Infusing Opportunity In Our City’s Southeast Sector

-Dwayne Jones, Director, Communities of Opportunity (COO)

The buzz and initial success of Communities of Opportunity (COO) is growing. Since the beginning of the administration, Mayor Newsom has dedicated his political and personal attention to some of the most challenging issues that plague our beautiful city: better government, homelessness, clean streets and now, persistent poverty.

COO is an innovative partnership between the city of San Francisco, philanthropic organizations, and residents, to revitalize struggling neighborhoods of our city. The pilot phase is in the Southeastern section of the city, with full rollout citywide in the near future. It is a new system that fundamentally does two things:

1. Link the efforts of the city, philanthropy, and the community together to ensure residents have easy access to the services they need – regardless of what city department or nonprofit provides them.

2. Connect residents to genuine opportunities created by the economic development occurring in their community and citywide.

For decades, residents, city staff, and political leaders have discussed, lamented, surveyed and analyzed the issue of poverty, particularly the intense concentration of poverty that exists in the Southeastern part of the city. This area of the city harbors every hallmark of chronic urban decay: crime, unemployment, poor health, deteriorating housing, poor education and a fragmented social service system. Our volumes of yearly disparity reports affirm the reality that the current system simply, is not working.

Communities of Opportunity (COO) is a new innovative initiative that pushes rhetoric aside, directing real action and resources toward the systemic causes of poverty: physical environment, education, health, economic development and social networks. There was a time in our city when few were disconnected from the services and opportunities they needed to get ahead. Families could access and understood how to navigate the prosperity grid. Attendance at local schools usually resulted in quality education, job training led to good jobs, business corridors flourished; families purchased homes and other wealth building assets. San Francisco was a place of genuine opportunity for all.

We are at a historic crossroad in our city. For generations, we have neglected the Southeast sector of the city, leaving the last predominantly African American neighborhood to deteriorate as industry fled and opportunities became scarce. Now, over $1 billion of economic development is slated for Bayview Hunter’s Point and Visitacion Valley, but the residents of those neighborhoods are not positioned to take advantage of it. Without substantial effort and wide spread reform in advance of that development, the natural forces of gentrification may continue, following the pattern of the Fillmore and other neighborhoods in the past.

We are committed to making sure that does not happen. We must discontinue the practice of allocating enormous resources that simply maintain the status quo. This is our opportunity to fundamentally change the system so that those resources can be used more effectively and we can help residents, in these and over time, other communities, grow and thrive. It is for this reason that we launched the Communities of Opportunity (COO) initiative.

This will not be easy. It will require a cultural shift at every level – residents will have to set aside their historic mistrust of government and actively engage in this effort as partners; nonprofits will have to look beyond their specific services to participate in, and be accountable for a broader system of change; and the city will have to break down its silos to allocate resources more efficiently and connect programs more effectively.

It will also take time. Never before has our city, or any city like ours, undertaken such a comprehensive systems change effort. COO will require every department to engage with the community in new ways and for the city as a whole to change the way we support our communities in need. But the moral imperative cannot be ignored. Despite the many good programs and services currently provided by individual departments and nonprofits, the whole is less than the sum of the parts, and on every dimension – crime, unemployment, education, health - these communities are suffering. COO is our promise to try an innovative approach to break that cycle.

Over the next 6-9 months, COO will be launching over 20 new catalyst programs, co-designed by residents, to fill the gaps identified in the current social service landscape. We will also be working with nonprofit groups to help build their capacity and provide training for those who wish to deliver one of the catalyst programs. If you, or an organization you know, would like to be involved in the COO project, please contact info@coosf.org for more information on upcoming information and training sessions for nonprofits. And for more information about COO in general, we will be launching our website in the coming weeks at www.coosf.org , so please check back soon for new updates and information.

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