The Stay Over Program Folding Beds

The Stayover program at the Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community School in San Francisco is the first-of-its kind emergency family shelter in San Francisco. By using an active school gym to house 80 family shelter beds and support services, this model allows families a means to transition to stable housing. The program requires a complex partnership between the school, a non-profit shelter operator, SFUSD, and San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

The B.lab program came in to offer design as a tool to remove some of the pain points and to try to make the lives of the families residing in the shelter, easier. To do this, we operated at the scale of a microintervention and leaned on a co-creation process.

Operationally, the dual use of the school gym is difficult - during the day the gym is used for PE classes and at night it is used as a shelter. The daily set up and break-down of beds is labor intensive. To remedy this, students fabricated 80 folding beds on wheels with storage compartments incorporating the suggestions of the families at an emergency shelter. Through extensive 1:1 prototyping, students held themselves accountable to the families and developed a shared purpose to guide the process.

Additional furniture was also built through a collaborative process to add storage, a reading book, screen and bookshelves to the dining area. 

︎︎︎Micro Intervention and Co-creation at a Family Shelter presented at the 2024 Disrupters on the Edge ACSA conference, Vancouver California 

A collaboration between:
Faculty: Sameena Sitabkhan, Karen Seong, Tammy Ho
Students: Lowai Ghaly ,Mazen Ghaly, Mohamed Meawad, Andrew Hart, Kim Ebueng , Amanda Estrada, Giewel David ,Kendryx Soriano Dolores Street Community Services Stay Over Program
Buena Vista Horace Mann Escuela Comunitaria K-8
826 Valencia