The Buchanan Mall is a five-block-long park that runs through the Western Addition—formerly San Francisco’s jazz district and a historically African American neighborhood. In 2015, the Exploratorium’s Studio for Public Spaces joined local residents, filmmakers Citizen Film, grassroots social enterprise Green Streets, SF Rec and Park, and the Trust for Public Land to envision, design, and build new interactive features aimed at making Buchanan Mall a safe, green, and well-used neighborhood resource.

In  2018, a group of young people from Buchanan Mall, some of whom had been part of the park’s transformation, partnered with Exploratorium Explainers over the summer to learn about informal science demos—and to share them with their neighborhood at the annual Peace Festival on Buchanan Mall. This partnership was supported by the Science Sandbox Initiative, a project of the Simons Foundation.