Hidden Garden Steps as Community Partner

The recent 10^th anniversary celebration of the San Francisco Department of Public Works (DPW) and San Francisco Parks Alliance (SFPA) Street Parks Program reminds us that the Hidden Garden Steps community is continuing to become seamlessly interwoven with other communities of volunteers.

A brief video prepared for the Alliance by students from San Francisco State University places the Steps project within the larger context of volunteers collaborating with others to incrementally improve the neighborhoods in which we live. Onsite conversations at the celebration, which was held in San Francisco’s Progress Park (another highly successful Street Parks project), gave Steps and other Street Parks Program stewards a chance to see how they can work more closely together to support even more street parks in San Francisco. And stewards currently engaged in trying to complete projects including the Athens Avalon Greenspace clearly realized from Steps and other colleagues that they are not alone in the ever-growing family of volunteers nurtured and supported through DPW and the SF Parks Alliance.

Volunteers engaged in their weekly sweep of the Steps site

The interactions between Hidden Garden Steps volunteers and others around San Francisco consistently provide rewards far beyond the effort required to initiate and maintain those interactions. Through the donations of plants we receive from other volunteer-maintained gardens for the Hidden Garden Steps gardens, we are literally planting reminders that those succulents and native California plants connect us to a network of public and private gardens lovingly tended by Street Parks Program colleagues like John Priola and Paul Matalucci. Through the conversations that take place on an almost daily basis between Steps neighbors and visitors from many different parts of the world, friendships clearly blossom. And through the efforts of the ever-growing group of people who take the times to sweep the Steps, remove the small amounts of trash that sometimes end up on the Steps, and tend the gardens, people who might otherwise feel as if the Steps belong to someone else are drawn into conversations that lead to their own participation in preserving and adding to the beauty of the site on 16^th, between Kirkham and Lawton streets, in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District.

What clearly is at the heart of successful Street Parks Program projects are the people and connections they inspire. Volunteers like Liz McLoughlin are working to document the individual stories behind the more than 600 tiles supported by donors to the Hidden Garden Steps project. Other volunteers capture and share photographs via Facebook and Twitter to document some of the interactions that add to the sense of community that continues to grow on the Steps. And neighbors who might otherwise never meet are increasingly stopping to chat with each other onsite.

If you haven’t yet joined the Steps community, please don’t hesitate to come onsite to see what you’ve been missing.

N.B.: Numerous articles documenting the Hidden Garden Steps project remain available on the Building Creative Bridges blog. Steps updates can be found on this Friends of the Hidden Garden Steps blog. Stories provided by donors to the Hidden Garden Steps project are currently being added to the project website by Steps volunteer Liz McLoughlin, and a step-by-step virtual tour created by McLoughlin and by project volunteer Gilbert Johnson is also under development.