When she first came to San Francisco roughly a decade ago, Ermei Wu landed a job in a Chinatown restaurant to support her three kids. Like many monolingual immigrants, she didn’t have anyone explaining wage laws to her in the language she speaks, Cantonese.
She never knew to challenge her boss for what she later discovered was wage theft, until she joined the Chinese Progressive Association’s program, the Workers Rights Community Collaborative.
“I knew I had rights as a worker, that I had paid sick leave, that there was minimum wage, that there was overtime,” Wu said through a translator. She pays it forward: “I tell all the people around me about what rights they have as a worker.”
In her next restaurant job, Wu was paid what she was owed. Last year, however, the Office of Labor and Standards Enforcement scaled back the workers’ rights program by nearly $400,000, roughly half its budget. This year, the program is set to lose the other half and shutter entirely.
It’s not the only one. The pot of money funding San Francisco’s legion of do-good organizations is about to shrink.
Mayor Daniel Lurie’s budget would cut roughly $154 million, or 9%, from the city’s grant programming next year, according to an analysis by The Standard.
Nonprofits are waiting in the dark to find out what will happen to their finances, as the mayor’s budget doesn’t contain line-item details to easily discern contract cuts. The Standard’s analysis offers a first view at just how devastating those trims will be.
Joe Wilson, executive director of the nonprofit Hospitality House, said Lurie’s proposal to gut grant funding may have disturbing consequences. Lurie has repeatedly pressed on the need for public safety, but when nonprofits providing food, shelter, and jobs are cut, people get desperate.
In Lurie’s budget proposal, Hospitality House lost funding from the Office of Economic and Workforce Development that pays for a program on Treasure Island to help 500 job seekers, Wilson said.
“When there are fewer community-based health options, fewer community-based employment options, fewer community-based housing options, the city pays that cost, and it’s much more costly than the investments we’re already making,” Wilson said.
Lurie has repeatedly characterized the city’s spending as excessive, saying San Francisco must make structural cuts to resolve a staggering $782 million deficit. In his budget plan, public safety agencies like the San Francisco Police Department and district attorney’s office maintained their budgets.
The Standard’s analysis found:
- Funding to the City Grant Program, a primary funding pool for nonprofits, will decrease next year for 17 of the 24 departments that have that as a budget line item.
- Three departments are losing all grant program funding: the Department on the Status of Women, Building Inspection, and Elections.
- The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing is facing the biggest reduction to its grant program, $83.5 million, though a portion of that is due to Our City, Our Home funding, which will be spent over five years, but was only reflected in last year’s budget.
- At No. 2 is Economic and Workforce Development, which will lose $58.6 million. A portion of that is the movement of some major contracts to another department.
Some of the department-level reductions are straight-up cuts by Lurie. But in some cases, grants moved from one department to another. In others, the grant reductions are because federal or state funds dried up. During previous years, the city elected to shore up the loss of some state funding with local funding, but in this climate, that generosity is hard to find.
- Some nonprofit contracts fall under “non-personnel services,” a spending category for facilities management, insurance fees, and other expenditures. Non-personnel services spending will increase next year by 2%, or $69 million.
- Twenty-five departments will get reductions in non-personnel services. Those include Juvenile Probation (a 75% cut), Ethics Commission (46%), Sheriff’s Department (24%), Public Works (36%), and Human Rights Commission (40%).
In a January memo to city department heads, Lurie directed them to cut grants from the “least effective” organizations. But Sarah Wan, director of the Community Youth Center, said even outcomes that are difficult to measure can have real impacts.
CYC started its Bayview Services program in 2011. It provides connections to city and neighborhood services for the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in the Bayview but also offers bridge-building programs between Black and Asian neighbors, such as joint Lunar New Year and Black History Month celebrations, local history bus tours, and translators to help bridge the divide.
CYC is facing a $1.5 million budget reduction. The Bayview CYC location may shutter.
“It took us like 15 years to do that, to build that partnership,” she said. “I think we definitely helped build bridges across communities. It’s how to ensure everyone feels safe.”
A full accounting of how many organizations would be affected by the mayor’s budget is not available, as it contains only top-line numbers, not the line-item detail necessary to discern what programs may be axed. The People’s Budget coalition, a collective of more than 150 organizations, rallied Wednesday at City Hall to protest the coming cuts.
Despite the unknowns, one thing is certain: Nonprofits are expecting a bloodbath.