TL faces $6.8 million in cuts — so we’re helping the community mobilize

City Hall is cutting its spending, and very deep cuts are coming to the Tenderloin if current plans aren’t changed.

We’re talking an estimated $6.8 million sliced from Tenderloin nonprofits and service providers, according to the People’s Budget Coalition, which specializes in analyzing these cuts. In this neighborhood, the programs at risk provide: job readiness training, job placement, case management, multilingual support for immigrants, emergency assistance like one-time help with rent, drop-in services for people living on the street, and youth medical and mental health care. Funding for the outdoor event Sunday Streets would also be eliminated.

But there’s still a chance to reverse or reduce these cuts. To help make that happen, organizers are planning a rally. 

On Wednesday, June 10, at 11 a.m., they’ll gather on the steps of City Hall to protest these cuts, then visit politicians and try to persuade them and their staff to come up with solutions. The main organizers are representatives from the Tenderloin People’s Congress, Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, and the GLIDE Foundation. They want as many people to show up as possible, to demonstrate the community’s will and power to elected officials.

At the Tenderloin Voice, we’re trying to do our part to help this community mobilize and prevent or ameliorate the devastating effects neighbors tell us these cuts would have. We’ve created the flyer below to help spread the word about the June 10 rally — there are two per page, so you’ll have to cut them after printing. Please print and share it! 

Need a printer? If you have a library card, you can go to a branch and print for free, as long as the print job is worth less than $2. That’d get you 38 flyers. