San Francisco Foundation

Collaboration across sectors is how we will achieve lasting, systemic change. Together with our partners, we lead four collaborative efforts that tackle challenges to housing, employment, access to transit, and civic participation in the Bay Area. Great Communities Collaborative (GCC) works at the intersections of housing, climate resilience, transportation, and land use to create a racially equitable, economically inclusive, and environmentally sustainable Bay Area. This year in Marin County, leaders gathered a wide range of nonprofit and public sector leaders to discuss housing. L See the power of collaboration in our 2024 Annual Report. https://ow.ly/1xeW50U9As7

The more you know about Alameda County | Native American Heritage Month Edition Over the past century, Indigenous people have relocated to the Bay Area for various reasons. In the 1920s, Indigenous laborers who moved west to build the nation’s railroads organized “worker villages” with tribal councils to forge ties with arrivals from different tribes. These efforts to “reterritorialize” initiated a tradition of organizing intertribal communities. During the 1930s and 1940s, Indigenous children were forcibly relocated to boarding schools at the edge of the city, while Indigenous adults came to work in WWII industries. And when the Federal Relocation Program began in 1956, offering basic job training and one-way bus tickets from rural reservations to cities like San Francisco, the Bay Area saw another dramatic increase in Indigenous residents. Part of the Federal Relocation Program’s agenda was to assimilate Indigenous people into broader U.S. culture. To counter this, community organizations run by and serving Indigenous communities were founded in the Bay Area, including Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland and Friendship House Association of American Indians in San Francisco. Serving the approximately 60,000 urban Indians living in the Bay Area, these organizations provide a place for a multi-tribal community to come together and honor their history and the cultural ties that bind them. Intertribal Friendship House was established in 1955 as one of the first urban American Indian community centers in the nation. Experience a history of social and political change through Mapping Change, a virtual tour of the Bay Area. https://ow.ly/La2U50U9vF7 #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth

Collaboration across sectors is how we will achieve lasting, systemic change. Together with our partners, we lead four collaborative efforts that tackle challenges to housing, employment, access to transit, and civic participation in the Bay Area. ReWork the Bay works with leaders across sectors to build a diverse and equitable Bay Area where all have quality, empowered employment. ReWork the Bay launched four pilot programs last year that trained over 200 systematically excluded workers in labor law and organizing through existing job training programs.  See the power of collaboration in our 2024 Annual Report. https://ow.ly/A3NO50Ubmxm

Collaboration across sectors is how we will achieve lasting, systemic change. Together with our partners, we lead four collaborative efforts that tackle challenges to housing, employment, access to transit, and civic participation in the Bay Area. The Partnership for the Bay's Future is a collaborative effort to equitably produce and preserve affordable homes and protect tenants. During its last grant cycle, PBF helped pass 13 local housing policies, including Antioch‘s Faith Land Policy for Cottage Communities, which allows select faith-based institutions to develop affordable cottage communities on their land. See the power of collaboration in our 2024 Annual Report. https://ow.ly/zazE50Ubg2M

One of the many ways we work toward a more equitable Bay Area is providing grants to organizations working to advance racial equity and economic inclusion. For Arts and Culture, we provided nearly $4 million in grants to 29 partners with over 60 Bay Area artists and creative changemakers. These grants are helping artists support community-informed solutions on issues such as environmental resilience, immigrant and worker rights, and public health. See more stories of impact in our 2024 Annual Report. https://ow.ly/hWkG50UbeX2

The more you know about Alcatraz Island | Native American Heritage Month Edition The federal government is not typically in the business of preserving graffiti, but it broke form in 2012 when the National Park Service rebuilt the water tower on Alcatraz Island and freshly inscribed the red-lettered graffiti Indigenous activists left there during a nearly 19-month occupation from 1969 to 1971. “The water tower was the occupation’s most outwardly focused message to the world,” said National Park Service spokeswoman Alexandra Picavet. Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, made famous when three inmates tunneled through its walls and escaped in 1962, has also held Indigenous people guilty of no more than trying to preserve their way of life. It held Modoc leaders in the 1870s who fought U.S. occupation of their ancestral lands. And in the 1890s, a group of Hopi men was imprisoned here for resisting federal land allotment that would disrupt their collective agricultural practices and refusing to send their children to federal schools that aimed to strip them of their language and culture. In November of 1969, a group called Indians of All Tribes organized by Mohawk activist Richard Oakes occupied Alcatraz. They demanded the land be turned into a university and cultural center serving Indigenous people. For more than a year, the group ran a consensus-based community that was forcibly removed by federal agents in June of 1971. In the decade after the takeover, a wave of activism began: Indigenous activists occupied more than 70 other locations, bringing the issues central to them to national attention and strengthening the “Red Power” movement that was instrumental in increasing self-determination and sovereignty for Indigenous people. Experience a history of social and political change through Mapping Change, a virtual tour of the Bay Area. https://ow.ly/4y3t50UanfM #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth

