Three Lines at the Bottom
At the bottom of an April 2026 post on the SNA website — beneath a description of the SFFD's 24-hour emergency training program, beneath a report on a 200-person citywide drill — Michael Kelly published three lines: an email address, a ham radio call sign, and a phone number. The full post describes what the system requires. Those three lines document who volunteered to be the way in. Kelly holds three overlapping coordination roles in Sunnyside, and the public record of how he fills them reveals a specific kind of neighbor: one who absorbs institutional complexity so the next person doesn't have to.
Three Lines at the Bottom
At the bottom of an April 2026 post on the SNA website — beneath a description of the SFFD's 24-hour emergency training program, beneath a report on a 200-person citywide drill — Michael Kelly published three lines: an email address, a ham radio call sign, and a phone number. The full post describes what the system requires. Those three lines document who volunteered to be the way in. Kelly holds three overlapping coordination roles in Sunnyside, and the public record of how he fills them reveals a specific kind of neighbor: one who absorbs institutional complexity so the next person doesn't have to.
The Newcomer's Arc
The SNA bylaws, established in 1974, require three things of a board candidate: Sunnyside residency, household membership, and current dues. No tenure minimum. No committee prerequisite. Nominations happen from the floor at the February meeting; voice ballot; immediate installation.
Michael Kelly became a resident in 2024. By April 2025, he was listed as 2nd Member-at-Large, the role the bylaws assign to maintaining the membership roster. By March 2026, he was president. The roster assignment is worth pausing on: the person who tracks who belongs learns the full membership before anyone makes introductions. A clerical duty that doubles as orientation.
Niran Somasundaram arrived in July 2025 and was elected Treasurer seven months later. The 2026–2028 board absorbed three members who had lived here two years or less. Fifty-two years of biennial elections at St. Finn Barr have worn the threshold low enough that willingness is the only real credential.
The Training Calendar
Three NERT basic training sessions are open on the SFFD calendar right now, each one spanning six evenings. Twenty-four hours total, spent in a room with people you have not met, assessing building damage, practicing triage, learning to shut off a gas valve. All worth knowing. Six weeks of showing up to the same room on the same evening, doing unfamiliar things alongside the same strangers, is also how names get learned and acquaintance starts to hold.
Sessions begin July 30, September 2, and September 15. A citywide drill on October 17 gathers graduates for a full-scale practice scenario; last spring's version drew more than 200 volunteers. The program is free. Michael Kelly is the Sunnyside NERT coordinator, reachable at nert.sunnyside@gmail.com.
The Unexpected Opener
The SNA's March 2026 board introduction mentions Michael Kelly's membership in the San Francisco Amateur Radio Club almost in passing, tucked into a sentence about local safety. Easy to skim past. But the club, founded in 1909, is not a person hunched alone over a shortwave dial.
This August, SFARC members will build directional antennas from tape measures, then fan out to locate a hidden transmitter by following its signal on foot. The club calls it a Fox Hunt, which is, practically speaking, a scavenger hunt run on radio frequencies. San Francisco turns out to be a rare county in contest geography, so operators elsewhere actively seek contact with anyone transmitting from here.
If you see Kelly at an SNA event, try: Are you doing the Fox Hunt in August? He'll have to explain what it is, and that's the conversational door opening.