The park itself has gone through lots of transformations, but it never really became a wonderful place that people were happy to enjoy.
It was simple. It was nothing. It was literally just a dry walkway.
This activation happened in November 2015 and
it keeps growing it keeps evolving and I think the work that we did this summer with with the Exploratorium Youth Explainer program
brought a different set of kind of engagement and activation and
beautification to the space.
So this grant has really enabled us to move past
building an object and maintaining it.
It's allowed us to re-engage in a meaningful way, but really to offer us a full spectrum of the Exploratorium.
We got the students from Citizen Film to come down to the Exploratorium for three weeks in a row and
we had them work with the Explainers on doing different things like demos.
We learned how to do magic tricks and we learned how to do a flower dissection.
Now, I could go to somebody and like look at the plants in our Buchanan Mall area and
be like okay, so where, how, how do you think plants can make babies and how can like the seed travel or whatnot?
That's kind of like what I expected to gain out of like coming to this program like something new,
some new ideas to add on to the Buchanan Mall.
For me growing up and hanging out in the Fillmore,
I got to see a different side of San Francisco that I hadn't really been accustomed to seeing for so long.
It's a big part of the African-American community in San Francisco, and so I think for our Explainers
they got to see a little bit of the cultural side of San Francisco and of that actual Fillmore area.
While for the Buchanan Mall students
I felt that the only thing that we're trying to show them is how much fun we have at the Exploratorium
while kind of giving education back.
Here when you're an Explainer, you're you're building confidence to like present something to somebody else like a complete stranger.
Being able to teach other people is really nice.
it's like you're given and it's a gift that you
can keep giving
and passing on, and it stays with you.
If I can pick up a flower and dissect it, and like make a little kid's day, I think that's really powerful.
My hopes and dreams for all the youth that I've come in contact with in the Western Addition is for them to take
this experience at the Buchanan Mall not only to learn something, to actually
become engaged in their community. Meaning that, even, I don't care
what age you are. You come back and give back to your community.
I love the idea of being able to work with the kids that are coming from those underserved communities
because I just don't get to see them here at the museum sometimes and that, that kind of hurts.
My dream is just to continue to build this
relationship and then to bring it out to like Hunter's Point and bring it to Treasure Island, to bring it to West Oakland and
all these other areas where kids need more.
My hopes and dreams for Buchanan Mall is to really just have people in the community come out and enjoy it and
people in the community to feel like somebody actually cares.
My hopes and dreams, they're kinda already starting because I see tourists walking fully through it, fully through the five block mall. So
I wanted to see more people.
I hope that we can put, maybe not an Exploratorium, but you know, something that really symbolizes that the Exploratorium cares about the Buchanan Mall out there.
I just hope that we could stay in contact with you guys and like you guys be there to the finish line.
So you guys could see like what you guys have helped, you know, build.
That's what I hope, for the Buchanan Mall to be just - a spark.