In recognition of Women’s History Month, the San Francisco Foundation is proud to honor the leadership of women heading organizations tackling crucial issues impacting our region, including affordable housing, environmental justice, criminal justice, and the role of art in advancing community change. Through their dedication and unwavering commitment, these women, along with the organizations they lead, are shaping a Bay Area that is more liberatory, compassionate, and joyful for all. By highlighting their contributions, we celebrate the power of women to create a more just and equitable Bay Area.
Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN)
Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) is led by two powerful women who serve as Co-Directors, Vivian Huang and Cristine Cordero. With deep roots in California’s Asian immigrant and refugee communities, APEN has built a membership base of Laotian refugees in Richmond and Chinese immigrants in Oakland since 1993. Working with multiple generations of Asian Americans in multiple dialects and languages, APEN engages community leaders in advocating for a transition away from extractive economic models based on profit and pollution and toward the creation of healthy and life-sustaining local economies that benefit everyone. At the local level, that’s meant fighting to stop Chevron from expanding its massive oil refinery in Richmond. It’s also meant organizing to stop the transport of dirty coal through the Bay. At the state level, APEN is working to end public subsidies for fossil fuels. This means no new permits for big polluters, real caps on emissions at the facility level where they are created, and the rapid phase out of oil and gas production. Together with their partners and allies, they’re building a movement powerful enough to make justice inevitable.
Donor Center Specifics:
Grantee: Asian Pacific Environmental Network
Short purpose: For general support.
Faith in Action Bay Area
Faith in Action Bay Area (FIABA) is led by its Executive Director, Lorena Melgarejo, who brings over 20 years in community organizing experience to her role. Melgarejo started her career as a union organizer and later became a faith-based organizer. FIABA is comprised of community organizers and leaders working in congregations and schools across San Francisco and San Mateo Counties to uphold the dignity of all people. Its work would not be possible without the powerful women who make up the majority of the organization’s Board of Directors and staff. It is intentional in supporting grassroots leaders’ development and positioning them to center their experiences and expertise to inform organizational and campaign decisions. This includes fighting for the rights of families and seniors to stay in their homes, civically engaging neighbors to imagine what it would be like to transform their cities into ones in which everyone belongs, and launching listening campaigns in congregations to identify and act on community priorities for social change. Currently, FIABA is leading a ballot measure campaign in Redwood City this fall for rent control and renter protections in response to the displacement of many low-income and immigrant renters.
Donor Center Specifics:
Grantee: Faith in Action Bay Area
Short purpose: For general support.
Galería de la Raza
Galería de la Raza, a community-based arts organization located in the Mission District, is led by Executive Director Ani Rivera who identifies as queer and Chicana. Over her career, Rivera has been a fierce proponent of women’s rights and serves on the boards of the Commission on the Status of Women and the Chicana/Latina Foundation of Northern California.
Founded in 1970, Galería de la Raza works to foster public awareness and appreciation of Chicanx, Latinx, and indigenous artistic expression, including visual, literary, media, and performing arts. Through its artist-in-residence programs, it also serves as a laboratory where artists can explore contemporary issues related to the intersection of art, culture, and civil society. Beyond being a non-profit art gallery and artist collective, Galería de la Raza also strives to be an advocate for San Francisco’s Latinx community. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rivera partnered with other Latinx leaders in the Mission to obtain a $28.5 million commitment from the City of San Francisco to strengthen the safety net for the Latinx community, which was disproportionately impacted by the virus. Ultimately, its work demonstrates how art and artists are essential to advancing equity and well-being in San Francisco and beyond.
Donor Center Specifics:
Grantee: Galería de la Raza
Short purpose: For general support.
Young Women’s Freedom Center
Led by women of color leaders, Abigail Richards and Julia Arroyo, Young Women’s Freedom Center (YWFC) uplifts and empowers young women and trans youth impacted by the criminal legal system. With over 30 years of experience, YWFC provides support, mentorship, training, employment, and advocacy to those who have faced poverty, street living, and violence. Its ground-breaking Freedom 2030 campaign is a ten-year effort led by formerly incarcerated and systems-involved women and trans people of all genders to end the incarceration and criminalization of families and communities and to build transformative justice processes and community-based alternatives. It also operates the Freedom Research Institute, which uses participatory, community-driven research as a tool to drive local, state, and national policy change. Ultimately, YWFC is providing the space, support, and resources for young people to find safety and stability in their lives, cultivating movement and community leaders, changing the narrative about systems-impacted young people, and transforming systems and institutions to do less harm and be more responsive to community needs.
Donor Center Specifics:
Grantee: Young Women’s Freedom Center
Short purpose: For general support.
Moms 4 Housing
Moms 4 Housing is a collective of unhoused and marginally housed mothers working to establish housing as a human right. The organization received national attention in late 2019 after three of its leaders – Dominique Walker, Misty Cross, and Tolani King – occupied a vacant Oakland house that had been foreclosed and sold to a real estate investment firm. Their occupation and forcible eviction highlighted the affordable housing and displacement crises in the Bay Area.
The activism of these mothers and their allies ultimately led local and state government to change housing practices and policies. The Oakland mayor and California governor brokered a deal for a local community land trust to purchase the occupied house on behalf of Moms4Housing. The house, now called the “Moms’ House,” is used as a transitional home for unhoused mothers. And in September of 2020, California enacted a law that prohibits bundled foreclosure sales of residential properties to a single buyer at auction. If a corporation submits the highest bid at auction, then local governments, non-profits, tenants, and individual buyers have a 45-day window to submit a higher bid for the property. Additionally, the law gives cities the authority to fine corporate owners as much as $5,000 per day for leaving a property “blighted” for longer than 30 days.
Donor Center Specifics:
Grantee: Moms 4 Housing
Purpose: For general support.
The Maven Collaborative
Led and co-founded by two women of color leaders, Anne Price and Jhumpa Bhattacharya, the Maven Collaborative centers race, gender, and joy in the pursuit of economic justice. It leverages its research and expertise on the racial wealth gap to build a strategy for addressing racial wealth inequality at the local level. The organization launched shortly after Anne Price, one of its co-founders, resigned from her position as president of a California racial justice organization alleging race discrimination. Given Price’s established track record, funders rallied to support her and her colleagues in launching the new Maven Collaborative. Over the past five years, staff from the Maven Collaborative have engaged partners working at the local level in the Bay Area and across the country to tackle racial wealth inequality. As a result of these partnerships, Maven has built a blueprint for how cities can address racial wealth disparities by, for example, eliminating city and county criminal legal fines and fees, discriminatory interest rates, contract leasing, and payday loans. With its new blueprint, Maven is inspiring and challenging city officials and policymakers to develop new models for dismantling the structural barriers faced by Black communities and other disinvested communities.
Donor Center Specifics:
Grantee: The Maven Collaboration
Fiscal Sponsor: Community Change
Short purpose: For general operating support of The Maven Collaboration.
