Program

San Francisco is a very diverse city made up of over one hundred distinct neighborhoods grouped within eleven districts, each distinguishable on the basis of culture, race and economic status. Like all cities, San Francisco's neighborhoods all carry with them stereotypes which lead San Franciscans to make assumptions about them and often keep groups from understanding the true essence of the neighborhoods. For example, youth from certain neighborhoods are sometimes forbidden to go to others because of the prejudices which exist, often with some foundation in truth, but often based on hearsay. This type of judgment and misunderstanding prevents positive and meaningful interaction among diverse groups.

Neighborhood Vision Project (NVP) sees a future in which those barriers are put aside–where the wealthy of San Francisco give up time in service of the poorest, and where racial differences do not provide barriers to understanding. NVP seeks to make this future a reality by educating the next generation of San Franciscans—by reaching San Francisco's youth. NVP is a former University of California, Berkeley student organization and a developing community project dedicated to gathering high school students from different San Francisco neighborhoods to create community service projects that address a common social issue affecting each other's neighborhoods.

Leadership Program

Fall: Conversation Among Neighbors
The purpose of the fall component of the year-long leadership program is to conduct dialogue among students who live in different neighborhoods. First, in the fall the Neighborhood Vision Project focuses on engaging students from different backgrounds and neighborhoods in conversations about their experiences of San Francisco, giving students a chance to understand one another better by seeing how their lives are similar and also by recognizing the impacts of the areas where they differ. Then, students are asked to engage in a critical analysis of their communities and of their assumptions about one another's communities by brainstorming issues that they have heard about in different areas and hearing feedback from other students who actually live there. Finally, students from across San Francisco's neighborhoods work together to identify a social issue that affects all of them in some way or another, and to envision individual community service projects that could address it, in each other's neighborhoods.

Spring: Organize a Community Service Project
High school students from diverse neighborhoods then spend the entire spring semester bringing their neighborhood community service projects into reality. Throughout the second component of the year-long program, San Francisco high school students from diverse backgrounds engage in project organizing activities centered on topics of community awareness and engagement in their own community. They learn how to network with community organizations, how to do community outreach, conduct a needs assessment, and then plan and implement their neighborhood service projects. This process of personal development and collaboration is valuable on the individual level, for students as they enter into a system of education through action, which gives them an idea of real-life work that they may not get anywhere else in their academic career. It is also valuable for the group because students are asked to work together with other students from different racial, socioeconomic and physical arenas toward a common goal both inside and outside of the classroom.