San Francisco and the 2017 Celebration of Love

There's an old saying: "in order to love someone, you need to love yourself first." Recently, San Franciscans have been expressing their frustration with rising costs, diminishing diversity, wider wage gaps, less freedom and originality, all resulting in a break down of community spirit. San Francisco has historically been a city at the forefront of expression, one to which people come from worldwide as a means to express their individuality, their love of life, and their love of this fair city. 2017 marks the 50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love.

The question we are inspired to answer is how can the City celebrate love, if it's having trouble loving itself? The purpose of the 2017 Celebration of Love Community Engagement Program will be to reintroduce and help remind San Franciscans that it's the city in which to love yourself, your neighbor, your neighborhood, and all of our diverse inspirations.

How it works: Each month, beginning in January of 2017, we will celebrate a specific district. There are 11 districts in total, the month of December will be a citywide celebration.

What is planned for each celebration? There will be some uniform events for each district, including but certainly not limited to: movie nights in the park (with movies that highlight that locale, or were made by a native from that neighborhood), block parties, community garden days, showcases of local neighborhood artists, month-long mural paintings, pub crawls, and scavenger hunts with participating nonprofits and small businesses, all the while highlighting neighborhood heroes.

Why? People will learn more about their own neighborhoods and their neighbors, as well as become acquainted with the variety of non profits and interesting organizations that inhabit their district, fostering a sense of pride, belonging and community, and also inspiring participation and volunteerism. Additionally, as the year highlights a different district every month, people will be invited and encouraged to visit each and every district in the City, once again giving people a sense of greater community, discovery, and new found pride in identifying as San Franciscans.

We need your help and expertise! In more ways than one. Each district and neighborhood has it's own flavor, and it's only right to reflect that. We need your help to do something that will celebrate your community! Each district will be different, and each organization will have something different to bring to the table, and WE WANT TO KNOW!!! We want your talents and creativity, to create a celebration worth celebrating!

What we are looking for: Ideas, feedback, outreach volunteers, school participation, how your organization can help, how you individually can help, how can we help you or your organization?

Please share with any person, business, or organization you can think of that would be interested in getting actively involved and helping create San Francisco's 2017 Celebration of Love!

For more information or to get involved, please email [email protected]