san hose's save our streets in the mission district by i-280. we have a lot of quality of life issues. we worked on a lot of traffic calming. one. things that came up as an easy thing to do required thing to do is a lot of greening. we worked on greening on san jose we have 9 blocks done south

of caesar chavez and we are working to go north. the community challenge program has been retool indeed 2005 to encourage neighborhood involvement. that's me. >> this is david wincelow. >> i'man architect and urban planner and currently take into practice one. focuses of my research over the last 20 years is alleys. and i will talk about that as we get started. >> i'm director of kid serve an art program where we guide community and young people through the process of creating

permanent permanent mosake art and transform a wall in the neighborhood. >> the panelists what were invieded here because they have received community challenge grants but they also have public processes in terms of for one thing, creating something oust nothing where nothing was possible previously but figuring out who the stake holders are in their community and involving them on going. hopefully with a view being able to channel that involvement into other issues. because that typically is the thing that sustained neighborhoods if you grow from a one issue group to a multiissue

group you will have sustainability. the next thing is to see a show of hands in how many have applied for the grants and know what they are. how they work. >> most of you don't know anything about the program. i don't like to talk a lot this way. i would like to have a discussion where we have ideas. the room is not set up for that. i will begin by giving a brief over view of how the grant system worked. the community challenge grant program is funded through the neighborhood beautification fund paid for by businesses annualy. an opt in system. when you renew the registration on your business there is a check box that you check that designated a percentage of the money from your business to the

beautific fund. it was created to make sure money goes directly to the neighborhoods. which is difficult to do through other vehicles in the city. so it pulls in a million dollars a year. twice a year we give away a 500 thousand dollars typically. there are 3 categories of grants. there are small projects, which are awards up to 10 thousand dollars. and those require a neighborhood match of 50 percent and i will explain how the match works. there are medium projects that go from 1001 dollars and 2500 dollars and then to a hundred thousand dollars those require a 25 percent match and require rigorous documentation that your group has done large projects before can can do them.

[inaudible]. >> you mean -- >> how do you know if a project is a small, large or medium. >> people ask for that you want you have to ask for budget on your project. >> is that the whole scope of the -- we went small 10 thousand dollars. >> no, no. not at all. >> that's a great question and we should talk about that in q and a. i would like to run q and alike a discussion where we bounce ideas and how you can work your projects continuously if you need to. let's see, there are -- we only fund a certain kind of project the types are urban forest, community art.

neighborhood beaut ifkdz. graffiti abatement and street and walk. many projects come in and they are both categories not to worry about that. the point is that there are a lot of things we don't fund. in our workshop somebody wanted to know if we were talking about a bathroom in a park. we don't do that. it's an object that should come out of an agency's budget. it's not something you that you can involve the community. community will not build a bathroom or maintain a bathroom for 5 yeeshs. they might but that was not the application submitted. >> let's talk about briefly the match because that has to be that requirement has to be met before we talk about the scoring. the point of the match the

reason the program was retooled and called the community challenge grant is the idea is to encourage neighborhoods to value themselves and their own work. the grant is unique in the city and in many other cities in that we have placed a dollar value on your volunteer time of 14 dollars an hour. you are allowed to include your volunteer time as the match. as a committee we more strongly favor neighborhoods that come in with the bulk of their volunteer match made up with volunteer time rather than dollars. some projects come in and have the required match and it's cash from a big corporation. that's fine it doesn't show community challenge had is what we are interested in. it's unclear the dollars from the corporation match how the

community will sustain that. are you hoping you will get an equal match from the corporation. we don't know. when you submit your budget and documented volunteer hours and given us a sense of hathey look like. that's what we really like. and the volunteer hours can be inunskilled labor or professional services those canning volunteered up to 70 dollars an hour. if you have an architect in the neighborhood donating their designs that's a 70 dollar value. you can quickly come up with a nice match if you have a robust community. that is the selling thing the more you have the more you can do and the more likely you will get our grant and several grants. and then you go to other grants from other institutions like san francisco beautiful. so then to further emphasize the

community challenge portion of the match, we then score applications once they come in. with a heavy emphasis on community building and community benefits. if you have the application package it's self explaintory 35 points to community benefits. 20 points to neighborhood participation. 30 pounts toward project feasibility. the paps, 20 points is sort of furthered by 10 points in the community benefit's section. a lot is geared toward projects that have a lot of neighborhood involvement. >> go through that one more time. >> it's on you have the

