San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie this month introduced legislation authorizing the city to lease the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center to the nonprofit Booker T. Washington Community Service Center for one year.
Manuel Orbegozo/For the S.F. Chronicle
City officials say they had to move quickly to find a new operator for the Booker T. Washington Community Services Center in San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood after the former operator collapsed amid scandal. (Google Street View photo)
James Spingola leans against the wall of the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center, which his nonprofit ran, in 2018. Spingola, who is accused by prosecutors of aiding and abetting a former city official in alleged financial conflict-of-interest crimes, is no longer affiliated with the center.
Santiago Mejia/S.F. Chronicle
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie is asking the Board of Supervisors to approve a no-bid deal for a nonprofit caught up in the Dream Keeper scandal to take over a community center previously run by the two central figures in the controversy.
Lurie this month introduced legislation authorizing the city to lease the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center, a hub for children in the historically Black Fillmore neighborhood, to the nonprofit Booker T. Washington Community Service Center.
The lease, supported by three other city departments and Supervisors Bilal Mahmood and Myrna Melgar, would charge the nonprofit $1 to rent the space for a year. The city is also expected to pay Booker T. to operate the center but has not said how much.
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The mayor’s office and other city agencies said the lease is a temporary, emergency solution to ensure that children have a place to learn and stay safe this summer, spurred by the collapse of the center’s former operator, Collective Impact, this spring.
They said they picked Booker T. because it previously ran Ella Hill Hutch and provides city-funded programming for children at another nearby community center. Booker T. said on Monday it had collected more than 240 letters of support for the proposal, including from Public Defender Mano Raju and prominent organizations such as Glide.
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But the proposal is raising concerns for some critics, including a former Booker T. board member, because of a perceived lack of community engagement in the selection process — a claim the city disputes — and ties between the nonprofit’s executive director, Shakirah Simley, and the former department head embroiled in the scandal, Sheryl Davis.
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins in March charged Davis and her housemate James Spingola over alleged conflicts of interest that stemmed from Davis funding Spingola’s nonprofit, Collective Impact, in her role leading the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and the Dream Keeper Initiative.
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Dream Keeper was launched by then-Mayor London Breed in 2021 to invest millions of city dollars into organizations helping the Black community. Prosecutors alleged Davis engaged in pervasive self-dealing and misappropriated funds, and that Spingola aided and abetted her. Davis has pleaded not guilty, while Spingola has not entered a plea.
Simley worked under Davis until 2021 as director of the Office of Racial Equity, a division of the Human Rights Commission. She went on to lead Booker T., a historic Black-led nonprofit that received Dream Keeper funding.
In the arrest warrant affidavit against Davis and Spingola, prosecutors referred to Smiley and Booker T. but did not accuse them of wrongdoing.
Prosecutors said Davis “effectively controlled and directly profited from” Collective Impact. Davis also “exerted similar control, although to much lesser extent, with two other local nonprofit entities” — including Booker T. — “sending them invoices to pay for HRC-related expenses and asking vendors to split invoices between the nonprofit entity and HRC.”
Splitting invoices is a way that city prosecutors and auditors have said Davis improperly used city funds and avoided triggering oversight of her spending.
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The DA referred to Booker T. only as “Nonprofit Entity #1” and to Simley as its unnamed executive director, but the Chronicle identified them by reviewing public records described in the affidavit.
Prosecutors did not provide a legal assessment of the nonprofit’s spending.
Lurie spokesperson Kate Poltrack declined to comment on whether the mayor was aware of the references to Booker T. in the affidavit prior to selecting it for the lease.
“The services provided at Ella Hill Hutch are critical to Fillmore families and children,” Poltrack said. “Through this agreement with Booker T. Washington, the city and community partners are working together to ensure there’s no gap in services this summer and our kids are safe as they continue to access critical programming.”
Through a spokesperson, Simley declined to answer questions about the spending and the references to her and Booker T. in the affidavit, or to make herself available for an interview.
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She provided a statement that said Booker T. had “five consecutive years of clean audits” and had gone from “a structural deficit to serving 6,000 people annually.”
“When the Mayor’s Office asked us to stabilize operations at Ella Hill Hutch, the answer was clear: our community cannot wait, and we will not let it down,” Simley wrote. “We are stepping into Ella Hill Hutch not out of opportunity, but out of obligation and commitment.”
Simley said the city needed to act on the lease by June 15, or else “60 teenagers will lose their summer jobs, 100 families will lose free childcare, and a neighborhood that has fought to turn the corner on violence will lose the programming that makes that possible.”
The Chronicle identified an example of the nonprofit’s spending on behalf of Davis in city records, in which Booker T. supported an event that was scheduled to take place less than 48 hours before Davis resigned in September 2024.
Davis signed a contract agreeing to pay the five-star Riggs Hotel in Washington more than $30,000 to host the event, a “fireside chat” showcasing celebrity guests.
