that's it. >> tools and strategies to engage your community. i want to pose a question to you. who is in your community. the first question you have to answer is who is in your community? think about that for a second because in our neighborhood we actually have an eclective group. we have residents, homeowners, renters. starving artists to starving studentses to corporate america to very rich people. we have a dynamic range of residents. we have a large merchant corridor on divisdaro and fulton. a lot of community organizations. we have a new mental health clinic and drug rehabs in our neighborhood. we have private and public

schools. we have a dynamic it's a luxury and beautiful neighborhood because of the wide variety of people in the communality. my question to you is who is in your communality. you can start thinking through this session how you engage the people. what tools are you going to take out of this to engage that community? we as a neighborhood association have a lot of standard tools but i will connect it to how it relates to tresidentses. we have a news letter it's an 8 page news letter produced every other month. una is on the front cover because she is-ing us start a neighborhood watch program. our neighborhood -- i lived in my neighborhood for 20 years i never seen we have been plagued by violence i know is a city

wide problem. we have as a result started a neighborhood watch program. we have over 30 blocks, that's a lot of bonni blairings starting neighborhood watch. thank god for safe and una because that organization is really helping us kick started. that's a great way to build communality. what's a neighborhood watch a block by block level not on a territory. you have to go get to know your neighbors. how many of you know your immediate neighbors or people that live 2 doors down from you. you would be surprised how many in your neighborhood don't. through a neighborhood watch program we are making neighbors get to meet each other it's a great way to build communality. our news letter we have a yahoo group over 600 people. we make it easy to join. we have a website where you type in your e mail address to the website and you sign yourself

up. i don't have to sign you up you can do it quickly and easily through the website. we also just launched a wiky. how many of you guys know wik pedia? not that many of you. wiky is i'm excited about this tool. it's an imagine a website that everybody in your community could contribute to. that's a wiky. i welcome you to go to our wiky site it's nopnawi k i. org. jarry is our wiky manager he's the guy that sort of birthed it and has taken ownership. all of you could contribute. mo magic are in the western adition are the community convener they don't have a

website we added their information to our website so people who are connected and want to look for tools or agencies that help them can get that information. so, pardon? >> the wiky the site is nopnawiki. org. we have the news letter and yahoo groups and website and wiky site. we fliers for all our meetings at our cafes and merchants. you can read about the events in the neighborhood. there is word of mouth that's the best way i think. talking to people is the best way to build communality. we do organize a lot of activities in our neighborhood. the reason why we are successful in organizing all the activities

is we have a large shared leadership organization. all of us our volunteers and 11 board members we have over 60 volunteers in our neighborhood distributing on a parent's group or safety team. they are helping with marketing and pr. they are helping us with reaching out and setting up meetings with the mayor. we also set up meetings with the mayor and our city representatives. so, through those organization and volunteers and the committees we get a lot of community building everybody knows somebody else the classic network model. we do have meetings general meetings for the neighborhood and those are we communicate

those meetings through the news letter through the yahoo group and fliers we generally get 70 people. the last had 160 meeting. the driver was because we had shootings in our neighborhood. the neighborhood association got a lot of big hitters to our meeting including the da's office and mayor's office and the police always come and park station is our police station and they are great. they care about us and communicate with us a lot. so, those are some of the few tools. we do things we have low income housing projects in our neighborhood as well. we have done family pot lucks events. until i got involved you don't realize how easy it is to do something to just organ event.

create a flyer and set a date tell people about it. it's not that tough. we are doing you are all invited if you have kids. i just started a kids dance party at palang lounge. we are fortunate to have the new top 10 clubs in the neighborhood. we know the owner and pitched the idea of just letting the neighborhood invite the families and let the kids come and dance for 3 hours. noon-3 o'clock this sunday september ninth, tomorrow. that was something we came up with. we created a flyer and posted it. last party we had over 30 families there that was the first one this one we're xching a lot more people.

