Episode 26: Shaping San Francisco

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A transcript, lightly edited for clarity and length, follows.

Show Guest: LisaRuth Elliott, Co-Director of Shaping San Francisco

Voices of the Community Introduction: Welcome to voices of the community which explores critical issues facing Northern California communities. We introduce you to the voices of community thought leaders and change makers who are working on solutions that face our fellow individual community members neighborhoods cities and our region. This is George Koster your host. 

Series Introduction: This episode is part of our series exploring COVID-19’s impact on nonprofits and small businesses in San Francisco. We started the series back in April 2020 during the height of the first phase of the Covid 19 pandemic and the Shelter In Place requirements. Over these past nine months, the Covid-19 pandemic and economic meltdown have wiped out millions of jobs in both the nonprofit and small business sectors as well as shuttered tens of thousands of small business operations.

The goal of the series is to shine a spotlight on the nonprofits, small businesses, and their staff who are struggling to deal with the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic on their operations, services and sustainability. The series of interviews we conducted features voices from a cross-section of organizations that make up the fabric of our community.  Each of them brings a unique perspective on how they and we are dealing with the issues facing our community during the global pandemic and economic depression.

Show Guest LisaRuth: San Francisco can be very wrapped up in an amnesiac culture where we forget what happened last year or just yesterday. And we are moving ahead to the next thing and this being a large tech center these days, we're always, surrounded by this ethos of looking forward and, trying to make innovative gains. 

Episode Intro - Show Host George: In this episode, our featured voice is Lisa Ruth Elliot the Co-Director of Shaping San Francisco and we’re discuss Shaping San Francisco’s unique model of being a participatory community history project that documents and archives the overlooked stories and memories of San Francisco 

Show Host George: I'm joined remotely via zoom by LisaRuth Elliott, the Co-Director of Shaping SF or Shaping San Francisco. Thanks for being here, Lisa Ruth.

Show Guest LisaRuth: Thanks for having me, George.

George: Could you please, share with the audience, why you created Shaping SF in all of the really wonderful components that make up Shaping SF? You've got your digital archives, your, public talks, your tours, bookstore, special projects that you do, oral history. It's all really wonderful, historical information, but information about San Francisco that I think most people don't realize. So, tell us about Shaping San Francisco.

 Lisa Ruth: San Francisco can be very wrapped up in an amnesiac culture where we forget what happened last year or just yesterday. And we are moving ahead to the next thing and this being a large tech center these days, we're always, surrounded by this ethos of looking forward and, trying to make innovative gains.

And oftentimes that means we don't look back to what we have done as a city of, collective people to bring about the urban space and to create this world that we, live in as residents of San Francisco. So, we're really trying to combat this amnesiac culture that we live in by bringing people together in public space, doing participatory community history that comes in a variety of forms, which you've mentioned.

We have public talks, which we've been doing for 15 seasons we're in our 15th season of offering space to discuss how the city got to be at the way it is, who helped make it happen. And we firmly believe it's not only the names that are on street signs than the ones that we hear about pretty often, but it's really those of us who create the city every day just by using it, by making our way through it, by envisioning it in all the ways that we do.

And we also bring people into public space through walking and bicycle tours. And now, newly created urban forum, a walk and talk, which is COVID special. And also, through our digital archive, which has been around since 1998 as a multimedia experience of learning about seeing images about and sharing one's own experience of San Francisco history.

It's really an amazing time to be a historian for years at Shaping San Francisco, we have been saying, and using the tagline history is a creative act in the present. And in 2020, it has felt like a year that everyone around us has finally understood this statement. As we all live through these intense times that have shifted how we think about the world around us and how we come together.

And as we collectively witness historic moment after historic moment, we're invited to be a part of things. Indeed. We are a part of things more than we have been called to be ever before in our lifetimes. Through our digital archive and other resources, we offer a way to gain perspectives on this historic year with its various ruptures.

We invite people to share their stories of life during the pandemic that we will integrate as part of our digital archive. And we're poised to collect voices of the community this way. As we live through this pandemic, as we live through moments of social contest station, as we are an activated citizenry during this year's election, as we feel the effects of climate chaos around us.

George: So much of what you do in person, so how has COVID-19, impacted, Shaping SF's ability to share your wonderful love of history and to educate, the general populace about the place that they live?

Lisa Ruth: So, for Shaping San Francisco, our experience of disseminating history is really based on this idea of it being participatory and, with COVID restrictions and sheltering in place and not being able to come together in public that really impacted us in the spring of 2020, when we were trying to, re-imagine how we can do what we do. It's really important for us to open the space of public intellectual ism that is done in person. And so, a lot of the options people were turning to through zoom or through other online platforms that are able to reach a lot of people that really wasn't where we wanted to, shift our programming.

So, we tried to envision for the fall 2020 season of events, how can we still gather in public safely, how can we, align with the restrictions of the City and the Public Health Departments and still offer an outdoor and participatory experience. So, we introduced something called urban forums, which we also are calling walk and talks.

