Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy
Project: Strategic Planning
About the Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy:
Yerba Buena Gardens is a treasured urban sanctuary in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood of San Francisco that blends lush gardens, vibrant public spaces, and inspirational arts and cultural institutions into a dynamic gathering place in the heart of the city. The Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy (the Conservancy) programs, operates, maintains, and improves the publicly owned open spaces and cultural facilities of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens. It works in partnership with the Gardens’ nonprofit cultural organizations, commercial tenants, and the City and County of San Francisco, for civic and public benefit and enjoyment by the City’s visitors and residents. The Conservancy’s mission is to provide arts, culture, recreation, and nature in beautiful, accessible, welcoming spaces for all.
Why the Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy partnered with Lyons-Newman Consulting:
After a previous attempt to develop a strategic plan, the Conservancy sought to restart with a process that intentionally incorporated skilled facilitation of its diverse and dynamic board of directors, community engagement, and strategy development expertise to develop a robust and meaningful strategy for the Conservancy — while fostering trust, building shared ownership, and achieving consensus on the strategic plan. Our collaborative community organizing approach, deep listening, and interactive facilitation helped the Conservancy engage its board, staff, cultural entity partners, and community members in developing and aligning on a shared vision for the future of Yerba Buena Gardens.
The process:
The process was designed to identify the Conservancy’s strategic priorities for its next five years, clarify its role in programming, and define its approach to fostering inclusion and deepening engagement with the neighborhood’s diverse cultural communities, including underrepresented groups and communities historically displaced by the development of the Yerba Buena Gardens. Central to the strategic planning process was a core question: how will the Conservancy maximize its relevance and impact in service of the community in the years ahead?
The planning process began in early 2025 with a discovery phase focused on understanding the needs, perspectives, and aspirations of the Conservancy’s cultural entity partners and the communities they collectively serve. This phase included stakeholder engagement and analysis that led to the development of a set of partnership principles to guide collaboration across the campus.
A Strategic Plan Working Group was established to serve as the steering committee investigating strategic questions, shepherding the planning process, engaging the community in planning, and crafting the plan in collaboration with our team. Throughout the process, board members, staff, cultural entity partners, and community members were engaged to provide input and feedback, ensuring the plan reflects a broad range of expert and stakeholder insights and perspectives. These conversations explored community needs, the evolving local landscape, and opportunities and challenges facing the Conservancy over the next five years. Secondary research examined trends in arts, culture, and public space usage in the SoMa neighborhood and across San Francisco.
This input and research informed an initial framework for the strategic plan that was further developed at a day-long retreat where convened board members, staff, and cultural entity partner leaders developed strategic priorities and built alignment on a plan, which was refined at the retreat. Following the retreat, the Strategic Plan Working Group, in collaboration with Lyons-Newman Consulting, developed a final draft of the strategic plan.
Board members and staff of the Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy, pictured here at their retreat that we facilitated, collaborated to plan for how the Conservancy can best serve the community over the next five years.
The results:
The Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy’s 2026-2030 Strategic Plan was adopted by its Board of Directors in June 2026. The strategic plan outlines the following strategic priorities that the board and staff are dedicated to achieving together:
Activation: Activate the campus, engaging community to participate in, benefit from, and contribute to the Conservancy’s interwoven arts, nature, play, and cultural places and spaces.
Capital stewardship and financial resilience: Steward, improve, and grow the Conservancy’s capital assets and infrastructure financing.
Synergystic partner ecosystem: Nurture a collaborative, synergistic campus ecosystem of partners and programs thriving together.
What the Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy says:
“Lyons-Newman Consulting guided our path to create a robust strategic plan that we all contributed to and are excited to follow. They skillfully facilitated disparate views and ideas from community partners, board members, and staff. They have been a delight to work with. The Conservancy is in a better place with staff looking forward to and already working on realizing the strategic plan goals and meeting our key performance indicators.”
— Seve Ghose, Executive Director, Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy