SF Chronicle: Glide Church + The SF Foundation Team Up

SF Foundation hosts fest, drafts plan to tackle wealth disparity

By Carolyn Said

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The ChronicleAngela Coleman (center) discusses how the programs at Glide Memorial Church have transformed her life, due, in part to Glide co- founder, Jan Mirikitani (left) in San Francisco, California on Thursday,…

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle

Angela Coleman (center) discusses how the programs at Glide Memorial Church have transformed her life, due, in part to Glide co- founder, Jan Mirikitani (left) in San Francisco, California on Thursday, September 17, 2015. Jan Mirikitani will be receiving a Community Leadership Award from the San Francisco Foundation at Bay Area Bold.


While the Bay Area enjoys unprecedented prosperity, the chasm between rich and poor has grown to alarming dimensions, with minorities especially marginalized.

Now the San Francisco Foundation, one of the nation’s oldest and largest community foundations, is preparing to marshal its considerable resources to address this disparity. It’s drafting a proposal to reduce the wealth gap and plans to expand from its traditional grant-making role by advocating policy changes and bringing together key people from the public and private sectors.

“We can embark on a path to create a climate of greater economic and racial inclusion so that race, economic status and ZIP code will no longer determine one’s future and opportunities for success,” said CEO Fred Blackwell, 45, who took over last year as head of the 67-year-old foundation.

In one of its first hands-on endeavors, the foundation will host an event at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts called Bay Area Bold on Friday and Saturday, designed as both a call for collective regional action and a celebration of creativity and the arts. Friday will include a summit with TED-style talks, panels and presentations for paying guests. Saturday’s all-day free festival will feature music, dance, film and interactive performances.

On Saturday, the foundation will also honor four community leaders with awards of $10,000 each. One is Janice Mirikitani, co-founder of the Glide Foundation at Glide Memorial Church, a mainstay in the Tenderloin, where it provides food, education, recovery support, temporary housing and other services.

While Mirikitani is most known for her social justice activities, the award recognizes her artistic achievements. A poet laureate of San Francisco, she’s also involved in the visual arts.

Her face lit up last week as she showed off huge portraits at Glide of homeless people and their pets. “Pets have saved their lives,” she said. “Everyone can relate to loving your pets, so it’s a way of reminding everyone of our common humanity and of revealing their voices.”

Blackwell visited Glide last week and told a few dozen people who gathered after their free lunchtime meal about Mirikitani’s award, eliciting whoops and hollers that echoed through an institutional room decorated with mobiles and posters. Several rose to their feet to tell Blackwell about their lives and what brought them to Glide.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The ChronicleFred Blackwell, CEO of the San Francisco Foundations listens to ideas on equity during a meeting held at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, California on Thursday, September 17, 2015.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle

Fred Blackwell, CEO of the San Francisco Foundations listens to ideas on equity during a meeting held at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, California on Thursday, September 17, 2015.

“I’m a broken individual,” said one man, identifying himself as 18 months cocaine-free. “I get my repairs from Glide.”

Afterward, Blackwell sat down to lunch with Mirikitani, husband the Rev. Cecil Williams — Glide’s co-founder — and Glide senior staff, and explained what spurred the foundation’s single-minded focus.

He and his staff conducted seven months of “listening sessions” to draw comments from more than 1,000 Bay Area residents on the region’s challenges, he said. Hearing so many accounts of people’s struggles to make ends meet inspired the foundation to hone its mission.

“It’s not a pivot, because we’ve always been social justice focused,” Blackwell said. But the goal now is to “move the needle” in closing the gap. “Our north star is to address barriers to opportunity based on race, income and where you live.”

He’s got a lot to work with. The foundation has $1.3 billion in assets. Of that, $800 million is endowed money that it decides how to spend, while $500 million is in donor-advised funds — money from living grantors who decide where, when and how to distribute it, with the foundation just writing the check. The foundation handles about 500 such funds for about 700 individuals. Such funds have generated some controversy, because donors get an immediate tax write-off, but can delay actually giving the money.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The ChronicleReverend Cecil Williams and Jan Mirikitani listen as clients discuss the positive impact that Glide Memorial Church has had on their lives, in San Francisco, California on Thursday, September 17, 2015.…

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle

Reverend Cecil Williams and Jan Mirikitani listen as clients discuss the positive impact that Glide Memorial Church has had on their lives, in San Francisco, California on Thursday, September 17, 2015. Jan Mirikitani will be receiving a Community Leadership Award from the San Francisco Foundation at Bay Area Bold.

That half a billion dollars represents a huge resource. “It’s an opportunity we have to motivate, incentivize donors to join us in the equity journey,” he said. “Someone who wants to do good, we can advise them, align them with objectives we want to achieve.”

One such person anonymously gave the foundation $34 million this year to address needs in Oakland. That gift, distributed in July to about 15 nonprofit groups, could create 2,502 jobs and 731 units of affordable housing.

Housing continues to loom as a formidable issue throughout the Bay Area.

“Affordable housing is as close as you can get to rocket science,” Blackwell said, asking Glide executives about the housing situation of its free-meal recipients.

“Half of the people who eat here are housed; it used to be 90 percent homeless,” said Kristen Growney Yamamoto, Glide co-executive director. In surveys, they say they need the free meals so they can afford their rent.

Many clearly are the working poor. “We see people in uniforms (from their jobs) in our lines on their lunch break,” said Kyriell Noon, a Glide program director.

Blackwell said he sees Glide as a model for what the foundation hopes to achieve.

“You move people from volunteerism to action, from social service to social change,” he said. “There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about what’s wrong. Now we want to make the transition into doing more to make it right.”

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid

Celebrating Launch of the Kapor Center for Social Impact!