These are an adaptation of our walking tours. They're an opportunity to learn a little bit about it, or just enjoy walking through it together.  And for us, we've been enjoying offering the opportunity for people to leave their house in a safe way.

We distance from each other, have, masks and good precautions in place and right around a dozen people, which is the limitation of the City right now to come together in outdoor gatherings and walk-through different neighborhoods that one might not know already together and talk about the history.

Talk about community, organizing. Talk about planned developments or the way that the place looks, how it got to be that way. Again, trying to integrate some of these values into some new gatherings. And we are still continuing after a break in the spring, in the fall of 2020 to offer our bicycle and walking tours with the same kind of precautions in place.

George: Lisa Ruth, over the last 20 plus years that you've been operating Shaping San Francisco, what would you say has been, the biggest impact in the community through your work?

Lisa Ruth: Well, it's hard to know the extent of our impact over the past 25 years. You know, it's an intangible thing. Gauging how knowledge of history affects one's life. We offer this digital archive found sf.org as a place to research about San Francisco history, but we often don't have a lot of one-on-one interactions with the 30,000 plus people who visit our site each month.

It's sometimes hard for us to know.  So, it's often hard for us to know our impact, but I think there's a couple of ways that we've been seeing more and more how we

start to create this space, this opening of public intellectual space. We're not artist historians, we're sort of cultural workers. And we sort of occupy this space in the humanities that isn't very well-defined. We have an arts commission, but there's not really like a humanities commission or a history department in the city.

So, we sort of open up this other space of being able to come together and dialogue and debate about local history, about the things that shape our lives. We really have, a dedication to this active verb in our name, Shaping San Francisco. We do think we are creating history in the present all the time.

So, the awareness of this way of going through our lives, I think is one of the ways we've had an impact. We see in other colleagues and other organizations and historical societies programming starting to really, pull apart, these questions as well. You mentioned the People's Guide to San Francisco Bay Area, which I have been a contributor to.

And they mentioned in the acknowledgements, how much of an impact Shaping San Francisco has had on the way that the authors about books see the intersections of the world around us. And I think that's one of the things that we can highlight in our work that isn't happening elsewhere.

Also, the Bay observatory at the Exploratorium has a lecture series that was modeled on our public talks. We have been honored to hear about projects, which site our work as inspiring.

We talk about sharing overlooked histories of San Francisco, and I think that's sort of in Vogue right now to really start to see where those marginalized stories are and bring them to the forefront. I think the Black Lives Matter activism and outrage this year has really helped people start investigating and finding more about black history and black stories in our community. But I think what we do more than just show the overlooked stories is help make connections and show these intersections of how things come together. We have different topics we cover, and we don't cover them as isolated pillars of history.

We don't talk about labor without talking about how the work that had, developed within San Francisco and how working people, shifted the landscape. So, we talk about ecology and labor intersecting. We talk a lot about social movements, so the freeway revolt where we could have a city crisscross with freeways, but we don't, it was really key. How art and politics come together. We love to invite artists to talk about their work and what we offer is a little bit different showcase than just here's what I'm working on. But how has a political outlook affected their work or impacted how they express themselves and we're interested in these intersections.

George: So, what are some of the additional needs that you're seeing through your work for artists, writers, cultural leaders, that Shaping San Francisco works with?

Lisa Ruth: Well, we've been impacted pretty heavily through COVID and the pandemic in the sense that, so many people and so many of the organizations who rely on revenue, income, have really taken a big hit without the patrons of their museums, perhaps, or their science space institutions or, groups who also have had historical educational interpretation in their mission statement. But actually, can no longer support those areas of work. So, we've, taken a big hit culturally the institutions not being open, the access being limited.  We're in the middle of an economic crisis due to the pandemic as well.

And we also still need the income for our cultural institutions to be able to continue to provide the important work of helping us understand who we are giving us as Angela Davis says a sense of the inner dimensions that artists can offer to the world, through just creation and focusing on art. As historians, we are actually really activated and excited about the way that people are turning to their own neighborhoods, to their own cities and have a sense of wanting to investigate those areas more in-depth which wasn't happening as much before when we were jet setting around the world as a global civilization.

George: So, it's actually made people focus on their own neighborhoods and their own city a little bit more because, they have to.

Lisa Ruth: Yeah, our restrictions provide these spaces of possibility. And I think we are really well-poised as a small, independent project of just two people. My co-director Chris Carlsson and myself, I'm doing all the programming and, managing our, digital archive. We're able to weather a storm like a pandemic because we're very small and resilient and we don't have the larger, real estate space, or like I said, the need for the revenue stream in the same way that some of our larger partners and, colleagues have had to reckon with.

George: Well, speaking of revenue, Lisa Ruth, how can people support, Shaping San Francisco, obviously funding you guys have a, Patreon, you know monthly membership. Are you, running a special COVID 19 campaign? You have wonderful merchandise. Can people volunteer?

Lisa Ruth: Those are great questions.  First of all, we're very grateful to some of our funders who have underwritten our work this year, the Seed Fund, we received a COVID 19 California Cares grant from Cal Humanities, and we really are grateful to the funders and the funding streams who have prioritized art and culture in these moments where, people have seen the bottom dropout of their income streams.

