SF’s Black Social Equity Program, Mired in Scandal, Is Being Revived and Rebranded

A book chronicling the lives of seniors in the Tenderloin. Job training in the cannabis industry with a focus on social equity. Backpacks for kids. Down payment assistance for families on the brink of being pushed out of San Francisco.

These were success stories of the Dream Keeper Initiative, a commitment made by San Francisco officials in 2021 to invest $120 million into the city’s Black community. But this dream was soon deferred — and overshadowed by allegations of corruption and millions of misspent dollars.

Months after former Mayor London Breed froze the program’s funding amid that upheaval, incumbent Daniel Lurie announced last week at the city’s Black History Month celebration that the program would resume under a different name and with vastly more oversight.

“Investing in the Black community is a critical component of my administration,” Lurie told KQED Forum’s Alexis Madrigal on Wednesday, adding that this work would continue with “accountability at its core.”

“We’re going to look at every group that has been part of the former Dream Keeper Initiative,” Lurie said. “And if there was malfeasance, they will not be getting funding.”

On Thursday night, the agency that manages the Dream Keeper Initiative — the city’s Human Rights Commission — took its first steps toward restoring some of those funds for former recipients.

“I know that many organizations and community members have been negatively affected by the pause of contracts, and I want to say again that it is the mayor’s office who determines the release of funds and how those funds are spent,” acting executive director Mawuli Tugbenyoh said during the community meeting at City Hall. “We’ve been and continue to advocate for funding to be released.”

City officials and many prominent voices in San Francisco’s Black community have expressed widespread support for the program and applauded the mayor’s decision to resume funding for nonprofits. Fred Blackwell, CEO of the San Francisco Foundation, a philanthropy that serves the Bay Area, noted the timing of the mayor’s decision amidst an ongoing backlash against DEI and affirmative action policies nationwide.

“Contrary to the narrative that is being put out right now, one community’s gain does not mean another community’s setback,” Blackwell said. “The way that we get to the kind of society and community that I think we aspire to sometimes means that we have to invest in the communities that have been left behind — and then sometimes kept behind — because we don’t win until we all win.”

But with more than a month before the city reopens requests for proposals, Dream Keeper’s former beneficiaries are tired of waiting.

“Where is our money?” asked Jessica Ponce, a program coordinator of All My Usos, an organization that serves Pacific Islanders across the city. At Thursday’s community meeting, Ponce described an annual event at Gilman Park that served more than 1,600 meals and provided access to critical resources last year.

“All of our work is at risk because of the lack of receiving our promised funds,” Ponce told the Human Rights Commission. “Our organization has not seen reimbursements for the last seven months. How do you expect us to continue providing care and support to our community when you limit our ability to help?”

Others, especially those who were involved with the early community conversations with Breed around the program, were frustrated to learn about Lurie’s plans to “rebrand” the program without grassroots input.

“What does rebranding look like? It was a community-led process from the gates,” Diane Gray of Youth Community Developers, whose 100% College Prep program received funding from Dream Keeper, told KQED. “We just want to make sure that that continues and that happens and that we have a voice in that.”

Inspired by the protests over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, Breed and Supervisor Shamann Walton introduced the initiative in 2021. Guided by public surveys and conversations with Black residents, Dream Keeper aimed to direct funding away from law enforcement and toward investment in the Black community.

At the time, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the reallocation of funds was intended to be “a gesture of reparations for decades of city policymaking that have created or exacerbated deep inequities for San Francisco’s African American residents.”

Black San Franciscans, who now make up just 3% of the city’s population, continue to face disproportionate challenges, including having the lowest household income and lowest rate of homeownership among all racial groups.

“We are in a state of emergency for the Black community in San Francisco,” said Dr. Jonathan Butler, president of San Francisco’s NAACP chapter, citing negative health outcomes for the Black residents and outmigration due to the city’s limited housing supply as primary reasons why programs such as Dream Keeper are necessary.

Between fiscal years 2022–25, the program disbursed $124 million, according to data provided by the HRC. Housing was a critical component of the Dream Keeper’s vision, including down payment assistance.

The program suffered a series of setbacks after problematic spending by the Human Rights Commission’s head, Sheryl Davis and several grant recipients were exposed in a series of investigations last summer.

Davis resigned amid reports that she misspent Dream Keeper funds, including up to $1.5 million in contracts for Collective Impact, a local nonprofit she ran until 2016, which is currently run by a man with whom she has a close relationship. Davis and James Spingola acknowledged their relationship to the San Francisco Standard, but she did not formally disclose it to the city.

Spingola appeared at the Thursday meeting to criticize the city’s decision to cancel various contracts with Collective Impact over what HRC officials described as “significant conflicts of interest” in a statement.

“They found me guilty — judge, jury and executioner — before they even had a conversation with me,” Spingola told KQED, adding that his organization is committed to its mission of serving hundreds of low-income and at-risk youth.

When asked about the nature of his relationship with Davis and whether it posed a conflict of interest, Spingola said, “At the end of the day, every contract we had went through the city attorney and the controller’s office. Sheryl Davis came from Collective Impact. Why didn’t the city attorney flag it then?”

The question remains about how Lurie’s iteration of Dream Keeper will look — and how the equity initiatives can avoid those same pitfalls. In an email, Tugbenyoh said the HRC will use a new procurement process, including a new scoring system for applicant organizations, and reorganize its departments to create more separation and compliance in finance.

“We are implementing stronger oversight measures to ensure funding reaches the communities it was intended to serve — especially those that have historically been kept out of access to critical resources,” he wrote. “This includes a sharper focus on funding impact and addressing gaps in services to ensure our investments create meaningful, lasting change.”

Liz Jackson-Simpson, the CEO of Success Centers, said that while cash flow and resources for the city’s legacy organizations are desperately needed, the city needs to take a closer look at how it builds out public-private partnerships.

“I truly believe in the ideals of the initiative, but there was very little investment in building out the infrastructure both internally (City) or externally (Organizations) to ensure the foundation was stable,” Jackson-Simpson said in an email.

Most of the $1.7 million Success Centers received, Jackson-Simpson said, was funneled to emerging organizations. The problem was that new organizations and their leaders lacked the knowledge required to comply with complex nonprofit regulations, Jackson-Simpson said.

“We anticipated that compliance would be a major challenge,” she said. “It was astonishing that the city did not recognize this need and ensure that these capacities were in place both internally and externally before launching this initiative.”

One challenge was that Dream Keeper funding was scattered across various city agencies, including the Department of Public Health, the Arts Commission and the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, among others. The HRC itself does not have the mechanism to manage procurement, contracts and negotiations, despite Breed consolidating much of the initiative’s funding under the department during her last budget cycle in office.

Some agencies routinely failed to pay the full costs of contracted services on time and did not honor their legal obligations of the contracts they signed, Jackson-Simpson said.

“Minimally, in any given year, [community-based organizations] are expected to float the city for three or four months before invoices are paid,” Jackson-Simpson said. “We don’t get reimbursed for bank fees if we are forced to take out loans.