City Box Office

Since 1980, City Arts & Lectures has presented events with leading figures in the world of art & ideas. Each season, there are more than fifty lectures and onstage conversations — and a few surprise performances — with outstanding figures in literature, criticism, science, and the performing arts, offering the most diverse perspectives about ideas and values. City Arts & Lectures programs can be heard in edited and delayed broadcasts on more than 170 public radio stations across the country. The broadcasts are co-produced with KQED 88.5 FM in San Francisco.

Each Fall, City Arts & Lectures presents "On Arts," a series benefiting 826 Valencia's College Scholarship program. The events feature conversations with writers, artists, comedians, actors, and other cultural figures, with proceeds going directly to the scholarship component of 826 Valencia's College and Career Readiness program. These annual awards help outstanding first generation college-bound students who have participated in 826 Valencia programming access college and be successful there.

826 VALENCIA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting under-resourced students ages six to eighteen with their creative and expository writing skills and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. 826 Valencia's services are structured around the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success. 826 offers after-school tutoring, project-based field trips, creative writing workshops, in-school tutoring, college essay help, and support for English learners. The organization has two writing and tutoring centers in San Francisco - the namesake site in the Mission and a new center in the Tenderloin neighborhood - as well as satellite Writers' Rooms at Mission High School, Everett Middle School, and Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8. Each center has a street-front retail store that engages students and families from the first step inside the doors. 826 Valencia's success led to the founding of 826 National, which has established six other 826 chapters across the country. For more information please visit www.826valencia.org.