The San Francisco Foundation Expands Support for Grassroots Leaders

To find out where grants are likely to make the most difference in the San Francisco region, Retha Robinson asks local residents a simple question: “Who in your neighborhood do you call when there is a problem?”

If the question begins to generate the same responses, you can get a pretty clear idea who the movers and shakers are, says Robinson, director of the Koshland Program at the San Francisco Foundation. Those are the people who can be trusted to help carry out the grant maker’s mission to improve life in the Bay Area.

The fellowship program, which the foundation has run since 1982, seeks to put money in the hands of people who are already recognized as local leaders, even though they don’t always have the bona fides of an official title, elected office, or established business.

During the pandemic, the foundation leaned on the fellowship program as a way to find out what was going on at the neighborhood level and to get money to the grass roots. In particular, it saw an opportunity to extend its reach deeper into the city’s Mission District, an area with a large population of immigrants and huge increases in housing rental costs that have made it difficult for low-income people to stay in the neighborhood.

Through the fellowship program, the foundation picks 12 leaders in a specific neighborhood and provides each of them $1,000 in cash and a $5,000 grant they can use to help their organization. Over the next five years, the fellows receive $300,000 for a project they design.

The current group of fellows, which includes religious leaders, educators, and community organizers, decided to create a program to train people from all walks of life to become better advocates for their neighbors. Tentatively called the Mission Community Power Institute, it’s based on the promotora model, which trains lay people to help their neighbors gain access to health care. Promotoras in the Mission program learn skills well beyond health care, like helping fellow residents who are looking for housing, work, or counseling. They also learn basic approaches to advocacy.

As the group came up with the plan, the foundation was largely hands-off.

“Those informal leaders set the agenda,” says Fred Blackwell, the San Francisco Foundation’s president. “It’s completely driven by them.”

Trust in Grantees

As the effects of the pandemic worsened in the Mission District, the foundation and the fellows agreed that neighborhood residents needed more support. The day after an evening of brainstorming, the fellows gave the foundation a one-page document that outlined their plans, Robinson says, and the foundation agreed to give the group $300,000, doubling its support of the fellowship.

The fellows knew they wanted to provide direct cash payments to residents hit by the suffering economy. But they feared people struggling to make rent would simply hand the money to landlords. The Mission is at the center of a prolonged gentrification debate, and the group didn’t want to support people on the other side of the struggle.

To receive a $500 payment, in the form of a gift card, the fellows decided residents would have to attend five online training sessions on tenants’ rights. Then, the 600 or so people who applied for the relief payment had to promise to call five friends to get them up to speed on housing policy.

Through the housing sessions, which started in December, the fellows identified its first group of promotoras, who this spring started a seven-week course of advocacy training. They include a woman who sells food she cooks out of her home, a maid, and a recently laid-off restaurant worker.

Temporary measures to protect residents from eviction and provide opportunities for rent forgiveness expire in California later this spring. Eric Cuentos, director of the Parent Partner Program of Mission Graduates and one of the Koshland fellows, hopes the promotoras can become a potent advocacy force.

Through the institute’s training, “we are creating a common language and a wider base of individuals who have that language to make change happen at a grassroots level,” he says.

The San Francisco Foundation is expanding its fellowship work. The next group of Koshland fellows will be from the North Central neighborhood in San Mateo County, and for the first time this year, the grant maker will support a separate regional fellowship using the same model. Robinson says the foundation sees an opportunity to bring “unsung” local leaders together on a wider basis to tackle issues like housing affordability that could benefit from a larger group of advocates.

While the design of the Power Institute came from the fellows, who decided how to use the extra money, Cuentos says, the foundation played a vital part in providing technical help and coaching. The community grant maker was willing to double its gift and cede control over the grant design only because it had invested the time it takes to forge deep relationships with members of the community, says Cuentos.

“They trusted us, and we trusted them.”