage, critique, and transform contemporary urban life in multiple ways. The Urban Studies program integrates courses and resources from both the School of Studio Practice and the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, allowing students to chart an individualized path of study. Faculty contribute expertise in such diverse—yet inextricably linked—fields as curatorial studies, visual studies, art history, anthropology, sociology, geography, comparative literature, philosophy, media/technology studies, ethnic studies and American studies. In addition, the Seed Fund Teaching Fellowship in Urban Studies brings distinguished artists, designers, architects, and planners to campus for discussions of urban practices.

Established in 2011, the Seed Fund Teaching Fellowship in Urban Studies was created as a co-curricular research and development initiative in support of SFAI’s Urban Studies program. Emphasizing art and design practices as forms of urban problem-solving, the fellowship program includes public lectures and colloquia by distinguished artists, designers, architects, planners, and artist collectives, and is meant to facilitate sustained on-campus residencies that enable discussions of process, aesthetics, and exemplary urban practices.

sfai.edu

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Education Fund

A recipient of the SF Bicycle Coalition’s Bike Match program.

Car-free space in Golden Gate Park.

People biking and enjoying a car-free Great Highway during the pandemic.

Students during a socially-distant bike education class.

Bay area residents enjoying biking on San Francisco streets.

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Education Fund
2019 - $10,000 General Support
2017 - $10,000 Transportation Equity Network
2013 - $5,000 "Kit of Parts" Manual
2012 - $25,000 2nd Street Project
2011 - $10,000 Family Biking Guide and Programs
2010 - $10,000 Connecting the City
2009 - $5,000 Great Streets Program

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is one of the oldest bicycle advocacy organizations in the country and was founded in 1971 by a group of activists representing a coalition of environmental and neighborhood groups. The organization quickly evolved into a powerful alliance of individuals working for a more bicycle-friendly city. The SF Bicycle Coalition has been dominated by a grassroots volunteer ethic ever since, growing into one of the strongest bicycle advocacy organizations in the country. For over 45 years, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has been transforming San Francisco streets and neighborhoods by promoting the bicycle for everyday transportation. Through their day-to-day advocacy, education and working partnerships with city and community agencies, the organization continues to create safe, just, and livable streets for all San Franciscans.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition embodies their core principles: transportation justice, sustainability, people power, and joy in all areas of their work. In their 2018-2022 strategic plan, the SF Francisco Bicycle Coalition incorporated these values to construct and execute a plan that prioritizes quality bicycle infrastructure and increases safety and invites more people to bike. In an effort to adapt to a world that’s changing the way it gets around, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition aims to transform the streets of San Francisco through:

1. The demand of high-quality infrastructure and visionary improvements to connect the city;
2. Building public support and political power to win affordable and sustainable transportation for all San Franciscans; 
3. The growth, engagement, and empowerment of membership in order to strengthen the organization and deepen community support for bicycling and; 
4. Introducing San Franciscans of all ages, identities, and backgrounds to the joy of bicycling and encouraging more San Franciscans to bicycle more often.

To fulfill these objectives, the SF Bicycle Coalition employs both their programmatic and advocacy related work to promote, educate, and reimagine transportation in San Francisco. Nationwide, transportation remains to be the second biggest expense in a household’s budget, and families in San Francisco feel that cost acutely. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition strives to provide affordable transit options to those in need and promote the bicycle for everyday transportation. 

Through the Bike It Forward program, the SF Bicycle Coalition works alongside community groups around the City to organize events structured to provide bikes to neighborhood residents. The organization reclaims unclaimed and abandoned bikes from the SFMTA, BART, and other agencies that are repaired with the help of volunteers. Alternatively, the Bike Match program connects people who have bikes they no longer use with those who need a bike. As a cooperative, community-driven collaborative, neighborhood residents who have expressed a need through partner organizations, complete a bicycle education course, get properly fitted for their new bike, and leave with a new, affordable, fun and healthy way to get around. 

