Readers save beloved homeless nonprofit

Two months ago, San Francisco’s beloved Gubbio Project appeared likely to go the way of so many other city businesses and nonprofits fighting through a soulcrushing and financebattering pandemic. It appeared likely to quietly fold up and disappear.

But San Francisco Chronicle readers proved to be a compassionate and generous bunch.

After a column on the likely end of the nonprofit that provides a space for “sacred sleep” for homeless people appeared two months ago, readers contributed an eyepopping $56,000 plus another $13,000 in pledges to donate later.

I checked my longneglected mail pile in the newsroom recently and found an anonymous letter with $400 tucked inside for the Gubbio Project. I delivered it to Lydia Bransten, the nonprofit’s new director, at St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal Church in the Mission that hosts the Gubbio Project.

“We’ve been having beautiful letters and checks come in,” she said. “I’m incredibly uplifted by the generosity of the people of San Francisco.”

The Gubbio Project has always been one of my favorite San Francisco nonprofits for its sweet simplicity in an overcomplicated city where everything costs too much, takes too much time and leads to too much neverending debate. At the Gubbio Project, staff watch over homeless people as they fall into a deep sleep that’s hard