08/12/2026
Brian Rashid Love Letters to San Francisco tells the stories of the people who keep The City’s spirit alive.
Thank you for coming to our recent event at the Commonwealth Club of California
From the San Francisco Examiner
“In the modern media marketplace, outrage is cheap to create and profitable to distribute. The playbook is simple: Put out fear, bad news or the latest threat, and shout it from the rooftop.
San Francisco has been a punching bag for a lot of this style of “news,” but there are many creators, artists, and storytellers who are taking a different approach to rewrite the narrative.
I was reminded of that recently at an event at Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California.
Adam Swig, founder of Value Culture, brought together a panel called San Francisco: Lost, Found or Reimagined in July at the public-affairs forum. The room itself felt like a living cross-section of the city — sixth-generation San Franciscans, whose family trees predate the cable cars, alongside younger creators using TikTok and other modern tools to document neighborhood culture.
What united them was not age or medium, but a commitment to telling stories about San Francisco that are rooted in possibility rather than exploitation.
Nellie King Solomon , an artist whose family roots in San Francisco stretch back six generations to the Gold Rush, offered a metaphor that reframed how I think about The City.
She called San Francisco a “rhizome” — a root system that grows horizontally beneath the soil. Even when the surface appears dry, dormant, or stripped bare, the roots are still quietly spreading, connecting, and gathering strength underground until new life suddenly breaks through.
That image stayed with me, because the younger storytellers in the room who began making videos about local “dumpling grandmas” and neighborhood shops while picking up trash on Baker Beach are not ignoring reality. They are simply refusing to flatten The City into its worst headlines. They’re using modern tools to highlight older institutions, smaller stories and overlooked people, proving that storytelling can be an act of stewardship.”
Continue reading the article at valueculture.org/news