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is considered the leading resource for street safety and education in the city. The organization structures its curriculum to cater toward people who bike and those who share the streets with people who bike. Whether a course is dedicated to youth and family biking, navigating safely through San Francisco, learning how to share the streets with all forms of transit, riding at night and in all weather conditions, or just getting acquainted with the basics, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is proud to offer free online resources and classes that accommodate all age ranges, levels of comfortability, and experience.

Through their advocacy work, the SF Bicycle Coalition continues to push for more car-free spaces, slow streets, and safe, high-quality biking infrastructure. To keep expanding the number of Slow Streets, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition continues to push the City to explore more permanent treatments and prioritize the densest San Francisco neighborhoods, including the Tenderloin and SoMa. In 2020, advocacy for better bike infrastructure pushed forward and construction continued on Lefty O’Doul Bridge, 7th Street from Folsom to Townsend, Howard Street from 3rd to Embarcadero, new protected bike lane segments on the Embarcadero, and improvements to 20th Avenue in the Outer Sunset. 

During the pandemic, the organization has seen six times more people biking in Golden Gate Park. Now, after decades of advocacy, San Franciscans can enjoy a fully car-free route from the Panhandle to Ocean Beach; take a car-free ride through the Panhandle, to the eastern segment of JFK Drive, through Overlook and Middle Drive, and onto the car-free western segment of MLK Drive. While more people are looking to spend more time outdoors amidst the lifting of shelter-in-place orders, the Slow Streets program has also expanded car-free space across San Francisco to help people stay healthy and safe. Thanks to this program, people can maintain social distance as they walk, bike, and roll on over 30 corridors that are closed to vehicle through traffic. 

The Seed Fund have been supporters of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition for over a decade and have partnered with the organization to fund certain campaigns centered around transportation justice, sustainability, people power, and joy. Some of these projects include:

• In 2012, the Seed Fund granted the SF Bicycle Coalition $5,000 toward the 2nd Street redesign in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood to push for and prioritize biking and walking infrastructure. 

• In 2013, $5,000 was granted to the SF Bicycle Coalition’s “Kit of Parts” manual that provided city planners with information on how to quickly transform city streets that included separated bikeways, greening initiatives, and sidewalk expansions. The toolkit was intended to be an open and accessible resource that provided inspirational, practical, and feasible designs not only for San Francisco officials but other cities looking to create more sustainable solutions on both a national and global scale. 

• In 2017, The Seed Fund funded the SF Bicycle Coalition’s Transportation Equity Network proposal that identified the need to come together with other local community partners to establish a collective that ensured an equitable distribution of bikes. The Community Bike Build program (now formally known as the Bike It Forward program) needed to extend beyond simply providing low income residents with a bike, lights, lock and helmet. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition — along with its partners —  determined that additional resources like bicycle safety education, affordable maintenance and culturally competent infrastructure needed to be implemented.

• In 2019, The Seed Fund funded the SF Bicycle Coalition’s Embarcadero campaign which helped hire staff and additional resources to ensure that the vision of a two-way bike lane along the waterfront side of the Embarcadero project advanced toward approvals. The $10,000 grant toward this project gave the SF Bicycle Coalition the flexibility to work with elected officials and City agencies to identify and allocate funding for construction. Additionally, these funds helped ensure that the necessary time and resources to make this project a national and international model for linking climate adaptation and mitigation efforts through the best practices of green infrastructure were met. 

sfbike.org

San Francisco Children in Nature Forum

San Francisco Children in Nature Forum 2012 - $5,500 General Support The San Francisco Children in Nature (SFCiN) Forum brings together educators, program directors, recreation and parks staff, health care and urban planning professionals towards the end of ensuring that all San Franciscan childhoods flourish with access to quality outdoor experience. The mission is to inspire city agencies, schools and communities to nurture, empower, and engage children, youth and families in their relationships with urban nature in San Francisco. Participating programs and agencies include: the YMCA of San Francisco, San Francisco Unified School District, San Francisco Recreation and Parks, the Presidio Trust, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, National Park Service, Literacy for Environmental Justice, Kids in Parks, the Randall Museum, preschools and child development centers.

