Four Corner Friday: Holding space in the Tenderloin

Last Friday I joined 826 Valencia for love note writing as part of Four Corner Friday in San Francisco's Tenderloin. A description of 4 Corner Friday is pasted below. Scroll down for some of the awesome love notes (a marriage proposal | big love for Glide Memorial | honoring a brother who died the day before). First of all, I had a blast with my 826 pals at this event. Second of all, the experience is under my skin. It was a powerful journey in human connection and an intense experience in witnessing and being witnessed. It's a true "get love. give love." action on a neighborhood wide scale and I do hope to return.4 Corner Friday is a community-building event to strengthen relationships among neighbors in the Tenderloin: residents, families, children, businesses, organizations, housed and unhoused. 4 Corner Friday is a project of Golden Gate Avenue Block Safety Group, an informal coalition of organizational stakeholders along Golden Gate Avenue and Leavenworth Street that meets to discuss street level community safety needs and how we can improve address them collectively. For this event, the Golden Gate Group has partnered with Tenderloin Health Improvement Project, a collective impact project led by the Saint Francis Foundation.We invite residents, businesses, and organizations is to join us on each of the four corners of the intersections listed above between 3:00 and 4:30 p.m. every first Friday. Come plant a seed, listen to youth read their poetry, draw your own pictures on the sidewalk with chalk, pick up information about services, organizations and businesses in the area—all during a time and a place where the open-air drug market in the Tenderloin can be at its worst. Help us take back the TL for all those who live and work here, housed and unhoused.