As LGBTQ Nonprofits Fear Targeted Attacks, SF Will Consider Easing Disclosure Rules

San Francisco city officials will consider removing some personal information from nonprofits’ financial disclosure requirements after LGBTQ organizations expressed concern that they could put staffers in danger in the current political landscape.

On Monday, the Board of Supervisors Rules Committee gave the first nod of approval to an amendment of the city administrative code that would strike requirements for organizations to include employees’ personal information and some financial documents in annual economic statements to the city.

Board President Rafael Mandelman introduced the amendment in December after he said multiple organizations raised worries about publishing reports that include the names of their executive officers and board members.

“As the mood of the country changed, and organizations, particularly queer organizations, found themselves under increasing and often violent threat, folks approached me about potentially amending that legislation to provide some protection for those LGBTQ-serving organizations,” he said during the committee meeting on Monday.

Among the organizations that could be affected by the policy change are family planning services, including Planned Parenthood. Such groups that provide reproductive health care have been targets of political attacks in recent years. Crimes against LGBTQ people also surged in 2024, and advocates have raised alarms over hundreds of laws rolling back transgender rights in cities and states across the country.

Mandelman’s proposed amendment comes after supervisors amended the city administrative code in 2023 to increase transparency in nonprofits’ expense reporting. Organizations that receive more than $100,000 a year from the city for public use were required to post their annual statement on websites and report back to the city starting in 2024.

The new amendment would remove five of these statements’ requirements, including listing the names of the agencies’ chief executive officer, other officers or directors and a disclosure of any other boards of directors that they sit on. It also cuts the requirement for a program-by-program description of all funding expended or budgeted, a letter from the Internal Revenue Service confirming the organization’s status as a nonprofit and a public copy of its most recent tax return.

Mandelman said that the city will still require this information from organizations in “various forms,” but it will be less publicly available to people with questionable intentions.

The amendment also increases the minimum dollar amount that requires a statement from $100,000 to $1 million a year, in line with the federal standard, and widens the scope of when required information can be redacted.

The current language says that any of the information can be redacted to ensure that privacy-related laws aren’t violated. The amendment would add a second cause for removing information — allowing organizations to redact information that puts employees at risk if they have “received threats of violence” within the last year. It would allow the same protection to nonprofits that have similar duties to other agencies that have been the target of these threats.

A previous version of Mandelman’s amendments only included the expansion of when information could be redacted. He said that he worked on the larger package of amendments with local nonprofits after they expressed that the policy still made them more vulnerable to harassment and violence than they were prior to the original 2023 reporting legislation.

“We’re still requiring some additional information that was not required before 2023 to be submitted, but we’re not going to make it quite so easy for the potential harassers and ill-wishers to do harm to organizations serving vulnerable communities,” Mandelman said during the meeting.

Beverly Upton, the executive director of San Francisco’s Domestic Violence Consortium, said that the amendment also provides much-needed security for victims of domestic violence.

“Survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, trafficking, and so many other areas and issues receive help in San Francisco and want to give back,” she said, thanking Mandelman and the city attorney’s office for “helping us to shape something that gives survivors and so many other people in other marginalized communities an opportunity to give back without fear.”

Upton said that as national attention toward San Francisco has intensified, people working within marginalized communities can feel less safe.

“San Francisco is being watched very closely,” she told the committee. “We just want to make sure that we keep people as safe as possible, and this will help us do that.”

Supervisors Stephen Sherrill and Mandelman both voted to approve the amendments to the legislation, but because it includes substantive changes, the ordinance will come back before the committee in April before being forwarded to the whole board.