Mike Vuong has helped youths and the community thrive. Now he’s entering his next chapter.

Mike Vuong was 12 years old when he joined a community group that changed his life.

“As a youth, and honestly, as a young adult, I hardly felt seen,” he said. “It wasn't until I joined Boys & Girls Club that I felt like someone saw me.” 

The club gave Mike his first internship at age 14. At 17, he had a grown-up job there, he said, facility keys and all. He would work with the organization for more than two decades, eventually becoming director of Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Clubhouse, which offers activities at Boeddeker Park.

Mike stuck with the work for so long, he said, because “I wanted to do for others what my adult mentors have done for me.” 

And now, this chapter is coming to a close. Mike’s stepping away from the club into something new.

“I’m ready to run an organization,” he said, in his characteristic understated manner. He’s not sure where he’ll land, and whether that will let him continue working in the neighborhood.

So the Tenderloin Voice is taking this opportunity to tell you about him and some of his impact here, as well as his thoughts on what ails the community and what could help it. He’s been in the background, affecting much, seeing much. By now he has the long view.

In the Tenderloin, one of the top goals should be to better “systematize how communities work,” he said.

Getting people into the room

What does that mean? For Mike, it has often meant helping local groups work together in organized, consistent ways to achieve shared goals.

It might be pulling the right people into the right community meetings so they get to know each other, learn everyone’s needs, and coordinate effectively. This is basic stuff, yet vital, and it doesn’t happen unless someone makes it. In more than one case, Mike did.

In early 2019, he drove the creation of the Tenderloin Children, Youth & Families Coalition, and since then it has met weekly while school was in session. Attendees include staff from local organizations that run after-school programs, as well as those looking to generally support the neighborhood’s kids. Mike’s overarching goal was to give participants of any program indirect access to the rest — a kind of “universal membership,” he said. Staff would learn about the neighborhood’s full range of program offerings, then help the kids under each other’s care get into spaces that suited them.

“It was a way for us to try our best to make sure kids don’t fall through the cracks,” he said, “because that happens a lot.”

As one seasonal program ends, coalition members might identify others so children have somewhere to go. Or the group could help a kid’s social worker find a program that’s a good fit. Coalition members are each other’s sounding boards and provide emotional support. Sometimes the group spots issues that, on their own, members might miss.

“Maybe a kid got into a fight, got suspended for three days. And instead of coming back, they just go to a different after-school program,” Mike said. If nobody at those different programs shared information, then staff at one wouldn’t know where the kid went and staff at the other wouldn’t know the circumstances surrounding their new participant. That could let the conflict that caused the fight fester, then resurface.

“If we all share the same park, if we all go to Boeddeker Park, and we never resolve that fight? Another fight just breaks out.” Mike said.

This kind of coordination also fosters stability, he said. Community initiatives can dissolve overnight if they’re run by a single employee who leaves their job without a proper handoff. But if coalition members know about those initiatives, they can help them survive staff turnover.

Mike also helped start another group nearly two years ago, this one containing the directors of the Tenderloin’s major nonprofit service providers. It meets once a month. The idea is to reach agreement about neighborhood-wide initiatives and concerns, because then it’s easier to draw City Hall’s attention and resources to them.

Both the Tenderloin Children, Youth & Families Coalition and the group of nonprofit leaders have been talking with city officials, thinking through the neighborhood’s most pressing needs and how to satisfy them.

Community as ecosystem

As clubhouse director, Mike has worked to fill the resource gaps that can be barriers to joyful experiences for Tenderloin kids.

Younger kids tend to be the focus of holiday toy give-aways, but that skips over the middle- and high-schoolers, he said — groups that make up about half the kids the Tenderloin clubhouse serves. He has fundraised to buy gift cards for the older kids too, so they don’t feel left out. And he’s pulled together money to help neighborhood kids afford week-long stays at Camp Mendocino, which the organization runs. Members of Boys & Girls Club already pay a heavily reduced price of around $250, but Mike’s fundraising has dropped the price to $50, at most, for Tenderloin clubhouse members.

“The city’s an urban jungle. It can be really hard to be here all the time. For a lot of kids, that one week at camp changes perspective, changes how they feel about life,” he said. They return “with this renewed vision of themselves, and vision of the world.”

I’m sure that this fundraising is no easy task, though Mike has a knack for it. “I promoted nightclubs in a past life,” he said.

But other problems are even harder to solve, at the community level. He started to see the full shape of them during his time working at Boeddeker Park. He listened as local groups convened often to discuss pressing issues, and watched complex social dynamics play out.

It showed him that “everything connects,” he said. “Like an ecosystem.”

Prior to working at Boeddeker Park, he’d focused on how to help young people once they’d already walked through his doors. His position at the park helped him gain “a bigger understanding of what it takes kids to just get to the door,” he said. 

“Every day we ask our families with kids to walk through this neighborhood to come to Boys & Girls Club,” even though the streets can feel unsafe. So, there’s a connection: If you want children to get services, you need to increase public safety. The community’s opinion about how to do that has evolved in recent years, he said, from wanting more policing in general to calling for cops to be visible, walking around. 

Another connection: “We have kids whose mom and dad run the corner store. So by supporting small businesses, we’re de facto helping these families,” he said. 

He’s also seen places where the needs and available resources were not syncing up.

“We’re a neighborhood of 3,000 some-odd kids,” he said, “but we don’t have family housing. We have a lot of studios. We have SROs.” Single-room occupancy hotels offer small living spaces with communal bathrooms and kitchens for relatively low rents. 

What comes next?

In the Tenderloin, it’s commonly understood that addressing the area’s complicated needs will take sustained effort, and a strategy.

The community started designing one of those about a decade ago. Through meetings, surveys, and other outreach led by the Tenderloin People’s Congress, denizens crafted Vision 2020. This long list of requests and proposals, spanning from the mundane to the profound, would later inform the Tenderloin Community Action Plan — it packaged many ideas, including those from Vision 2020, for City Hall politicians to carry out. The city put about $4 million toward the plan in 2022.

Locals continue to discuss the plan’s various elements and how best to try to deploy them. Some are in conversation with city staff about it, and community leaders intend to press City Hall this year to fund parts of it — they hope to fare better than last budget cycle, when officials declined to renew funding amid major budget woes.

While essential, the plan and the conversations around it lack certain qualities that Mike dreams of. He wants the community to figure out which of its initiatives should happen early, midway, or late over a set period of time — a period long enough to address the Tenderloin’s problems small and large, circumstantial and systemic. Say, 10 years.

If the neighborhood publicly bought into that, it could keep the Tenderloin on track even as community leaders — or politicians — got on board or moved on. As with the Tenderloin Children, Youth & Families Coalition, there would be a structure that outlived any participant.

Crafting this approach would take hard work, and it’s not clear that Mike will still be working in the neighborhood to help that happen.

But if there’s one thing that working in the TL has taught him, “it’s that hope is always worth having,” he said. “There’s always tomorrow.”