package? >> it's there in the box up there. there is also it's on s fcc gp. org has the application the community challenge grant web page. so, let's see. it's a highly competitive grant. there are 200 officially recognized neighborhoods in the city of san francisco. check it out if you go to sfgov. org and click on agencies and the planning department on the planning department home page there is a spreadsheet they update when they have time of neighborhood organizations that want to be notified. so and many are interested in

getting money to improve their neighborhoods. we usually have applications along the order of 2-1/2 times the funding that we have. like we will have 500 thousand dollars available to give out ask and we get 1.3 million dollars worth of applications. it's competitive. we are not hard and fast about breaking down the money between small, medium and large. we are pretty flexible. we like to look at good projects. we always try to fund one large project if it's a hundred thousand we may be might not fund 2 large projects. so, with that, i will quit and invite david and neil and joseph to talk about some of their projects and how they have

looked at their neighborhoods and tried to figure out who the stake holders are that can be really activated to produce a lasting physical improvement in their neighborhoods. >> you want to go first? >> sure. >> everybody hear me i don't want to blast everybody. can you hear me now? >> i don't want to blast everybody out of their chairs. basically what my organization does i'm a very small nonprofit. i have a couple of people that work for me part time. i have been basically i do mural residencies in schools, community centers, after school programs around san francisco and now the bay area. we have done projects in oakland and marine as well. and i will usually work with a group of young artists and their

teachers and parents for a limited period like 14 weeks, 28 weeks during a school year or the summer program and we will guide the young artists through the process of designing and creating a permanent out door mural in their neighborhood. if you have driven by the 19th and everybodying and the mural at the star bucks or down geary boulevard chances you saw our kid's murals. the residency start with a phone call and meeting to meet with people in the community that are interested in doing a project that involved transforming part of their neighborhood. a couple of years ago i had funding from an oakland based foundation to do a n mosaic

project. i had done a project for the school 2 years beforehand. we had the money and i couldn't get the principal to meet with me for a 20 minute meeting. i meet with the principal and some parents and the chosen teachers one or 2 teachers and we will start a project. i had the money. they didn't have to come up with the money. i couldn't get the principal to meet with me. one of my murals was up in their school. i told the secretary said we am lose the opportunity. i got the teacher who sounded like this was dumped in my lap. can you work with 400 of our kids. >> no only 40. i couldn't get her to return a phone call. i went to the funder and said if

i can't get the people to sit down and meet with me when i'm bringing a 10,000 program to their school. they said as long as it's in the same neighborhood and works for the same population and i did i called another principal. she met with me at the meeting. this is true. the principal was there. 2 teachers and 2 parents and members of the pta were there. so, what i the signs i get are community involvement. the pta i like seeing people at the meeting it is because they are members of the community that are coming together to try to make the school a better place for their kids. which can involve a lot of things but often tytimes is

removing graffiti and community gardening and taking back the neighborhood. they are doing the same work kid serve is doing. the fact that parents and teachers show up because they are interested says community involvement. those other things i look for when i get on the phone and try to create a meeting. the one thing i will say is i know the deadline from this grant is the 19th it's soon. >> it's actually you should know the deadline was extend to october 12. >> okay. if for some reason it takes time to set up meetings. there are new deadlines in the spring. if for some reason you miss this deadline stay in touch with the website because there are new

deadlines that come up. parent teacher association, these are parents and grandparents that live in the neighborhood they are representative of the neighborhood. merchant associations that's a phone call i will make after the initial meeting because these are businesses in the immediate neighborhood, a lot of the people have been in the neighborhood for years and that will also if i get a meeting with them it says they are interested in talking with me. and these are great ways to get volunteer commitments. businesses will be willing to donate either anything from refreshments to soil for ga gardening program. >> i come from a slightly different -- [inaudible]

>> okay. and i will share my audio visual presentation with you. my office used to be above this cafe on windam. in the garage space and became this over night success of people coming and waiting in line for this individually made coffee. through that process this is a bit of the context of the proje project. people wait indeed line on the narrow sidewalks and rubbed elbows talk to people. there is a community that developed from that use on the space. and at some point somebody pulled out a table and chair on the 6 foot wide sidewalk and a

neighbor complained that was blocking the sidewalk. he thought, the owner of the building and the partner said can we do a sidewalk encroaching permit. no, the sidewalk is too small. we were thinking there is a plan in the market/octavia plan neighborhood plan that has emphasizes the use of alleys as creating living space. the neighborhood that's grid with busy streets and in between are the narrow and underused streets that could be used to off set as public gatherering spaces and planted areas and conducive for people. let's scratch the surface of that. within a week, the community challenge grant and the mayor's office of greening had grownup from had it's own grass roots and it was kismit there was a