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The event, timed to coincide with a Congressional Black Caucus conference, was to feature crab cakes, braised short-rib crostini and an open bar. The hotel would charge $20,000 for the reception and $10,770 for rooms for 10 city employees, including Davis.
“I’m Shakirah and my organization will help cover the cost of this event,” Simley wrote in an Aug. 28, 2024 email to the party planner. “My community partner James Spingola will assist as well.”
The records do not show the total amount that Booker T. or Collective Impact paid. Simley declined to explain why her nonprofit helped pay for the event or how much it spent.
As of August 2024, city records show Booker T. had received $1.75 million in Dream Keeper grants from city agencies other than the Human Rights Commission. City auditors have previously found Davis controlled Dream Keeper spending beyond her department.
Supervisors Mahmood and Melgar said they had been unaware of the references to Booker T. in the affidavit. Both vouched for the nonprofit and stressed the importance of the city ensuring children can participate in programming at Ella Hill Hutch this summer.
Mahmood said Booker T. had a “strong track record stewarding city resources and delivering services for families, with no substantiated findings of wrongdoing.”
“Right now, our focus is making sure no child or family falls through the cracks,” he said.
Melgar said she was thankful “people are not found guilty by association.”
“We need this right now,” Melgar said. “It would be irresponsible of us to just stand up hundreds of families.”
Julian Davis, a former president of Booker T.’s board of directors, opposed the lease. He said Simley’s leadership had eroded the independence of a nonprofit that he believed should be more representative of the neighborhood than of City Hall. He said he views Simley as an extension of Breed’s administration, in part because of her past job under Sheryl Davis.
“The community deserves better than to have City Hall continue to lean on the same people and continue to appoint them from the outside without a genuine community process,” said Davis, who said the Booker T. board improperly removed him in 2021 after he raised concerns about Breed’s connections to the board, Simley’s hiring and other issues.
Davis said he was not aware of Booker T. “sponsoring city officials to go on a travel junket to another city” during his time on the board from 2006 to 2012 and again from 2017 to 2021. He said he would not be comfortable with the spending described by the Chronicle and that the money would have been better spent directly serving the neighborhood.
There is no indication that Booker T. or Simley violated city ethics law by helping Sheryl Davis pay for the event. San Francisco law currently prohibits any person from providing “anything of value” with intent to influence or reward an official. However, that law was less restrictive when the spending took place, and there is no evidence in the emails reviewed by the Chronicle that Booker T. or Simley intended to influence or reward Davis.
Sean McMorris, the transparency, ethics and accountability program manager at Common Cause California, a government watchdog group, said the spending did not raise any obvious legal red flags and cautioned against making any presumption of guilt by association.
But McMorris said the spending raised questions about its purpose, including whether it was purely a goodwill gesture with “no expectation of influence or benefit in return.”
“Regardless of whether any laws were broken, the situation underscores the importance of the city carefully vetting the individuals and entities with whom it conducts business in order to avoid both actual conflicts and the appearance of impropriety,” McMorris said.
Rev. Amos Brown, pastor emeritus of Third Baptist Church near Ella Hill Hutch, called the Booker T. lease a “power grab.” He said the city did not consult with its historically Black institutions before picking the nonprofit and argued that Booker T. does not have as deep a connection to the Fillmore community as city officials have portrayed.
“That institution had no solid ongoing relationship with this Black community,” said Brown, past president of the San Francisco branch of the NAACP.
Simley said Booker T. had “deep roots” with the Fillmore and Western Addition tracing back 107 years through “redevelopment, gentrification and a pandemic.”
Mahmood said the city discussed its plans publicly at a town hall earlier this month. He said the city was committed to a “transparent long-term process” for finding its next operator.
Sherrice Dorsey, executive director of San Francisco’s Department of Children, Youth and Their Families, said city staff members were on a time crunch to find a temporary operator for Ella Hill Hutch after Collective Impact notified the city of its intent to terminate its lease this spring, and Booker T. had the relevant qualifications, including experience in the neighborhood.
She said the city plans to launch a competitive selection process and engage the community about the long-term vision for the site.
DCYF and the Human Rights Commission said they planned to update existing contracts with Booker T. to pay for its proposed management of the center, but declined to say by how much. The commission said the dollar amount was being finalized.
The proposed lease was approved “as to form” by the city attorney’s office, a spokesperson said.
Sally Oerth, San Francisco’s director of real estate, said in a letter that the nominal $1 rent was justified by the importance of the programming Booker T. would offer at the site.
Mahmood said he expected a Board of Supervisors committee to vote on the lease May 27. City officials hope to have the lease signed by June 15. If approved, it would be in effect until June 30, 2027, with the option to extend six months.
Booker T. isn’t the only nonprofit interested in running the center.
Renard Monroe, who runs a nonprofit that provides programming for children in the Lakeview neighborhood, said he would apply to run the center once the city launches its request for proposals process. But he was not optimistic about his prospects.
“When you have an organization that is already in there and they apply for the RFP, who is really going to get the RFP?” Monroe said. “Let’s not be silly about that.”