Life’s experiences come full circle for S.F. Foundation CEO
Fred Blackwell has a boyhood memory that stays with him: his mother’s excitement when she opened an envelope from the San Francisco Foundation. It contained a sizable grant to fund his mother’s fledgling nonprofit, the Urban Strategies Council.
Blackwell, 44, now sits in the CEO’s office at the very same foundation that launched his mother’s career, leading Angela Glover Blackwell to become one of the nation’s most renowned antipoverty crusaders.
“I was absorbed in neighborhood politics from a very early age,” said Blackwell, who grew up, and still lives, in Oakland. “As a kid I read the cartoons in the op-ed section of the paper, I went to city council meetings with myparents, and I rode my bicycle all over the city. I was curious about things, like why were the low-income communities always located near the railroad tracks?”
Blackwell, who led community development projects during stints in both San Francisco and Oakland city halls, took over the San Francisco Foundation in June. He calls it his lifelong dream job.
With $1.3 billion in assets, the San Francisco Foundation is among the nation’s largest philanthropic community founda- tions, and funnels nearly $90 million annually to programs that help the needy, struggling artists, seniors and entrepreneurs in San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Marin counties. Philanthropists, corporations and national organizations donate to the San Francisco Foundation, which in turn parcels grants and loans to improve health, arts, education, the environment and neighborhoods and create community-building public policy in the Bay Area.
“I’ve come full circle,” said Blackwell, who in 1996 stretched a two-year fellowship with the San Francisco Foundation to five as he brought credit unions, job training programs and revitalization plans to East Palo Alto, West Oakland and impoverished parts of San Jose. “This is an opportunity to pull together all myexperience and interest into one place.”
Blackwell left a promising career in city politics to come to the foundation. He had recently been promoted from assistant to interim Oakland city administrator, where he was a key official in luring developers to the city and in trying to keep its professional sports teams in town.
Before he began working for his hometown in 2011, he served as executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and director of the Mayor’s Office of Community Development in San Francisco. Blackwell was hired by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom to run the new Communities of Opportunity program, designed to improve low-income neighborhoods physically and socially, by making sure city departments collaborate to address problems.
Blackwell was instrumental in ensuring that the first neighborhood to benefit from San Francisco’s citywide free Wi-Fi plan was the Alice Griffith public housing project in BayviewHunters Point, where he oversaw the renovation of dilapidated apartments with a federal HUD grant.
Blackwell is still getting settled into his new role, but he’s already thinking about his to-do list. The father of two is particularly interested in the rocketing income inequality in the Bay Area and what can be done to ensure that families aren’t priced out of their longtime homes.
“There are no throwaway children,” said Blackwell, who knows what it’s like to lose childhood friends to city violence. “I was exposed to everything Oakland had to offer, the good and the bad. The most profound thing to megrowing up was watching who made it and who didn’t.”
Some who didn’t make it were smarter, and more talented than he was, Blackwell said, but the only difference was that he had a family support network. His father is a surgeon and his mother is a public interest lawyer. His uncle founded OCCUR, an Oakland nonprofit focused on expanding opportunities for the city’s urban poor.
After attending Morehouse College in Georgia, Blackwell earned a master’s degree in urban planning at UCBerkeley. There, he met his mentor, Joe Brooks, a program executive with the San Francisco Foundation who visited Blackwell’s class to tell the students about the foundation’s fellowship program.
Blackwell was intrigued at the idea of using his good fortune to help others get a fair shot at a career and happiness. He applied for, and received the fellowship, and began a lifelong friendship with Brooks.
He parlayed his fellowship into a job directing the Making Connections Initiative for the Annie E. Casey Foundation in the Lower San Antonio neighborhood of Oakland. He helped establish a revolving loan fund for low-income housing there and workforce development programs.
Blackwell’s nonprofit work caught the attention of a graduate school colleague who was working in then-Mayor Gavin Newsom’s economic development department. The friend brought Blackwell to a meeting with Newsom, and Blackwell walked out with a job offer.
And this year, when Dr. Sandra Hernández left the foundation after 16 years to become the CEOof the California HealthCare Foundation, Blackwell caught the attention of the San Francisco Foundation Board of Trustees, said board chair Andy Ballard.
“Very few people have the combination of having worked both sides of the bay, and also grown up here so their commitment is authentic,” Ballard said. “Inevitably it means he works better with local governments and nonprofits.
“Fred has presence and the mind-set and style that gave us a lot of comfort he’d be a natural in this complex role. Even when he has to make an unpopular decision, people still have a lot of respect for him.”