San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S.F. program shows value of investing in Black community
A smiling Sheryl Davis waited out 25 seconds of applause from a mostly Black audience during last week’s San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting before introducing a presentation on the city’s Dream Keeper Initiative, which has invested $60 million in the city’s Black community since 2021.
“I want you to know that’s for … dream keepers and not for me,” said Davis, executive director of San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission, which played a pivotal role in developing the initiative.
Over the next several hours, it became clear why the applause was warranted.
The Dream Keeper Initiative was created in 2021 by Mayor London Breed and Supervisor Shamann Walton to help Black San Franciscans overcome decades of inequities in everything from housing to employment.
The Human Rights Commission hired independent researchers to evaluate the work of the initiative. Although it’s natural to be wary of a report commissioned by those who stand to gain the most if its results are positive, the findings released Tuesday indicate that investing in Black San Francisco benefits all of San Francisco.
The initiative has trained more than 280 Black entrepreneurs and helped the historically under-resourced group
obtain more than $2.7 million in startup capital; launched 201 businesses; and opened 34 new storefronts, including 17 businesses within the city’s Fillmore neighborhood, which city leaders have spent decades failing to revitalize, the report states.
As for Black residents simply looking for steady work, the initiative provided workforce training to hundreds, and more than 50% have obtained employment, earning an average of $27.36 per hour, the report says. This is about $10 more than San Francisco’s current minimum wage.
“That is no short feat when it comes to contributing to the economics of this city,” said Saidah Leatutufu-Burch, who serves as director of the Dream Keeper Initiative.
That’s especially true when you consider that Black San Franciscans, who now make up only 5.7% of the city’s population, have never been the engine or the beneficiary of the city’s economy.
According to data from the city, San Francisco’s gross domestic product was $250 billion last year. This was more than 25% of the entire Bay Area’s economic output. Yet the city’s 439 Black-owned businesses represent only 1.3% of the 34,800 total businesses in the city, according to a 2021 study by the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.
Latino residents deserve their own Dream Keeper Initiative, as they are also woefully underrepresented in the San Francisco economy, making up 15.7% of the city’s population but only 1.4% of the city’s business owners.
The Dream Keeper Initiative also made homeownership more achievable for some Black families. This is especially noteworthy in a city where racist housing laws have pushed out Black residents for decades, and contributed to San Francisco’s homeless population being 40% Black today.
According to the independent report, the Dream Keeper Initiative has helped 22 Black families purchase homes in the city. While it may not seem like much, the number shows that the initiative is doing something San Francisco’s more traditional programs cannot. As Leatutufu-Burch explained Tuesday, only five Black families have benefited from San Francisco’s down payment assistance loan program for first-time home buyers during a five-year period.
But with the initiative’s success comes increased scrutiny on the organizations it supports. As we’ve recently seen with the African American Art & Culture Complex, avoidable compliance issues can tarnish even the most admirable nonprofits, and undermine the respectability of their programs.
The next challenging step will be persuading the city to maintain Dream Keeper’s funding.
In 2021, after saying she would fund Dream Keeper with $120 million in reallocated law enforcement funds, Breed instead used $60 million from both the police and also the city’s general fund. The decision just so happened to come while Breed was being criticized for being a “Defund the police” mayor, and the national winds around public safety were blowing more conservative.
Breed allocated another $60 million for the initiative in 2022, which is notable, but stops short of protecting the robust program from being defunded or outright shut down by the city at a moment’s notice.
This truth, coupled with how the Dream Keeper funding source changed a year after its launch, wasn’t lost on the dozens of Black residents who called on the city Tuesday not to backtrack on its funding promises. They know San Francisco’s pattern of being hesitant to make long-term investments in the Black community, and fast to deprioritize such efforts if they’re deemed unpopular.
“The Dream Keeper Initiative has enhanced critical services supporting our children, youth as well as our seniors in San Francisco, by amplifying Black voices in our community and allowing us to make crucial needed changes,” Greg Ledbetter, a 60-year resident of San Francisco, said at the meeting. “My ask … is to keep the dream alive.”
A truly progressive San Francisco would do exactly that.