Jared Joiner

Founder

Jared is exploring youth-centered civic spaces through artifacts from the future.

Media FUTURES

DISTRICT 9

ABOUT JARED

Jared’s work background spans public education systems, philanthropy, technology, and community-building, but the throughline has always been the same: translating between worlds that don’t naturally speak to each other. He’s focused on building civic life that feels accessible, relational, and real, especially for young people who are often excluded from shaping the systems that affect them.

INTERESTS

Social Futures, Youth as Designers, Technology

VISION

San Francisco is a city where young people don’t just inherit civic systems, but help design them. Their ideas, stories, and experiments are treated as essential inputs to the city’s shared future.

dateline 2046

Every story needs somewhere to be written. Every voice needs somewhere to develop. In San Francisco, the spaces where young people have historically done that — neighborhood publications, community media centers, youth programs, public gathering places — are disappearing, or were never there to begin with.

In this activation, SF high schoolers pick up artifacts from 2046: fragments from two possible futures, one where youth-centered spaces for storytelling and civic life flourished, and one where they collapsed. Students become detectives and authors — piecing together what happened, then designing what they'd build instead. The activation produces a large-format map of where those spaces exist and are absent across SF today, and a set of youth-designed prototypes for the spaces that could exist tomorrow.

The future of media isn't just about platforms and formats. It's about whether young people have places to find their voices in the first place.

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