About us
A community-led San Francisco event and news resource, working in and for North Beach.
Mission
What we’re
here to do
North Beach Now is a community-led San Francisco event and news resource.
Our premise is that art and culture are the most powerful portals to community engagement and social justice. We produce music and fine art events and performances in addition to Town Hall forums to create lasting bonds within the community, and to forge new relationships between different communities in San Francisco.
The premise
People who won’t come to a meeting will come to a concert
Civic life in a neighborhood does not fail because people stop caring. It fails because the door is boring. A hearing notice taped to a lamppost recruits nobody.
A show recruits everybody. So we open with the thing people actually want to attend, and we make sure that when they get there, the conversation about the neighborhood is happening in the same room.
That is the whole method. Art first, because art is the portal.
Programs
How it works
Music
Live sessions, benefits and street performances. We book local players, pay them properly, and keep tickets free or sliding scale so money is never the reason somebody stays home.
Fine art
Exhibitions, open studios and community murals. Work made here and shown here — with the artists present and talking, not just credited on a wall label.
Town Hall
Open forums on the things that decide whether people can stay: housing, small business, public space. Neighbors in chairs, working through a real agenda toward a real proposal.
Town Hall forums
Neighbors,
in chairs
A Town Hall is not a panel. There is no dais and no keynote. We set an agenda from what people actually raised at the last one, invite whoever holds the relevant decision, and give the room the floor.
Every forum ends with something written down — a position, a proposal, a list of what we are asking for and who we are asking. We publish it, and we report back on what happened to it.
They are free, they are open to anyone who lives or works in North Beach, and you do not need to have been to a previous one.
How we operate
Ground rules
Community-led
The programming comes from the neighborhood, not from us. If nobody here wants it, we do not put it on.
Free at the door
Free or sliding scale wherever we can manage it. Cost should never be the thing that decides who is in the room.
Artists get paid
Exposure is not a fee. If we book you, there is a budget line with your name on it.
We report back
Anything a Town Hall decides gets written up and followed up in public, whether or not it went our way.
Join in
This only works
with people in it
Volunteer at an event, put money behind the programming, or just tell us what the neighborhood needs.