National Night Out: @terns and @TwitterSF giving back to the Tenderloin

The month of August @TwitterSF kicked off with a series of exciting volunteer events that brought Twitter and the community closer together.

On August 1st, over 20 @terns in San Francisco came together for the second #InternforGood event, a backpack build. The @terns, in collaboration with Family Giving Tree (@FGTtweets), assembled approximately 400 backpacks, complete with supplies such as pencils, erasers and colored pencils for elementary and middle school children who will be attending school in the Tenderloin this coming fall. Family Giving Tree is a charitable organization that is dedicated to lifting children out of poverty in the Bay Area through education.

Following the build, the @terns joined forces with other employees at HQ to distribute the backpacks during National Night Out. National Night Out is a community event that was started in 1984 and has gained prominence across the country over the years. It is a collaborative national event in which law enforcement seeks to connect with the communities they serve in order to forge partnerships and share ideas and resources on how they can build safer, stronger and more resilient communities.

Mike, a representative from the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco (@BGCSF) shared that “community building is a key aspect to creating a healthy and safe neighborhood, but it takes all of us to do it. This includes the community organizations, the local police station, the families and the local businesses. National Night Out is the perfect opportunity to bring all those elements together. Add on needed resources like backpacks and school supplies and you have an event that creates collective impact.”

The backpacks were distributed at Boeddeker Park in the Tenderloin to children from the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco as well as from the Tenderloin Community School, who recently received an influx of children fleeing the conflict in Yemen. A teacher at the school shared that “these backpacks will mean a lot to kids who have so little”. We wish all the children from the neighborhoods around Twitter HQ and beyond success in the upcoming school year!