(GreenFaith leaders - pictured above - will join Human Banner-SF
for an Earth Day-themed banner titled "Energy From Heaven")
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VOLUNTEERING AT THE NEXT HUMAN BANNER
This Saturday, April 18th, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Stairwell 17 — Ocean Beach, SF, CA
Arrive by 11:30 am to be in place for filming at 12:00 pm
More Details and Register here
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Dear Human Banner Community,
INTERESTED IN VOLUNTEERING?
Please send an email to info@humanbanner-sf.com.
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ALL WE ASK of human banner “attendees” is to arrive at the beach half an hour before photography begins, and go with the flow.
Without the hundreds, or sometimes the thousands of you folks, there’s no point, no rally, no banner.
YOU make the whole deal work!
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THAT said…
Having a cadre of early-arriving “volunteers” is also absolutely essential to these banners.
Twenty years ago, I (Brad, central organizer, 20 years and counting) more than once found myself wrangling tools on the beach alone in the dark for an hour and a half before another person showed up. I’m glad those days are over.
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(Brad on the beach - Photo: Chet Zebroski)
As recently as a year ago, Travis and Frank (who has driven in from Nevada City starting years and years ago) and Sally and Ed and I (all five of us in our 70s), plus early-30s Sam (with-the-video-cam), often found ourselves looking around at each other at 7:00 am (then 7:15… 7:30… 7:45… even 8:00 am) and saying aloud:
“How are we gonna get these tools out of our cars, down to the beach, moved around to where they need to be, run these tapes, sort these tarps, inscribe the letters into the sand, and be ready for the crowd by show time? Not possible.”
(Photo: Tom Spingola)
On March 28th, at our epic “Trump Must Go Now” banner, I drove the U-haul truck full of gear up to Stairwell 17 shortly before 7:00 am. A coned-off parking spot awaited me. 10 volunteers, mostly people I’d never seen before, put 20 hands to emptying the truck – five minutes flat. Next, they grabbed garbage bags, shovels, rakes, hoes, and headed out to our 5.3 acre parcel(!) to clean up after Friday night’s partiers. A flatbed truck delivered five portable toilets right on schedule.
More volunteers, often younger, fanned out to deliver boxes of 300’ tape measures (we now own 14 of these, almost enough!), mallets, wooden stakes, signage, surveyor flags, bags and bags of tarps, Letter Captain dowel-rod-flags, also coffee and exquisite homemade cookies to their respective destinations.
Somewhere around 10:00 am, with things humming along nicely now, I looked around and counted 50 people either working at something or looking for a job. Even with all the help, we completed the “W” just 11 minutes before deadline.
Again: Early volunteers are Absolutely Essential! Please and Thank you!
(Artist’s concept)
“Energy from Heaven” image will not be anywhere near as sprawling as “Must Go Now.” (We hope to email a “final image” sketch early this coming week.)
But we’ll still need plenty of volunteers. At least ten early arrivals to unload gear, clean the beach, sculpt the sand, figure it out, be useful. More is better. Twenty would be great. With 20 – more is better – we can do this thing we’re working on…
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In addition, we will need approximately 30 Letter Captains and Border Captains.
Being a Border or Letter Captain is one of the easiest, most fun, and most important ways to help.
You don’t even need to arrive so early for this one. Most people won’t have to set an alarm.
We aim to have a Captains meeting 60-90 minutes before overhead photography begins — usually in the 10 - 10:30am range.
A Captain’s assignment: Keep our lines straight and our crowd happy. Which dovetails with the overall mission of every banner: “Get a crisp, clean image that news editors everywhere will want to use.” As you’ve seen, it frequently works very well — often spectacularly.
Again: We need approximately 30 Letter Captains and Border Captains. Please and thank you.
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The most common trait among the folks on our core team: We show up early.
If you’ve ever been curious about how this sausage gets made, showing up early is the best way to find out.
If you come out, we’ll do our darnedest to put you to work.
NOTE: Everyone has their own skill set. Sometimes we have trouble matching a person’s skills to the particular jobs we need accomplished. Once, when the only job available at the moment was the planting of surveyor flags into the sand, an eager volunteer asked me what she could do: “Anything!” she said. I demonstrated the simple task. “Oh, but my knee,” she said. “The only thing I can’t do is bend down like that.” We both laughed, and soon found her something else to do.
Whatever comes along, we try to roll with it. If it doesn’t work out, there’s always the fallback option: “Enjoy the beach. Meet new people.”
Looking forward to seeing you Saturday! Please register so we know you're coming!
Warmly,
Brad Newsham, Central Organizer
For the Human Banner-SF Team
humanbanner-sf.com