coincidance of events. we sketched up a few drawings of what we could think of. which is to remove a couple of -- 3 on street parking spaces so as to narrow the road bed of the street and provide places to sit. you know, landscape the areas for the community of coffee drinkers, if you will. we started to realize. this will cost money and it's a tremendous opportunity to connect with the neighbors. neighbors being residence denies. mixed use alley has automatic repair shops. it has some residential and some businesses. and so you know it's not our traditional one block of residential users or something.

so we reached out with the sketches we had and found a receptive audience. and i think that was you know so receptive it was like a yearning. people really looking for a good idea and a good place to do it and you know from there enabled the partnership of the city to give us a grant through the ccg and really help that whole process along. it's like starting a snow ball rolling getting a grant from the city and validating the idea and we are on your way. what we did in terms of aplying for the grant we came up with one of the sketches that's floating around the curvy area in the middle of the street n.

real world of design there is the transportation authority and parking and traffic. accessibility issues that make it normative. the idea was to take a portion of the alley about 90 feet west of goth street and raise the entire road bed to the level of the sidewalk and with the uniformed paving material. a ceiling of continuity but not a dedicated for pedestrians or automobiles. seating blocks and benches and planters and trees in that and creating a space that's intimate and usable by the community of coffee drinkers but the residents and the business owners and anybody else who

happens to wander through hayes valley and feels there and discovers this special space that's accessible to all. the meaning with community members was you know it's one thing i never liked to do. you meet with people and faced with a hundred objections or a hundred different ways of doing something we approached a collaborative idea. we do have a preconceived notion of the desired outcome but not on how to get there. the result was just an input of good ideas from unexpected places. people that you know are not necessarily professionals or used to thinking about urban spaces in these terms. i think that was one of the keys was going into it not knowing.

as a professional i didn't know how to do something like this. i had never done one before and i think that was an enabler. relying on the network of people at stages through the permitting process. and you know which is where we are now. halfway through the permitting process and we will start construction in the spring. but it has yet to be seen how the community will develop over this object. i'm not using it but tending and caring and maintaining it. whether with money or in kind. picking up litter and watering plants. that's the desired outcome. >> you can kind of see the difference in there in the projects but. it's you got it it's a large

project. it's complicated. it involved several, many city agencies. a lot of loops to go through. it's expensive and innovative and they are uh-huhs all over the city where people have alleys that are unused space in san francisco that attract crime. they want a creative stewardship in a city that will not be building more parks. perhaps overwhelming you kind of see, i hope or hear from his presentation that there really was an a huh that happened in the neighborhood. this idea that supporting ideas came from unsuspected places that's what we see in this grant program. these activate communities. a lot of people are grateful for

that. a lot are waiting for the right thing to get them involved. that's a powerful thing to have in your neighborhood. the focus of this workshop not the workshop the summit today is tow repeatedly hit us over the head with hurricane katrina when the compliment to that which is an earthquake the stronger neighborhoods will survive and the ones that are capable will dealing with a variety of issues and used to talking to one another a buddy system of a variety of levels. because i heard alarming things about the new orleans neighborhoods that in neighborhoods in new orleans in which there was not the history of conversations or history of shared projects and activism. the decision about the future of the neighborhoods whether they

would exist or not is being made by the federal government and many of the neighborhoods will be park lands. that's the opposite extreme of what you want to have happen in san francisco. san francisco is about neighborhoods but some neighborhoods are better than another. community challenge grants are a fun way to stimulate these conversations. i want to point out a few great people in the room that you don't already know. give you examples of further examples of what things are possible. so mark and canoli are here they run the neighborhood assembly's network and specialize in large group conversations. which is sort of a basic building block to think about if you you don't know where to start with these things. may be you have the space in your neighborhood that's crying

out for a project but you don't know what you should do with it and don't know who the partners are. it's good to know there are people like that in the city who can help initiate conversations. or if you get the people in the room they will make sure they talk to one another. those are some people you want to talk to. the executive direct of community benefits in soma. that's a really another great idea where property owners have elect to the tax themselves to create their own pool of funding to have a discussion about more expensive permanent improve. s they want in their neighborhood. they agreed to tax themselves for 15 years. >> right. >> so they can have this on going conversation