Audrey Dilling

If you listen to KALW regularly, you might have noticed that every day, we announce the school lunches in the San Francisco Unified School District. What you might not know is that KALW studios are actually located inside a San Francisco High School. In this story from our archives, KALW’s Audrey Dilling followed the former head lunch lady here in the school cafeteria and brought back Gowana Keys’ reflections on nearly three decades of serving school lunch.

Market Street begins, or ends – depending on how you see it – down by the bay. There’s a plaza here, Justin Herman, where Market almost hits the Embarcadero.

At 4:30pm on a Tuesday afternoon, streams of people pass through this public space. Many of them carry briefcases and look like they’re in a hurry. Nick Gaffney, who’s on his way to the ferries, says his commute to the Financial District puts him on Market Street more often than he would like.

“I don’t understand why people drive down it quite frankly, because all you can do is take a right,” says Gaffney.

Our new community storytelling project, Hear Here is popping up in libraries, food banks, and schools to capture these stories and snapshots of life in Oakland and San Francisco. A few months ago, Hear Here set up shop in the Golden Gate branch of the Oakland Public library to talk to local residents about work. They heard this story from Regina Tolbert.

Listen to the full story above. This story originally aired on July 24, 2012.

The Hear Here project has been visiting libraries and community organizations around San Francisco and Oakland, bringing back the personal stories of people who live in those cities. At the San Francisco Main library, they discovered Chris Mason. Mason came to the library to share his story of coping with a life-altering nervous system disorder.

Listen to the full story above. 

If you're a San Francisco resident, there is a good chance you went to college. Over 40 percent of the residents are college graduates, making San Francisco one of the most educated cities in the country. So when we send our community storytelling team out to gather stories from locals, many have tales of college life. Our Hear Here team heard one of them from San Franciscan, Ben Nelson at the San Francisco Main Library. He shared his plan for a new kind of Ivy League university, which he first thought of as a college student.

Listen to the full story above.