Western Neighborhoods Project is dedicated to the history of San Francisco's Richmond, Sunset, OMI and West of Twin Peaks districts. read more ...
By donating your time with us, you'll have fun and meet like-minded people as part of the WNP family. You'll also acquire new experiences and contacts within the history and museum communities while honing your skills in research, writing, historical preservation, and so much more.
See below to learn more about the organization and the areas in which we need help.
Western Neighborhoods Project (WNP) is a 501(c)3 California nonprofit that specializes in preserving, interpreting, and sharing the history of San Francisco's west side from the community's point of view. From our Home for History at 1617 Balboa Street in the Richmond District, we host lectures, film screenings, panel discussions, and rotating exhibitions. Our work also extends beyond the office and out into the neighborhoods, supporting other nonprofits and local businesses throughout San Francisco as we lead guided walking tours, guest lecture at community meetings, and display local history at festivals.
On our website, OutsideLands.org, you'll find consistently updated articles, a community chat room, videos produced in partnership with local filmmaker Joey Yee, and our podcast, "Outside Lands San Francisco," which is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher and has over 1.5 million downloads. In 2014, we launched an auxiliary program called OpenSFHistory in order to rehouse, digitize, and make available online approximately 100,000 historical images spanning all of San Francisco sourced from one Private Collector. Since then the program has expanded to include other prolific private collections in the Bay Area as well as those from local nonprofits without the capacity to launch their own digitization project.
Collections Management: Rehousing, cataloging, and improving metadata on materials in our collection, primarily photographic media.
Public Programs: Assist the WNP Team with developing program ideas, help to staff coordinate and manage live and virtual events (set up / break down, working a bar / snack table, checking in guests, distributing surveys and logging responses).
Marketing & Outreach: Assist the WNP Team with improving our communications by helping draft and design emails, fliers, and create content across all our social media platforms.
Accessibility: Translating and transcribing our podcasts and creating audio files for written content in order to increase accessibility for the hearing impaired and those with impaired vision. Last year we also started a project that seeks to improve equity in archival descriptions by removing subjective racial terms and, instead, coding them in keywords.
Development: Working with the Executive Director to research and write grants, develop targeted sponsorship opportunities and fundraising campaigns (print and digital), and help with membership drives. This may also include preparations for our fundraising gala postponed until October 2021 and smaller fundraising events this year.
Exhibitions: Working with the Executive Director, co-curators, and our Fabrication Tech to research, produce, and install three exhibitions a year that combine local history with local artists in our gallery and also to refresh our window displays. On hold until we're past this pandemic, aside from planning.
Education: Working with the Executive Director and community partners to develop curriculum resources based on local history, produce activity workbooks, and illustrated stories for our Education Initiative. If you are an active or retired educator, we would love your expertise!
Special Projects: Other duties as assigned connected but not limited to: "Chinese in the Richmond," a collaborative venture with the Chinese Historical Society of America that seeks to understand the migration of Chinese Americans to the west side of San Francisco.
Skills Preferred