we also organize holiday parties. we have a halloween party. kids are a great way to build community because everybody loves kids for the most part. you know, even the bad kids are good kids. we have our trouble spots but you know building community is about communication and as mark said, that's how you communicate with those people and that's i think the most effective tool is figuring out how to communicate and communicate. thank you. >> i want to piggyback on her point on kids. kid is a great way to bring families together. it's one of the most excellent way to bring diverse families together because children play with each other. and they go to the same school. the safety network and sunset neighborhood coalition we have

worked together to prepare for the sunset community festival. one of the tools that we use is to try to make the event really run, really entertaining and try to make it culturally appropriate for the communality. one of the tools we use to try to make it appropriate is that in all of our fliers and out reach materials we try to translate all of them to the different languages that our community members use. and also we try to build relationships with our local media. i think that is one of the most effective way to let all of our community members know about our events. not only just english but media press with the local chinese narp or whatever language your community may need.

thots one of the most effective way to get to community measures that may be more isolate the. and i think fundraising campaign is also a great way to build community because in our community, there are play grounds that are old and i'm sure there are play grounds in your community that are old and needs to be renovated. and i think play grounds is the way to bring people together because everyone wants their kid to play in a safe play ground. they want better facilities. it's a unifying goal that everybody wants. i think finding a unifying goal is important in community building. i think and then all of what the other panelists have said are very useful. >> thank you.

>> we heard from our exerts a lot about the successes and the tools and strategies that they use to really engage their communities. a lot of us in the beginning raised our hands and said we were very actively engaged in the community already. it's a good time to talk about the challenges that come up. i'd love to hear from you in the audience what you see as challenges. what you would like to hear our panel give advice to or just hear your concerns and see what we can do to offer you support. anybody have a question? yes. >> i have a question about [inaudible] what techniques do

you suggest from revitalizing a neighborhood association and get people become on the positive track [inaudible]. >> okay. i know that the film crew needs us to repeat questions. the question is what do we do about burn out in the community when we have success in engaging people and the energy sort of deplates out, what do we do? >> i can start with that. involving a large section of the community who's interested. we ask for volunteers. and we don't over burden them. we meet quarterly. the reason we meet quarterly after two months people are eager to meet. if you meet too often there is the burn out. what we try to do and we do have

emergency meetings and a shopping center we had an albertson's that closed we had special meetings between the quarterly meetings, well attended. and people interested in supporting that segment. we try to be inclusive and involve all segments of our community and people outside of the area attend our meetings. we are very positive much the key is communication, 2, not meeting that often, believe it or not with our group. other groups it may be important to meet every month. to avoid the burn out get as many people involved and meet only when it's necessary to meet. >> just as someone who came into a community that was burnt out on having meetings because of the violence and all the issues that have happen instead western addition when we started up there were concerns about

meets because people feel you meet all the time and nothing changeses so what's the point. we meet regularly. the key is with volunteer organizations i think nopna is good about tapping into the resources existing. find out what community based organizations and what the police department and what the mayor's office or the city has to offer and really try to tap into people who are getting paid to do some of the work you need to have done so you don't burn out the volunteers. using the volunteers for the event and project piece that happens so they can relish in the joy and beauty of this is great. we have something to show for. but for our time but to take advantage of people who are getting paid to do some of that work so that that day to day the phone calling and the following up the creating the agendas. may be some of that stuff can be

done through somebody else who's getting paid to do that. a lot of the neighborhoods have community organizes like safety network who do out reach and support. i think you have to find out what resources are available to you. and take advantage of them. the mayor's office of community develop. the mayor's office of housing. all of the departments have an out reach division or a piece you with tap into and take advantage of. initially you have to do what's realistic. you probably can't meet that often but make the best use of the time you do meet and find the resources in the city you can use to further your agenda. >> other questions people have?

>> can i say first off though that the city dcys funded a community convener for treasure island somebody is getting paid to have convener meetings and bring the community together. >> i can get that information for you after this meeting. through the community -- i'm sorry -- department children youth and families of the city are paying the treasure island

development housing initiative. it's being paid to do community convening. >> that's tidi and i understand tidi there is the residents out there. and tidi has their ideas there are market rate people that want to organize. >> this is a new funding that has come out where they will engage the whole community. follow up because they got money specifically to engage the entire community. >> i'd like to add that we up here we really want to help every single person every neighborhood organization in the room. what we need from you is to sign the clip board that's come around because even though you signed in when you registered

for this workshop that's going to city government. they don't share their information with us. we have no way of contacting you once this workshop is over unless you sign in. i particularly as coalition for san francisco neighborhoods would like to have especially those who said they want to start new organizations or revitalize an organization to get in contact with me or give me your information personally so i can help you with that. as to treasure island i'm going to have to pass on that one to somebody else but i could help you with your organization. not as a specific geographical. >> i'd like to address your question. may be we need to talk off line but it's engaging the residents everything starts as a seed.