We are very fortunate to have over 100 people who are monthly donors to our work. So, the individual contributions to our work, are invaluable and what it means to have over 100 people giving to us monthly as little as $5, sometimes as much as $25 a month, that offers a base from which we can support our operations throughout the year.

And without that, we would not have weathered this year as well as we have. And we're so delighted that more than 90% of those monthly donors have hung in there with us where we expected a lot more to drop off of their own economic needs. We're really grateful that those small contributions are still continuing to create a larger base for us to profit from. Some of those monthly donors are, Patreon patrons.

So, we do have a, Patreon giving option. That's a monthly membership type thing. Our merchandise, you know, books don't really pay the bills, but we do have, books that we have produced over the years with City lights, books. And also, Chris Carlsson has a new book out called Hidden San Francisco. All of that goes towards underwriting our work. And we will be doing a fall fundraising campaign in 2020.

It's unclear how successful that will be, but we were also very Boyd in the middle of the year because we decided not to continue our mid-year fundraising campaign in 2020 that we reached the goal we would have tried to reach anyway, if we had done a formal campaign just through people being generous and helping us out through, out the middle part of the year.

So, I think there's still a lot of generosity out there. I feel that we are very fortunate to have continued to be able to pay ourselves throughout the pandemic. And we are also very happy to continue to provide the programming that we do. Even in times that are, dire

George: And LisaRuth, what would you like to see as some of the positive things that could come out of the pandemic and economic meltdown that would support artists, writers and cultural leaders, local histories, such as yourself?

Lisa Ruth: You asked what are some positive things that could come out of this crisis? There are a couple things that are very clearly true across the board. I think there's a lot of creativity happening right now around how to re-imagine how we provide our programming, not just as historians, but as other cultural workers to the larger community. And one of the advantages with digital communication platforms is that we can reach a much wider audience and we've seen other cultural institutions and our partners increase their audiences beyond the smaller scale that we were working on when we could fit, less than a hundred people in a venue, or when we had limitations based on geography, like who was able to come to the programming that we're doing? I think as a whole, in general, our society is re-evaluating our priorities and as we see what is really important. I do see that attention to our local history, our local environments, those people we live very near to is still really high, or even if not higher on the list for folks.

So, what we've seen since we started our programming this fall in 2020 has been that all of our tours are filling up and we have waiting lists. So, there's a lot of demand. And I think it's not just for the history, but it's also to find ways to safely come together that are few and far between, and there's only so many zoom calls you can look at across a week, even though it offers the opportunity to travel around the world from the safety of your living room. But I think the creativity of how to re- imagine the provision of programming is one of the bigger things that is coming out of the pandemic.

And also, globally. We've had the experience of slowing down throughout the quarter century of Shaping San Francisco as a project. Our rationale to look to the shared stories of the past has been yes to learn, but also as a guide for how to imagine our urban future, as we want to shape it together, it isn't a given.

And we've seen that really clearly this year, how things will be tomorrow. And I hope that collectively we've had a chance to assess what is really important to preserve about our before times and how we can shift our perception and creation of our shared future. Already. We see more ecologically sensitive visions being realized in our cities, which is encouraging as one example. I talked about the fact that people are becoming more aware of their own immediate surroundings as we're constrained to a smaller radius through sheltering in place. And we're also more aware of our interconnected-ness globally, more tangibly than ever.

George: Well, thank you, Lisa Ruth, for sharing, Shaping San Francisco's work today. We'll make sure that the listeners and viewers, have your contact information website, all your social media, so they can follow San Francisco, and more people get engaged in those public talks, tours and special projects.

Episode Outro - Show Host George: That’s it for this episode of voices of the community. You have been listening to the voice of Lisa Ruth Elliot the Co-Director of Shaping San Francisco 

To find out more about Shaping San Francisco’s tours Digital Achieve Found SF Public Talks, walking, Bicycling Tours and Bay Cruises, along with their Bookstore and Special Projects  go to shaping sf dot org         

Series Outro: We hope that you enjoy the insights, points of view, and personal stories from the voices of change-makers and their nonprofits and small businesses featured in this series. To find out more and get engaged with the nonprofits, small businesses and staff members, featured in this series please go to my web site george koster dot com and click on Voices of the Community to find links to the extended versions of these interviews and to listen to the entire series. After listening to these stories we hope that you will consider making a donation and volunteering to provide a hand up to your fellow community members.

Series Credits: I want to thank my associate producer Eric Estrada, along with Mel, Michael, and Lila at the San Francisco Public Press and KSFP. To listen to our next episode in this series and to our archived past shows which feature community voices working on solutions to critical issues facing Northern California communities, please go to george koster dot com. While you are on our website please consider making a donation to help us provide future shows just like this one. Please subscribe to Voices of the Community on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or where ever you get your podcasts. Follow us on twitter @georgekoster and please email us with feedback and show ideas at george@georgekoster.com. I'm George Koster in San Francisco and thank you for listening.

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