Former SF Human Rights Leader Faces 31 Ethics Violations, Including Gifts for Contracts

San Francisco’s Public Ethics Commission laid out dozens of corruption charges against Sheryl Davis, the city’s former Human Rights Commission head, on Thursday, as part of an ongoing investigation into her alleged violation of city and state ethics laws.

Davis, who resigned from her role as the agency’s executive director amid a major City Hall corruption scandal last fall, accepted flight upgrades, vacation rentals, support for personal business ventures and a portrait of herself and other gifts totalling nearly $40,000 from nonprofits which received large contracts and payments from the HRC, according to a probable cause determination from Ethics Commission Executive Director Patrick Ford.

Many of the payments were linked to the nonprofit Collective Impact, whose former chief, James Spingola, shared a home and car with Davis at the time.

The allegations led to a larger city investigation and audit by the Controller’s Office and City Attorney, which revealed in September that the agency had misspent at least $4 million under her leadership, and sunk confidence in the Dream Keeper Initiative, an HRC-led equity program founded by former Mayor London Breed to reinvest in the city’s Black community.

Many of the charges in the probable cause determination aren’t new, but the document warns that Davis could owe “monetary fines and penalties” for her violations, per HRC policy, and clear the way for a formal hearing into the allegations by government ethics investigators.

The report states that beginning in 2021, Davis signed agreements that HRC would pay tens of thousands for a personal podcast. While marketed as a “limited series hosted by the executive director of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission,” PEC investigators said she did not mention the department or any city work, which HRC staff characterized as Davis’ “personal endeavor.”

Collective Impact later paid for at least $12,000 of those costs, and emails show Davis instructed one of the vendors to bill the organization another $10,500, though it’s unclear if that was ever paid.

Around the same time, Davis approved an agreement to grant Collective Impact more than half a million dollars in city funding in a series of grants.

“This agreement was executed one day after Collective Impact made its first $10,000 payment to GPS for the provision of services for [Davis’] podcast,” the probable cause statement reads.

In the following months and years, the document alleges Davis engaged in a similar pattern: soliciting payment for flight upgrades, keynote speaker slots, promotion of her personal book and the Martha’s Vineyard stay from Collective Impact, and granting the nonprofit major sums of HRC funding.

Over the two-year period, Davis received and solicited $39,100 from Collective Impact and granted them more than $1 million, according to investigators. The majority of that grant money came from the Dream Keeper Initiative.

Davis is also accused of violating conflict of interest rules when she approved just over a quarter million dollars for Urban Ed Academy, an organization that trains Black men to teach in public schools, after receiving a portrait of herself from the organization’s executive director, which she did not disclose, in 2023.

In 2022 and 2023, she approved a series of voucher payments to the University of San Francisco while employed by the school as an adjunct professor.

The determination said that Davis did not respond to a Probable Cause Report from the commission in September, and unless the parties reach a settlement, the commission can move forward with a formal hearing on the charges.