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GREEN STREETS
Can green enterprise revitalize America’s most distressed communities? For the past six years, Citizen Film has been working with White House Champions of Change awardee Tyrone Mullins and his peers at Green Streets, a social enterprise headquartered in San Francisco’s Western Addition. Citizen Film’s intensive, ongoing collaboration with Green Streets’ workforce to tell their own stories – in a suite of documentary films and, more recently, in sculptural multimedia installations in public space – catalyzes discussions among workers, resident associations, property managers, community leaders, public officials, policy-makers and many other community and civic stakeholders. This has created a virtuous cycle of storytelling, dialogue and action, providing stakeholders with a deeper understanding of the issues the community faces, its needs and its dreams, its resources and aspirations, and its opportunities and challenges; and engaging multi-stakeholder participation in the solutions.
THE NEW BUCHANAN MALL
Buchanan Mall is five consecutive blocks of public parkland transecting seven public housing properties in the Western Addition neighborhood of San Francisco. Citizen Film, together with Green Streets, the Exploratorium, the Trust for Public Land and the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department have been working with local residents to create a vital new center of community pride. The Buchanan Mall now features a lighted art walk with sculptural storytelling installations co-created by residents in a variety of media. The project is crossing longstanding turf lines to enable residents to work together, co-create documentary art, and reimagine their public park.
BUCHANAN YOUTH: WE ARE THE SEEDS OF CHANGE
“Our generation is the spark to start a change – to start something new.” Youth from Mo’ Magic, Project Level and TVHype worked with Citizen Film, Green Streets and other community partners in the summer of 2016 to direct and produce four short documentaries about the Buchanan Mall community. These stories have been placed into sculptural multimedia installations co-created by Citizen Film and the Exploratorium’s Studio for Public Spaces on Buchanan Mall.
BUCHANAN YOUTH: SO CLOSE, BUT SEPARATE
“I see a lot of potential for this neighborhood to be great if we can break down the barriers and start to work together.” This is another one of the stories youth mentored by Citizen Film created and fitted in a sculptural multimedia installation on Buchanan Mall.
A “Community Leadership” Video created by Citizen Film for the San Francisco Foundation
Van Jones, Co-founder and Board Member of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, was the winner of the San Francisco Foundation 2008 Community Leadership Awards (Robert C. Kirkwood Award) for his inspirational and galvanizing work in youth and civil rights activism. Van is the subject of this video portrait: one of many videos the San Francisco Foundation commissioned Citizen Film to create.
BACK ON TRACK
When Senator Kamala D. Harris was San Francisco’s District Attorney, her office commissioned Citizen Film to create a video to help her effort to prevent transitional-aged first-time offenders from cycling in and out of jail, re-offending soon after they hit the streets. District Attorney Harris convened City leaders to find solutions to this problem and Citizen Film worked with her to find the right story to tell that would promote Back On Track, an innovative education and employment reentry initiative designed to support young men and women making life-changing choices.
NATIONAL CENTER FOR VICTIMS OF CRIME
This video demonstrates Citizen Film’s sensitivity to working with police departments on important community issues. Citizen Film partnered with the National Center for Victims of Crime to identify and tell stories about police departments that successfully work with stalking survivors and victim service providers to achieve, demonstrate and promote outstanding practices in community policing. This video demonstrates how innovative community-oriented programs can mobilize resources and foster effective communication among police officers, victim service providers, and victims. Highlights of the successful dissemination plan for Links in the Chain include the viewing and discussion of this documentary production by approximately 100,000 police officers in communities around the country.
CALIFORNIA NURSES FOUNDATION
The California Nurses Foundation (CNF) came to Citizen Film to help bring the story of nursing and cultural competency to life for their large, statewide constituency of nurses and other healthcare professionals. From the planning stages on, we worked closely with the CNF team to identify strong storytellers who emblematized core messages. We then created several short documentaries, and designed and produced a digital environment that housed both the films and a curriculum to guide learning about the issues addressed in the films. This is an example of the power of high-quality documentary storytelling paired with easily accessible and distributable curriculum.
HERA: ANGELA’S STORY
Housing and Economic Rights Advocates (HERA) is a California statewide, not-for-profit legal service and advocacy organization. HERA’s mission is to ensure that all people are protected from discrimination and economic abuses, especially in the realm of housing. To create a suite of documentary films for HERA’s communications campaign, Citizen Film worked closely with HERA to focus on the needs of those who are most vulnerable, including lower-income people, the elderly, immigrants, people of color and people with disabilities.