Next Three Events:
Download the Fall 2025 calendar as a pdf here.
Spring 2026 Calendar
Coming Soon!
Public Talks, Walking and Bicycling Tours, Photo Hunt at Ocean Beach and more
We are hard at work on our Spring 2026 calendar of events. We'll be enjoying the ocean shoreline, but also a bicycling excursion along the Eastern bayshore, exploration of Candlestick Point State Recreation Area, conversations on our local oligarchy, a deep history of redwoods and how they shaped our region, a walk from the Presidio to the Mission in conjunction with a public presentation on our work with the SF Arts Commission's Shaping Legacy project (the Serra statue event below is the first of our public events), and much more... check back here in January for an updated website, and if you're on our mailing list, a print calendar should arrive in your mailbox before the end of January...
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Wed., February 11, 2026, 7:30pm
The Fall of the Junípero Serra Monument: The Unknown History
Public Talk at 518 Valencia
Excerpted from Foundsf: 1907 was the year the Serra monument was placed in Golden Gate Park. This early 20th century date awkwardly corresponds in time to the erection of monuments to Confederate generals across the Jim Crow South. Like the Daughters of the Confederacy who built those monuments to glorify their “lost cause” of slavery, the Serra monument ceremony was presided over by California’s Native Sons of the Golden West. (This group was dedicated to falsifying and glorifying the Gold Rush and promoting a burnished history of “great white men.” The actual gold rush was a half-decade rampage following the seizure of California from Mexico when American “settlers” began the 25-years-long genocide carried out on California’s First Peoples.)
We welcome donations. Donate now!
Explore Shaping San Francisco:
Ecology Emerges
Discussions and reflections on the history of Bay Area ecological activism, based on oral histories documenting the past 50 years.
Ecology Emerges is an oral history gathering project to explore the past 50 years of ecological activism in the Bay Area and the role that individual and institutional memories play in the development, policy proposals, and interrelationships that together make up the existing networks of ecological politics. We document the living ecological activist movement, in their own words, but also in a larger context of urban growth and globalization.
Oral Histories
Shaping San Francisco, as part of our ongoing work, sits down with people who have stories to tell and conducts oral history interviews.
Check them out here.
"Editor's Pick Tour" from FoundSF.org
Comprised of over 1,400 pages, and 2,500 historical photos, the wiki-based archive FoundSF.org is the product of hundreds of contributors, regular people who were compelled by the chance to investigate some piece of this City's past.
Shaping San Francisco is fiscally sponsored by Independent Arts & Media, a California non-profit corporation.