STREET BLOG: OUR STAFF SHARES THEIR STORIES

Hooray! The San Francisco Unified School District and the City of San Francisco unveiled their long-awaited Arts Education Master Plan at the Performing Arts Library today.

The plan is a concerted effort to bring the arts to every student in the SFUSD, every day, and to dedicate the funding and the staff needed to make it happen. The effort will bring teachers, principals, arts teachers and arts providers like Streetside together to ensure the young people in our community are dancing, making music and visual arts, and experiencing the literary arts.

Congratulations to everyone involved in this far-reaching effort!

At Streetside, we reach down deep to help the youth we work with discover their stories and tell them to the world. Stories, and the arts, aren't just something we do at work. Everyone here makes the arts a part of their life, and the arts we love in turn help us to be better teachers, coworkers, and program designers.

Our staff members here at Streetside are involved in a lot of amazing stuff when they're not helping young people tell their stories. You can see them performing around the Bay Area, sharing their talents.

For instance, Program Assistant Melissa Wong Renati is currently appearing at The Phoenix Theater in Absolutely San Francisco, "an original music revue about life, love, and the American Dream." The show runs until October 14.

Diana Gutierrez, Storytelling Exchange Facilitator, will be appearing in the Shotgun Players' Love is a Dream House in Lorin in Berkeley. The play is about a couple of activists who move into a house in Berkeley, then discover the a past they never dreamed existed. The play runs through November 5.

And last but not least, jazz singer and Storytelling Exchange Facilitator Cecilia Long will be appearing at the Octavia Lounge in San Francisco on Saturday, October 7. The show starts at 8 PM. The lady can sing a Billie Holiday tune!

Every year, Streetside makes hundreds and hundreds of journals for our Storytelling Exchange program. The journals are where our students do all their writing, and where they pull all their inspiration together into their final story. Each journal is a brightly colored folder filled with intriguing pages and stickers.

And who makes these journals?

Well, today, some excellent volunteers from Levi Strauss came to take on that task. First of all, they were really speedy (they finished hours early). Second, more than 25 of them took time out of their busy jobs to help us out. And third, they gave us a grant for $3,000--without even being asked!

Wow, Levi's! Thanks!

And thanks to Hands on Bay Area, who coordinated the day!

This fall, Streetside is kicking off an exciting new project called Digital Teachers. Streetside is training teachers at four KIPP Schools in San Francisco and the East Bay to make digital storytelling part of their everyday teaching practice.

Each school is getting a very cool mobile lab, with Apple MacBook computers, scanners, digital cameras, and software like Photoshop and iMovie. This summer, teachers learned how to make their own digital stories on the equipment. And this year, with the help of Streetside Digital Teachers Coach Erika Padilla-Morales, they'll teach their own students to make digital stories.

Teachers have generated some amazing curriculum ideas. A sampling:

A social studies lesson in which students make movies about the way ancient Roman inventions influence our lives today;
A language arts lesson in which students write and make movies about problems and solutions in their communities;
A social studies lesson in which students make real estate ads for homes in ancient Mesopotamia.

We can't wait to see what the brilliant students of KIPP come up with! At the end of the year, Streetside and KIPP will be teaming up for screenings of student work in San Francisco and the East Bay. Stay tuned!

Streetside has been helping youth tell their stories through digital storytelling for about three years now. Read about our other program, Tech Tales. And for more information about digital storytelling, check out the pioneers of the form: The Center for Digital Storytelling.