any idea even with our neighborhood watch programs on a block by block level what we are doing is getting 2 or 3 residents together they form critical mass and they meet and it's a gathering a seed process you have to water it. if there are 3 or 4 of you interested in creating a neighborhood association. put up a flyer at the coffee shop and may be you will get more joining you. it will flower if you are consistent with your meetings. you need to be have routine set meetings whether it's quarterly or every other month same day, same time of the month so people know when they are. and it's about communicating there are a lot of other people on the island that want to do exactly what you want to do.

and you need to get to them and communicate out to them. you can start a yahoo group and add one e mail at a time. i would be happy to share with you on how we started our yahoo group. we didn't start with 600 people we started with 5. our yahoo group has grown by 200 people in the last year primarily because we made it easy for people to sign up and we have been promoting the neighborhood association we have flyers up. we are doing a lot of value added activities for the neighborhood including parties. what cheryl said about finding daniel holmesy. do you know daniel holmesy? >> i know other people that are my husband is on the treasure island advisary committee.

treasure island's an area the city is investing in. i think you can leverage resources. >> if i can briefly answer becky's question. this is for everybody. number one, stay positive. >> number 2, listen to your constituency that's important and i think the key to the whole thing is find somebody in if it's department of public works or any organization sfpuc whom ever and get a liaison and invite them to the meeting. don't just have a complaint session come up with a problem and say, we will work together to solve this problem. here's what we can do. how can you help us? how can we work together. that's the key. organizations love coming to our meetings because it's not a c p

complaints we try to keep it positive we work with the agencies and that's the key to it. >> we were going to have volunteers but i don't see them so we are doing it this way. [inaudible].

>> great question. the question posed was how do we engage the young professionals in our community? how do we pass up the time and speak from people who have been engaged in the organizing effort to the younger people coming up. >> we organize block parties where we have bands come that

are basically we have parties. and people come out for parties [laughter]. that's the bottom line. we have bbq. they can get a beer at the local corner store. you know. >> we have apartments and condos all over our neighborhood it's the same thing. i'm telling you you have an event where there is music and food people will come. they just will. may be it won't be 200 people may be 50 people but the next time you do it you get another hundred people. i have to share a story that's not related but sort of relate the. we have block parties every year in may or september or something like thachlt this last one our block parties are great way for us to get everybody. we get the starving students.

we get the musician and it is artists and the families we get the you know people from low income housing coming. we get the corporate america, we get everybody at the block parties. it's because we do a variety of things. we have the bounce house for the kid. the music. you at our last 1 the guy named didz hip he's great. he was riding his bike bite block party he's an hoola hoop guy. he's on his guy with 30 hoola hoops riding his bike and said, hi, can i join. he had all the kids. he had a microphone and he was a spontaneous celebration. he sdoont live in our neighborhood but we invite him

back. have an event. [inaudible]. >> yeah. well, music, music brings in people. young professionals, young people like music and love free food. >> if i may comment. not only the young professionals but also people we live in a multili multilingual city make sure you involve every segment of the community in our organization. we try to do that. we are looking for bilingual services it's difficult to find because it's costly. we try to be inclusive. we are not exclusive. again, we have members who pay 15 dollars a year to join our

association but that is not who that's not who come to our meeting. anybody in the community. we have people who own homes who live outside of san francisco who come to our community meetings. it's important to include everybody and try to get as broad range of individuals in your at your meetings. i think that's part of the success. how you go about doing that we can go around the room and i'm sure everyone has suggestions and ideas. the key is being inclusive. [inaudible] [laughter]

>> the question is how dou break through the wall. how do you break through the wall of associations that have built up around issues that don't reach out to the whole community they serve? >> well, not just issues but it's a culture of personality i believe she was speaking to. 2 of the main things that you

can use are look at the by laws of the organization. are there term limits? what are the by laws state? and secondly, the actual meeting itself. assuming there are regular meetings, what kind of structures? parliamentary procedures or roberts rules of order. there are coalition of san francisco neighborhood in the audience has robert's rules in brief. a few copies she would be glad to sell you. >> for a very low price i believe 7 dollars. they are invaluable. robert's rules are some of the most interesting things i've read not intimidating what so ever. and if you would