Neighborhood centers are the stalwarts of San Francisco communities. Decade after decade—and in some cases for more than a century—they have provided essential services to residents of all ages in the city’s racially and culturally diverse neighborhoods. Recognized for their pre-school and after-school programs, summer camps, food pantries, and senior services, they are less well-known for their innovative programs,

Consider just a few: Cameron House in Chinatown was the first in the nation to offer domestic violence intervention classes in different Chinese dialects. And before Michelle Obama launched her Let’s Move Initiative to combat obesity, the neighborhood centers requested funding for a Healthy Behaviors Program. Booker T. Washington Community Service Center in the Western Addition planted a garden and built a chicken coop to connect youth to the foods they eat and teach parents how to prepare nutritious meals, and other centers started education classes in neighborhoods where diabetes had reached epidemic levels.


San Francisco Neighborhood Centers Together

San Francisco’s neighborhood centers are autonomous entities. Each controls its own facility and runs its own programs. While independence has its advantages, it also breeds isolation.  Busy overseeing staff and programs and scrambling to meet expenses, executive directors had had little time to get to know one another and find out what the other centers were doing.

To break down those barriers, Pam David, then the director of the Mayor’s Office of Community Development, convened a group of neighborhood center executive directors in 2001 to form San Francisco Neighborhood Centers Together (SFNCT), a network of nine centers. They began meeting regularly to discuss mutual concerns, share resources, and collaborate in problem-solving.

Setting aside time for executive directors to build relationships was a big step forward, but SFNCT had a larger vision: it wanted to start a movement to support neighborhood centers in improving the quality of life for all San Franciscans, with a primary focus on serving low-income neighborhoods.

“In serving the poorest San Franciscans,” say Julie Moed, SFNCT’s co-director, “the neighborhood centers are a critical line of defense against poverty. The vast majority of their clients are immigrants, people of color, and those with very low incomes. SFNCT’s reason for being is to support the centers in providing the best services they can to the most needy.”

All together, the SFNCT network serves more than 18,000 clients annually and enriches the lives of tens of thousands of others through community educational, arts, and cultural events. The centers vary greatly in size: the largest has a $4-million budget and 180 employees and the smallest have budgets under $500,00 and as few as four employees. Despite these differences, they grapple with many of the same issues. Over the years, SFNCT has brought in experts to educate its members about fundraising strategies and organized conferences that brought together executive directors, neighborhood center staff, funders, and policymakers to focus on topics like youth leadership and building healthy, equitable neighborhoods.

Impressed by SFNCT’s egalitarian and inclusive approach to working on these issues, funders awarded the organization grants to hire staff and consultants to serve the whole network. Few individual centers could afford to have their own human resource professionals; in 2006, they hired a high-level human resource professional, Rita Sever, to work with the network’s members. The following year, SFNCT received an operating grant that allowed it to hire two half-time co-directors, Julie Moed and Denise McCarthy, who had been part of the group’s discussions from the start. Moed brought her expertise in program and fund development and McCarthy her vast experience as the Executive Director of the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center for 25 years.

As evidence of the degree to which leadership development is integrated into the culture of the neighborhood centers, a group of program managers and assistant directors took it upon themselves to start the Leadership Coaching Circle in 2008, a support and learning group that meets for two hours each month. Michelle Cusano is the director of the Richmond Village Beacon, a project of the Richmond District Neighborhood Center and a member of the Circle.

Cusano started working at the Richmond District Neighborhood Center in 1999 as a site coordinator. Over the years, she has taken advantage of opportunities to broaden her skills. When she wanted to learn how to write grant proposals, the center trained her. Later she asked to test her abilities to handle a leadership position as the interim director of the program she now directs. Pushing herself even further, she applied to be interim executive director when the center’s director took a sabbatical. To build her confidence, she asked SFNCT’s human resource professional, Rita Sever, to coach her for six months in becoming comfortable with her natural leadership style.

At the members’ request, Sever facilitates the Leadership Coaching Circles. Members choose topics, such as team building, resistance to change, and “the undiscussables”—what’s left unsaid and must be discussed. Sever offers suggestions on how to handle the problems and invites the members to play the parts of the parties involved.

“Having a dedicated time for learning is important,” says Cusano, “but it works because we pick the topics for discussion and because we know that everything that happens in the Circle is confidential,” says Cusano. “Our work in the Centers is about building trusting relationships with clients. In the Circle, we’re developing close and trusting friendships with one another.”


Building Long-Term Connections

The Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center was established in 1890, Cameron House in Chinatown in 1895, and Booker T. Washington Center in 1919. The roots of other centers may not be as deep, but they are just as integral to their communities. They are the “go-to-places” for recreation and vital services, and the heart of the neighborhood. For many, like Laurene Chan, the Cameron House Neighborhood Center in Chinatown has been a constant in her family for three generations and a link to others in the community

Chan is the director of Youth Ministries at Cameron House. Her parents attended youth programs at there when they were in middle school. When Chan was five, her parents enrolled her in Cameron House’s summer day camp program. Throughout high school and college, she participated in its programs. After graduating from college, she was on staff at Cameron House in six different positions. Chan met her husband at Cameron House, and now their two sons are the third generation to attend summer programs there.

“Not long ago I officiated at the wedding of a woman whom I first met when she was in third grade and I was her volunteer high school leader at summer camp,” says Chan. “Now she is expecting her first child, whom I will know. It’s that kind of continuity—knowing people through the different stages of their lives—that’s so often missing today but can still be found at neighborhood centers. For me, the neighborhood center means a lifetime of community support.”


Shared Services

When SFNCT began, its members understood that its first task was to ensure the individual and collective strength of its members. Over the years, the group tossed around ideas for sharing services to build organizational capacity and to conserve and maximize resources. The economic crisis that began in 2007 made it a necessity.

The members had already reaped the benefits of sharing the services of a human resource professional, joint trainings and programming, and funding development efforts. “Before we hired Rita,” says McCarthy, “the centers parceled out H.R. responsibilities among the staff, but something always got lost or wasn’t finished. Rita helped them put systems in place and keep them on track, saving the centers time, money, and frustration.”

In 2010, SFNCT hired a consultant to conduct a feasibility study to determine what services its members would want to share and which would be most feasible. After hearing the results of the interviews with the executive directors and fiscal staff of the nine neighborhood centers, SFNCT narrowed the choices to three services that would be the simplest to organize and that would save the most money:  janitorial services, payroll, and office supplies. SFNCT has already begun implementing these shared services. “There are lots of details to consider in setting up shared services,” says McCarthy, “but it’s exciting figuring it all out. We may be the only network in the city working on a shared service model and the first to put it into practice.”


Looking Ahead

In 2010, SFNCT had a budget of $284,000, of which $180,000 was passed on to members as grants for planning and capacity building and grants to develop and implement healthy behaviors programming. One of its multi-year grants ended last year and another ends in June. SFNCT was already under pressure to raise funds as the demand for services have increased significantly during the long economic downturn, forcing the centers to do more with less.

“Most funding these days goes to direct services and emergency services,” says Moed, “making funding even tighter for organizations competing for the remaining grants. Based on our feasibility study and our long history of sharing services, we are confident that our model can save money on operations and administration and free our members to focus scarce resources on serving clients. Funders have expressed strong support for our work and our model, and we are hopeful that the philanthropic community will support us in the future.”