Shaping San Francisco

Shaping San Francisco
2019 - $10,000 General Support
2018 - $5,000 General Support 
2017 - $5,000 General Support
2016 - $5,000 General Support
2013 - $5,000 General Support
2012 - $5,000 General Support
2010 - $5,000 Ecology Emerges Project Documentation

Serving the City for 25 years, Shaping San Francisco is an ongoing multimedia project in bottom-up history, offering an online archive at FoundSF.org—a place to document, discover, and shape San Francisco history—and public programming sharing the stories of daily life in the City by the Bay. Shaping San Francisco provides access to the City's lost history, with a long-term goal of facilitating its discovery, presentation, and preservation. The project seeks to create a physical and virtual commons where together we make—and understand our place within—history every day

Shaping San Francisco believes that “History is a Creative Act in the Present,” or in other words, each person is an agent of history, and every moment is historical, even if relatively little makes it on to the “historical record.” Shaping San Francisco’s public engagement promotes the idea that history can—and should—be de-professionalized, made into a popular, participatory process. More than just a website, more than just a lecture series, more than a collection of ongoing walking and bike tours, Shaping San Francisco encourages collective investigation of and creation of new shared social histories about the world we cohabitate together.

Shaping San Francisco's work encourages ordinary citizens to see the urban environment around them having been created in by a combination of social and ecological processes over time, within historic economic and cultural contexts; just as important the urban environment is shaped, too, by a ceaseless effort to challenge the meaning and direction of those processes and contexts. Shaping San Francisco has focused from its origins on San Francisco's ecological history, the relentless leveling of its famous hills and the steady filling of the bay to “make land,” which permanently altered the surrounding bay. Shaping San Francisco’s historical investigations of the changing ecology of the City have led to unique and enduring analyses integrating its tradition of dissent with the dramatic (and often catastrophic) changes that dissenters often sought to prevent.

15 seasons of FREE Public Talks provide an informative, engaging cultural forum inviting presenters and audiences to dialogue about issues covering Art & Politics, Historical and Literary Perspectives, Social Movements, and Ecology, emphasizing the intersections of multiple themes across fluid boundaries of disciplines and paradigms. This in-person discussion space is meant as an antidote to historical amnesia, creating a place to change the climate of public intellectualism in San Francisco, and an unmediated place to meet and talk. Most all of the Public Talks are archived online. Historical walking and bicycle tours—and the recent addition of Urban Forums: Walk & Talks and Bay Cruises—bring people together to learn how the City is shaped through the efforts of engaged citizens and from a perspective rooted in its overlooked and forgotten histories, including those of marginalized populations (and species!) who don’t show up in the history books.

Shaping San Francisco fosters academic and community partnerships, incorporating a service learning element to its public programming, offering historic context for the issues currently faced in the urban setting through tours to students and community members. As seasoned tour guides, editors, and educators, the directors are frequently asked to share their expertise through custom tours and classes; they create customized tours each month as well as collaborative projects year-round including teaching, guest-curating, and co-producing projects. Shaping San Francisco is a fiscally-sponsored affiliate of Independent Arts & Media, with whom successful collaborations have been forged over the course of a decade.

shapingsf.org

SPUR (formerly San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association)

SPUR’s We Are the Bay exhibition

Farmer’s market in San Francisco; photo credit Sergio Ruiz

Rising tides threatening to flood; photo credit Sergio Ruiz

SPUR’s How We Move exhibition

A transit + design workshop held at SPUR’s Urban Center

SPUR (formerly San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association)
2023 - $20,000 Transit Oriented Communities
2021 - $15,000 Transit Priority Program
2019 - $10,000 Operational Landscape Units Project
2018 - $20,000 Regional Plan
2017 - $10,000 Operational Landscape Units Project (with SFEI)
2017 - $10,000 Framework for Sea-Level Rise Adaptation
2016 - $15,000 Framework for Sea-Level Rise Adaptation
2014 - $15,000 Fossil Fuel Reduction Report
2010 - 2014 $38,000 Food Systems and Urban Agriculture Program
2007 - $5,000 General Support

