No city in the country has made a bigger monetary investment in its Black community than San Francisco since the racial reckoning of 2020, which saw millions of people across the country take to the streets to protest the police killing of George Floyd.
In February 2021, Mayor London Breed and Supervisor Shamann Walton — political adversaries united by the distinction of being the lone Black elected officials in the city at that time — came together to announce the Dream Keeper Initiative, a landmark piece of legislation that promised to redirect $120 million to address issues caused by systemic racism.
The initiative, which also pledged to commit $60 million a year in perpetuity, was tasked with confronting all manner of economic and social challenges for the city’s Black community, which has dwindled to just 4% of the population after decades of mistreatment and displacement in the name of “urban renewal.”
Over the last two and a half years, Dream Keeper’s successes have led to more than 1,300 people getting jobs or business training. More than 67,000 people have attended Black cultural events and celebrations. Investments have been made in healthcare for Black mothers and infants, who suffer from a disproportionately high mortality rate. There’s also the Downpayment Assistance Loan Program, which has distributed more than $24 million to help 57 people purchase homes, a path to upward economic mobility.
But despite the many good deeds of Dream Keeper, the initiative has become a bookkeeper’s nightmare.
Many of Dream Keeper’s community partners — nonprofits, businesses and individual grantees — have been unable to build out capacity as planned, leaving millions unspent, while other groups have spent money in ways that have mystified and embarrassed city officials. It’s unclear where millions of dollars have gone based on Dream Keeper’s outdated budget dashboard, and Breed recently intervened to order a freeze on funds for certain organizations that were seen as misusing city money.
The rollback in funding is leading to disputes within the Black community, and The Standard has learned that Dream Keeper’s director, Sheryl Davis, who also leads the city’s Human Rights Commission, recently became the subject of a whistleblower complaint containing 20 allegations of impropriety.
In phone interviews, Davis admitted that mistakes have been made by Dream Keeper partners but said nothing illegal has been identified. She noted that the effort to build out capacity as quickly as possible with organizations that had less experience than larger nonprofits has been challenging.
“The whistleblower thing is crazy to me,” Davis said. “It’s probably somebody who’s not going to get funding. We’re not going to be bullied. I do think people have exaggerated the truth to some degree. People see something and make up their story.”
She added, “I think there are some folks who made some mistakes, but I don’t think it was anything malicious.”
Dream Keeper’s website notes that more than $38 million in city funds have gone to the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, which doles out the money through accepted proposals. A department spokesperson confirmed that the Office of Economic and Workforce Development has awarded $52 million in grant agreements. This money has gone to groups like the Homeless Children’s Network and San Francisco Black Wall Street Foundation.
SF Black Wall Street, a nonprofit that advocates for Black entrepreneurship, has received more than $2.3 million through Dream Keeper, according to city officials. But nearly a third of that money was spent on just two Juneteenth parties: black-tie galas in 2023 and 2024 that cost more than $700,000 to produce. That is more than the total amount ($660,000) SF Black Wall Street has spent on small business grants, according to city officials.
A closer inspection of IRS filings for SF Black Wall Street shows that one co-director, Tinisch Hollins, did not report taking a salary while doing 20 hours of work a week. Instead, she redirected tens of thousands of dollars in administrative fees to Ujima Global Consultancy, an LLC she created, according to state business records. Financial records for SF Black Wall Street were not available beyond 2022.
Davis said she was not aware that directors of some of Dream Keeper’s nonprofit partners have set up shell companies, or that some directors have been giving themselves substantial raises — in the tens of thousands — immediately after the infusion of millions in city funds.
Dr. April Silas, CEO of the Homeless Children’s Network, which has received more than $3.7 million from the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, saw her salary increase from almost $232,000 in 2020 to more than $283,000 two years later, according to IRS filings. Calls to the nonprofit went unanswered, and there was no voicemail option available.
Joan Harrington, a former director and current fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said she wasn’t concerned with directors getting a raise but called the creation of LLCs “a red flag.”
“If the city is going to continue giving this kind of money away, it needs to adjust the system through which it makes and supervises the grants,” Harrington said. “It sounds like they didn’t have a good handle of what was happening through the nonprofits.”
Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for the mayor, said in an email that Breed believes the Dream Keeper budget needed to be “right-sized,” and it will now be $40 million annually.
“The mayor is proud of the good the program has done in the community with lasting impacts and investments, but there have been areas where organizations did not deliver on the goals of [Dream Keeper Initiative],” Cretan wrote in an email. “These issues have been addressed in the mayor’s new budget, with stronger accountability measures being put in place and funding being directed towards areas where we’ve seen more sustainable impacts.”
One recipient of Dream Keeper money, J&J Community Resource Center, made headlines after its director tried to get booze and cigars reimbursed. Davis said that was blown out of proportion and the director was not reimbursed, but she and the mayor have had frank discussions on how money should be managed.
“She has been very direct with me,” Davis said. “We need to have a better handle on everything going on.”
Allegations made against Davis in the whistleblower complaint range from using city funds to pay for trips for family and friends to designing contracts to be less than $10,000 to avoid formal reviews.
Records obtained from the city show that Davis charged the city for more than $51,000 in reimbursements from 2020 through the first half of 2023. That total was almost $22,000 more than the second-highest department head, Ivar Satero, who serves as director of San Francisco’s airport. Davis said all of her trips were made on behalf of city business, including a stop at Martha’s Vineyard, the upscale summer colony in Massachusetts.
“It’s a very interesting question and not as easy to unpack, but yes, we did do a workshop presentation [at Martha’s Vineyard],” Davis said.
Davis wrote a children’s book last year that netted her more than $10,000 in outside income. She acknowledged that the city did make one “bulk” purchase of the book but said she was unsure of how many copies.
The decentralization of Dream Keeper funds and lack of transparency around expenses make it almost impossible for the public to track the money. The Standard was able to assemble these findings only through a laborious process of requesting public records department by department, repeatedly following up for clarifications and then sifting through nonprofit filings with the IRS.
Alyssa Sewlal, a spokesperson for the Controller’s Office, said in a statement that all city financial data is publicly available through dashboards, “but we appreciate that they’re not always intuitive to navigate.”
She added that the Controller’s Office does not confirm whistleblower complaints outside of quarterly reports.
“If whistleblowers wish to self-disclose and go to the press,” Sewlal said, “they’re welcome to do that.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Homeless Children’s Network was cut off from city funding.