"If we’re really trying to solve community problems at a level of scale that matters, we have to engage in policy and systems work and the advocacy that is necessary to make those changes." - Fred Blackwell Amplify your impact with a gift to SFF’s Bay Area Leads Fund. This fund provides flexible resources to amplify the foundation’s ability to bring community together to shift systems at scale, creating a more inclusive Bay Area. Last year, SFF donors contributed over $1.7 million to support this leadership work. Thank you Bay Area Leads Donors! Learn more about Bay Area Leads https://ow.ly/f0GT50Uc97c

We focus on three pathways to greater racial equity and economic inclusion: People🧑🏻🤝🧑🏻, Place🏘️, and Power📣 In our 2024 Annual Report, we share a story of impact of Power Pathway grantee FAITH IN ACTION BAY AREA who are working with their community of low-income renters and immigrants on important community-identified issues such as housing in San Mateo County. Our Power Pathway supports community power-building as a way to dismantle oppressive systems and advance authentic democracy, redistribution, and reparation. We focus on strengthening grassroots community organizing, developing values-based leaders, promoting civic engagement, and fortifying movement infrastructure to win governing power. See more stories of impact in our 2024 Annual Report. https://ow.ly/Saw150UavVU

The more you know about Contra Costa County | Native American Heritage Month Edition Tuyshtak, Oj.ompil.e, Supremenenu, SukkuJaman, Kawukum. The peak that’s often referred to as Mount Diablo today has, in its long history, gone by many different names assigned by the region’s Indigenous residents. When the Spanish arrived in the 1770s, the mountain lay squarely within the homeland of the Volvon, a Bay Miwok group, who recognized that the mountain’s trees, rocks and animals had lives, histories and spirits. The mountain itself figured prominently in the creation accounts of various Indigenous groups. In one tradition, Mount Diablo and Reed’s Peak were, at the Dawn of Time, surrounded by water, and from these two islands, the creator Coyote and his assistant Eagle-man made Indigenous people and the world. For hundreds of years, the spot was sacred, and Indigenous people used the top of the mountain for prayer and religious ceremonies. Further down the mountain, they hunted, set up camp and gathered nuts and seeds which they pounded in stone mortars, the remains of which are still found in this region today. Although the Volvon resisted Spanish and Mexican invasions, epidemics in the 1820s and 1840s proved devastating. Survivors were forced to work on local ranches or flee. In the 1970s, with the Bay Area rapidly expanding, subdivisions began creeping up onto the foothills of Mount Diablo. Conservationists Art Bonwell and Dr. Mary Bowerman co-founded “Save Mount Diablo” to help protect the mountain. Experience a history of social and political change through Mapping Change, a virtual tour of the Bay Area. https://ow.ly/La2U50U9vF7 #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth

We focus on three pathways to greater racial equity and economic inclusion: People🧑🏻🤝🧑🏻, Place🏘️, and Power📣 In our 2024 Annual Report, we share a story of impact of Place Pathway grantee The Unity Council who successfully advocated to establish Oakland’s first Latinx Cultural Arts District to celebrate and preserve the richness of the Fruitvale neighborhood and Oakland’s Latinx business owners, artists, and community-based organizations. Our Place Pathway is all in on housing because stable and affordable homes and strong neighborhoods are essential to creating a diverse, vibrant, and thriving Bay Area. We advocate at all levels to keep people in their homes, support thriving neighborhoods, and preserve trusted local organizations. See more stories of impact in our 2024 Annual Report. https://ow.ly/fqPk50UavyJ