The Mitchell Kapor Foundation announces a “new public face”: the Kapor Center for Social Impact!

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“For the past year, we’ve been keeping you abreast of an ongoing strategic shift here at the Kapor Foundation. We’re very excited to announce that we’ve arrived. As of May 15, 2013, the Kapor Foundation will have a new public face, the Kapor Center for Social Impact. Through a shared vision, set of values, and program activities, we’ll work more closely with Kapor Capital, our sibling venture capital microfirm focused on seed-stage tech startups…”

The Kapor Center’s working mission is to relentlessly pursue creative strategies that will leverage tech for positive social impact in underrepresented communities, primarily focusing on closing academic, political, health, and economic gaps. This mission represents our deep belief in the power of information technology as a tool to accelerate social good, and fully aligns with the Kapors’ longtime involvement in the tech industry, stemming back to their days at Lotus Development Corporation in the early 1980s.

Going forward, the Kapor Center will engage in partnerships across the for-profit and nonprofit continuum in three primary areas: Educational Access (which includes our College Bound Brotherhood initiative), Tech Tools for Social Impact, and Diversifying Tech. More information will be available at www.kaporcenter.org on May 15th.

As we make this transition, we are also concluding our grantmaking and related activities under the Green Access and Voting Integrity and Civic Engagement program areas, and will share the impact of what our community partners achieved in a series of retrospective reports to the broader community in early spring. We will not make additional responsive grants in these program areas. Additionally, Assistance & Advising will no longer be a distinct program area; it will be integrated into our everyday Kapor Center approach to partnerships. We will continue to be a leading partner in the College Bound Brotherhood.

We recognize that change, especially from a funding institution, always has ripples and repercussions. With this transition, we are now better situated to “provoke social change in communities of color en route to equality” by utilizing the ever-growing power of tech to our advantage. We hope that you join us in the excitement about the possibilities ahead.

Best wishes,

Freada Kapor Klein, Board Chair
Mitchell Kapor, President
Cedric Brown, Chief Executive Officer

NY Newsday & Baltimore Sun, Editorial pages, April 2007

In an April 2007 New York Newsday & Baltimore Sun op-ed, John Newsome contrasts South African vs. US political leadership and equivocation on marriage equality

“Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s support for gay-marriage legislation – even though he acknowledges passage by the State Legislature is unlikely – reflects that new American leaders are emerging on this issue. His backing for such legislation follows the lead of the mayors of Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco…”

Assuming more such leaders follow, and that the gay and lesbian community holds its ground, it’s a matter of time before we see more marriage-equality victories. In the meantime, when searching for moral leaders, I often find myself looking beyond the United States. Many national figures in the United States seem obsessed with caution around critical moral issues such as the Iraq war and gun control.

And marriage equality. Thanks to the cowardice of many of our most promising leaders, including Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the issue of same-sex marriage is becoming the third rail in American politics, when it should be a major “front” in the struggle for civil rights.

So I take my inspiration from South Africa, a country that had long been the scourge of the international human rights community. On Dec. 1, South Africa’s Parliament made headlines around the world when it granted same-sex couples the right to marry. This groundbreaking law did not arrive without major struggle. Its passage is a powerful testament to those committed and unyielding moral leaders who demanded nothing less than full equality for gays and lesbians.

Most notably, in pushing for marriage equality, South Africa’s Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu refused to acquiesce to public and political prejudices against gay people. Drawing upon the country’s painful apartheid history, Tutu drew parallels between racism and homophobia, arguing: “To penalize someone because of their sexual orientation is like what used to happen to us, to be penalized about something about which we could do nothing – our ethnicity, our race.”

Echoing Tutu’s bold moral call for gender equality was South African Minister of Defense Mosiuoa Lekota, who served prison time with Nelson Mandela. In arguing for marriage equality on the floor of Parliament, Lekota called upon South African leaders to uncompromisingly extend the rights of hard-won democracy to all South African citizens: “To look past the prejudices of our time and grant this right to those who have been pleading with us for so long now so that we may bequeath to succeeding generations a society democratic and more tolerant than the one that was handed down to us by those who preceded us.”

Sadly, back in the United States, we are waiting for our own Desmond Tutus and Mosiuoa Lekotas to defend the humanity of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) couples. Even within the Democratic Party, too many politicians have been AWOL on the issue of marriage equality, kowtowing to antigay prejudice – betraying the party’s commitment to civil rights.

Despite a solid majority’s support for the end of marriage discrimination in Massachusetts, Sen. John Kerry opposed nuptial equality. Although Clinton now says she’s “evolved” and not opposed to marriage equality, she shirks making a case for same-sex marriage. While Obama generally inspires, his stance on marriage equality is frustratingly equivocal.

Asked last month whether they considered gay acts immoral, both initially dodged the question. Then, Obama issued a statement saying he did not believe homosexuals were immoral. Clinton said on her Web site: “I have heard from many of my friends in the gay community that my response to a question about homosexuality being immoral sounded evasive. Homosexuality is not immoral. . . . That is what I believe.”

The equivocation of our national leaders (on this and other important issues) reflects their own cowardice, true, but it also reflects the LGBT community’s willingness to compromise too much. Many donors and activists, for example, are giving a pass to elected officials who fail to stand up for full marriage equality, maintaining that “civil unions are enough.” “Enough” suggests that there can be “too much” fairness for LGBT people. If only.

In stark contrast, South African LGBT activists were unyielding in their struggle, drawing strength from and giving strength to the country’s courageous moral leaders. Refusing to settle for civil unions, South Africa’s social movement for full marriage equality triumphed.

If people are looking for role models, and proof that seemingly unimaginable change can happen, I would encourage them to look south.