Craigslist may be the easiest, cheapest, and most entertaining way to find an apartment, used appliance or nearly anything else your heart desires, but the site — and its nonprofit offshoot, the Craigslist Foundation, which is holding its annual Boot Camp at UC Berkeley next month — can also help your business expand its role in the community and leverage its power for the purposes of social good.
Focused on community-building in its various forms, the Craigslist Foundation aims, according to director of events Paige Buck, “to give people the tools and resources and inspiration they need to empower their communities.”
It’s an abstract concept, to be sure, but Buck said the one-day Boot Camp is intended to break these ideas down into concepts anyone can use. For businesses, this means hands-on training on topics like leadership skills, social media, and the value of public-private partnerships, led by folks from government, philanthropy, and the corporate and nonprofit worlds. “Many small businesses do get deeply involved in their communities, so we want to provide people with tools and resources to do that,” Buck said. To that end, the keynote address will be delivered by Chip Conley, founder of the Joie de Vivre boutique hotel chain, and who will be discussing the meaning of community engagement from a business perspective. Other speakers include Cindy Gallop, founder of If We Ran the World, which unites do-gooders from all sectors for innovative social-justice work; José Cisneros, treasurer of the City and County of San Francisco; and, of course, Craig Newmark himself. Saturday, August 14, 7:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m., $99-$299. CraigslistFoundation.org
