The 5M Project is a mixed-use residential community development project in the heart of the South of Market (SOMA) neighborhood of San Francisco. Concerns of traffic congestion, visual blockage, and the effects of new housing created concerns from the surrounding community and caused major local opposition.
Our firm was hired to educate the community about the benefits of the project, identify supporters, and mobilize them to attend and speak at public hearings. The goal was to raise the voices of thousands of average voters to demonstrate to the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors that the 5M Project had wide and diverse support in the immediate SOMA neighborhood and across the City.
We developed a plan to identify project supporters and mobilize them to call, email, and write letters of support for the project to the Commissioners and Supervisors. To ensure success, we engaged the community in a multilingual door-to-door program in five different languages: Tagalog, Cantonese, Mandarin, Spanish and English. We integrated this traditional door-to-door engagement with direct outreach to other community partners and key stakeholders.
Five Corners Strategies mobilized over 620 5M Project supporters to attend and speak at several public hearings on the project.
We also knocked on 5,256 doors with our multilingual canvassing team, generated 1,561 statements of for the public hearings.
I am not only proud of how we delivered for our client, but also the manner in which we were able to integrate multicultural and multilingual tactics into the campaign. That was a unique challenge we faced and our team deserves an A+ for how they handled it.
Thanks to a strong demonstration of public support, the San Francisco Planning Commission was able to narrowly support the 5M Project with a 5-3 vote, and the Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 in support.