Work

Through research, education and advocacy, SPUR works to create an equitable, sustainable and prosperous region. SPUR practices urban policy, developing and advocating for ideas and reforms to bring about systems change. The decisions that shape housing, transportation, land use, economics, food access, sustainability and resilience have significant impacts on people’s lives. SPUR also focuses on governance because it’s how communities organize themselves to achieve collective goals and because SPUR believes in the power of government as a force for good. SPUR works across the nine counties of the Bay Area because the structural systems that shape people’s lives— the housing market, the transportation network, the economy — are regional. SPUR does deep work in San Francisco, San José and Oakland because policies set in the region’s three biggest cities have widespread impact on most Bay Area residents and because local context is critical for effective policy. SPUR believes that community and individual well-being are healthiest when a society achieves equity, sustainability and prosperity. Equity because systemic racism continues to create unjust and unacceptable outcomes for many members of our community. Sustainability because human well-being depends on a healthy and thriving natural environment. And prosperity because meeting individual and collective needs requires resources. SPUR conducts its work through research, education and advocacy because these tools have the power to change minds and shape outcomes. The organization believes that profound systems change requires addressing beliefs, relationships and policies, and SPUR works at all three of these levels. SPUR grounds its work in a spirit of inquiry and a big-tent perspective that engages partners and communities across the region.

Goals

SPUR has many key goals related to each of the organization's major policy areas, including:
Planning: Add new jobs and housing where they will support equity and sustainability, and make neighborhoods safe and welcoming to everyone.
Housing: Make housing affordable for everyone.
Transportation: Make it fast, easy and inexpensive to get around without driving alone.
Sustainability + Resilience: Eliminate carbon emissions and make communities resilient to climate change.
Economic Justice: Enable all people to participate in the region’s thriving economy and attain economic security.
Good Government: Support a high-functioning public sector that serves the collective good.
Food + Agriculture: Create healthy, just and sustainable food systems, and put an end to food insecurity.

Achievements

SPUR has accomplished many things over the course of its 100+ year history. The organization shaped some of the most important planning and urban policy issues in the region, including planning for the BART system, establishing the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, proposing San Francisco’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund and more. Recent achievements of the organization in 2020, include:

• Crafting more than 70 policy recommendations on housing, transportation, planning, sustainability and resilience and more
• Welcoming more than 13,000 individuals to public forums covering pressing issues in the Bay Area, such as the housing affordability crisis, economic inequality, how COVID-19 affects small businesses and more
• Co-sponsoring three pieces of legislation passed by California lawmakers, including SB288, which expands CEQA exemptions to speed up the delivery of sustainable transportation projects in the state
• Hosting the organization's first Ideas + Action symposium, which brought together public space experts and more than 1,500 attendees from across North America
• Released numerous reports and white papers, on topics such as the future of transportation, transit project delivery, climate hazards and modeling future places, which envisions a Bay Area that can welcome everyone
• Hosting a forum with Mayors Breed, Liccardo and Schaaf of San Francisco, San José and Oakland to learn how cities of the Bay Area can collectively work toward a more equitable, sustainable and prosperous region
• Leading convening efforts for the new California Home Builders Alliance, an informal advocacy coalition focusing on state legislation and regulatory reforms to build more housing

Impact Report attached; our most recent annual report was online only--it is available here: https://www.spur.org/about/annual-reports/2020

spur.org

Walk San Francisco

Mayor London Breed, State Senator Scott Wiener, Walk SF executive director Jodie Medeiros, and children from El Dorado Elementary School get ready for the 2019 Walk & Roll to School Day. Photo: Greg Zeppa

Walk SF was part of an action on Market Street pushing for permanent removal of private vehicles. 500,000 people walk on Market Street every day, and five of the city’s top ten most dangerous intersections are on Market. Photo by Walk SF.

Walk SF was part of an action on Market Street pushing for permanent removal of private vehicles. 500,000 people walk on Market Street every day, and five of the city’s top ten most dangerous intersections are on Market. Photo by Walk SF.

