About:

The Children’s Mural Program (CMP) is an environmental education program that uses instruction in visual art techniques as the basis of a curriculum to explore various environmental issues of concern to members of Southeast San Francisco, especially the Superfund clean-up and reuse of Hunters Point Shipyard. Our program has been developed and expanded over the past twenty years. In 2008, the Children’s Mural Program commenced its sixteenth successful year, having served more than 5,000 community children. The program was begun in 1992 in a single school, and has been presented with ongoing support of Hitachi America, LTD., The Hitachi Foundation, The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, The Mural Resource Center, and the Bayview Opera House at four community elementary schools for ten years. In 2001, the scope of the CMP doubled with the inclusion of Kids’ Environmental Education Program, KEEP!, serving annually with CMP approximately 700 children. 

In 2010, The Children's Mural Program founder and director, Heidi Hardin and Think Round were awarded one of the nine public art commissions for HPS through the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) HPS Public Art Program. In 2010-11, more than 60 local CMP students participated in the creation of this commission, titled STREAM of CONSCIOUSNESS, a 1’ x 120’ handmade ceramic and mosaic tile mural. See OUR PRESENT for more details about STREAM...

Need for this program:

Many of the problems in Southeast San Francisco are directly associated with the 1974 closing of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. For many years the shipyard was the primary source of employment for neighborhood residents. The shipyard is now in the middle stages of a massive environmental clean-up program prior to it being transferred to the City of San Francisco for its eventual reuse. The enormously expensive and complex clean-up is a matter of grave concern to the communities adjacent to the shipyard, raising issues of public health, employment, and economic development. Providing education about environmental issues by itself fulfills an important need. However, the residents of Southeast San Francisco have a more pressing need. The shipyard clean-up may require twenty years to complete, and will have a significant impact on the lives of the people in the surrounding communities—especially Visitation Valley, Potrerro Hill and Bayview Hunters Point. Today's youth, who will be living through this clean-up process and whose future livelihoods may depend on the productive reuse of the shipyard, need an educational program that will make sense of this complicated issue. The Children’s Mural Program and KEEP! are the only such a programs fulfilling this objective.