Friends of Rainbow Railroad raise funds, awareness.
Rainbow Railroad: Seth Rosenberg expands reach of nonprofit to S.F.
Seth Rosenberg is no stranger to challenge. At Facebook in 2014, he managed a project that transformed its computer chat function and made it work on mobile phones — leading to the Messenger app that now has 1.2 billion monthly active users worldwide.
Now he’s building another sort of community — expanding the reach of Rainbow Railroad, a Canadian nonprofit that provides gays passage to safety from countries where homosexuality is illegal or punishable by death.
The 27-year-old Pacific Heights resident, now a venture capitalist, assisted with establishing the American Friends of the Rainbow Railroad, the nonprofit’s first U.S. chapter. At an inaugural gala in April, Rosenberg and his co-host Jacob Helberg, a policy advisor at Google, raised $100,000 from 300 guests whose ranks included co-chairs Geoff Lewis of Founders Fund, Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, Sarah Tavel of Benchmark Capital and Jared Fliesler, most recently of Matrix Partners. A subsequent round of crowdfunding raised $250,000 more.
The event occurred just as news came out of Chechnya, a republic of Russia, that gay men were being beaten and thrown into concentration camps — a situation that Human Rights Watch reports is ongoing.
Another fundraiser on Monday, Aug. 7, a screening at the Castro Theatre of “Stilettos for Shanghai,” a documentary by Monet Allard-Wilcox about the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’s trip to Shanghai Pride week in 2014, will benefit both Rainbow Railroad and San Francisco’s ORAM (Organization for Refuge, Asylum & Migration).
Rosenberg, who has a girlfriend and is straight, understands persecution all too well.
“Growing up Jewish, you’re constantly exposed to the ephemerality of your existence,” said Rosenberg, referring to the Holocaust. “With Passover every year, it’s ritualized in your culture what it’s like to be slaves. When you see it happen to other people being tortured, killed and persecuted for who they are, there’s not much of a disconnect to what happened to Jews and others throughout history.”
A native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, he follows in his parents’ and grandparents’ philanthropic footsteps. His father and grandfather, both real estate investors, and his mother, a doctor, supported medical causes, the arts and education. During summers off from college at Queens University in Ontario, Rosenberg started an annual ball hockey tournament (hockey without the ice) that raised funds for computers for Winnipeg libraries. He served on the board of Buy-A-Net, a malaria prevention group that distributes mosquito nets in Uganda. He has raised the equivalent of $22,000 for cancer research in two Challenge for Life walks, and he and his siblings raised the equivalent of about $40,000 for a medical school scholarship in honor of their mother, who died in 2014.
It was Rosenberg’s sister, Raffie, who planted the seed for his new project. In 2016, working for the Upside Down Tree, a Winnipeg nonprofit, she held a fundraiser for Rainbow Railroad that collected nearly $400,000 in a single night. San Francisco, often referred to as the gay capital of the world, seemed a logical starting point for a Rainbow Railroad chapter, Rosenberg thought. And, as many in the field of philanthropy have observed in recent years, young tech employees create products for a global market, so they think globally when it comes to giving back. Donating to stop world hunger or to improve gay rights, for example, resonates more deeply than supporting local fine arts.
“Dignity and love,” said Helberg, “are basic and universal human rights.”
Guests at the April gala at the General’s Residence at Fort Mason took in sweeping sunset views of San Francisco Bay through floor-to-ceiling windows in the building, which dates to 1877. Their casual Silicon Valley T-shirts, jeans and sneakers were replaced by dressier suits and leather shoes or little black dresses and high heels. Donors paying $100 a ticket sipped cocktails with top-shelf liquors and nibbled appetizers passed by waiters.
The evening included brief remarks about Rainbow Railroad, a live art auction and a performance-art piece in which a woman, lying unseen under a pile of ropes, startled guests into silence as she emitted guttural screams and twisted her way out of captivity.
Surveying the scene, two veterans of the Bay Area’s society circuit — luxury real estate agent Joel Goodrich and Silicon Valley real estate developer Mark Calvano — marveled at the size of the crowd of men and women in their 20s and 30s, and also at the fact that the donors were new to the scene. Goodrich and Calvano, who
Stilettos for Shanghai
for Chechnya film screening and conversation, 7 p.m., Aug. 7, Castro Theatre, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. Tickets $10-$100; www.ticketfly.com.
seem to know everybody, recognized almost no one.
“At a first-time event, you’re lucky to get 12 people to show up,” Calvano said. “They have 300 here. That’s impressive.”
Rainbow Railroad, formed in 2006, references the Underground Railroad, a series of secret routes that helped African American slaves escape to free states in the 19th century. Since its inception, Rainbow Railroad has helped more than 70 people relocate to countries where they can live freely, at a cost of about $10,000 per person. Those countries include Canada, the U.S. and a few nations in Europe, said Kimahli Powell, executive director for Rainbow Railroad, declining to be more specific. None have moved to California, he said.
“Unfortunately, currently U.S. immigration policy makes it more challenging for us to move individuals into the United States,” Powell said via email, “but we have had some luck. A recent success story is someone who we moved to Orlando (Fla.) from Jamaica last year. Coincidentally, he was planning on going to the Pulse Nightclub the night of the fatal shooting.” The refugee has since moved to New York, Powell said.
Several locally prominent gay rights and human rights activists will speak at the Aug. 7 screening of “Stilettos,” along with Russian refugee Alexander Pikul, who performs locally as drag queen Natalie Ray. He left his native Moscow for San Francisco on a tourist visa in 2013 and — thanks to a private lawyer whom he hired to assist with asylum — never went back.
Initially, Pikul balked at the invitation by organizer Michael Williams, a.k.a. Sister Roma, to speak at “Stilettos” because he wanted to forget about his old life in Moscow, his homophobic family and the constant fear of being arrested for being gay.
“What changed my mind was when I saw a video of Sister Roma and other sisters protesting in San Francisco against people getting tortured in Chechnya,” Pikul said. “There was a Russian man who spit on the ground in front of them. I remembered that it happened to me in Russia, but they would not spit on the ground — they would spit on me. I felt like I needed to speak out.”
Rosenberg, meanwhile, is determined to make the American Friends of Rainbow Railroad’s future fundraising efforts spectacularly successful, aiming for millions of dollars. But real success would come in the form of cultural change and the repeal of anti-gay laws around the world.
“Hopefully, in 10 years,” Rosenberg said of Rainbow Railroad’s future, “the organization doesn’t exist at all.”