Walk SF was part of an action on Market Street pushing for permanent removal of private vehicles. 500,000 people walk on Market Street every day, and five of the city’s top ten most dangerous intersections are on Market. Photo by Walk SF.

At a March 2019 action on the steps of City Hall to shine a light on recent traffic fatalities. Photo by Walk SF.

A memorial to the lives lost in traffic crashes in San Francisco since January 2014. From the 2020 World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims. Photo by William McLeod with permission from Walk SF.

Walk San Francisco
2023 - $15,000 Climate Justice in the Bayview
2022 - $10,000 General Support
2021 - $10,000 20mph Speed Limit in the Tenderloin: Data Study
2016 - $10,000 Green Connections
2014 - $10,000 Vision Zero
2013 - $10,000 General Support
2012 - $6,000 General Support

San Francisco can and should be the safest, most walkable city in the United States. Yet every day, at least 3 people on average are hit by cars while walking in our city.

Walk San Francisco exists to change this. Walk San Francisco (Walk SF) was founded in 1998 by a small group of volunteers united by the belief that the city’s streets and sidewalks should be safe and welcoming for all.

Today, Walk SF is known as a tireless advocate in pushing for – and winning – life-saving changes across the city. Some defining wins include: 15 MPH speed zones around 181 schools; San Francisco’s second-in-the-nation commitment to Vision Zero; the removal of private vehicles from Market Street; the tax on Uber and Lyft; and groundbreaking changes to some of the city’s most dangerous streets.

Walk SF also founded and supports San Francisco Bay Area Families for Safe Streets, a group of traffic crash survivors and the loved ones of people who have been killed or injured in traffic crashes. Members offer emotional support and work together to win changes to prevent more lives from being destroyed by traffic violence. Each November, Families for Safe Streets and Walk SF hold World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims

In addition, Walk SF works to increase the number of children safely getting to school on foot, bicycle, scooter, and transit as part of the San Francisco Safe Routes to School Partnership. Walk SF also brings together the voices of the 30+ community-based organizations, nonprofits, and civic groups that make up the Vision Zero Coalition, plus leads the Senior and Disability Work Group. And throughout the year, Walk SF offers a variety of walks to both explore the pure joys of exploring the city on foot and the challenges faced due to unsafe streets.

In 2019, Walk SF launched its first-ever three-year strategic plan. The long-term goals outlined in it are to: 1) end pedestrian traffic deaths and severe injuries, and 2) increase the number of trips people take on foot.

As part of the strategic plan, Walk SF prioritized both what it works on and how it will work. Crash data shows that San Francisco’s residents living in communities of concern suffer the most from traffic violence. These are communities with the most low-income people, immigrants, communities of color, seniors, children, and people with disabilities. That is why while Walk SF works in the interest of all pedestrians in San Francisco, Walk SF prioritizes its efforts on communities and/or geographies where issues of equity are most at play.

Walk SF also focuses its outreach and education in communities and populations that have disproportionately been impacted by traffic violence and often not engaged in the community process. Walk SF works hard to ensure a community’s voice is authentically brought forward to guide advocacy efforts, and build coalitions across diverse communities. That’s why Walk SF goes much deeper in its community engagement and advocacy work in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, where traffic violence is a daily reality for the nearly 40,000 people who live there.

Walk SF’s vision is for a San Francisco where everyone – of every age and ability – can get around safely. And the benefits of making this vision a reality ripple far beyond the precious lives that will be saved. When it is safe and inviting for many more people to walk in San Francisco, it also means reducing climate emissions. It means thriving neighborhood businesses and greater health. It means changing the fact that people of color are more likely to live, work, and walk on dangerous streets. It means stronger and more connected communities.

A memorial to the lives lost in traffic crashes in San Francisco since January 2014. From the 2020 World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims. Photo by William McLeod with permission from Walk SF.

At a March 2019 action on the steps of City Hall to shine a light on recent traffic fatalities. Photo by Walk SF.

walksf.org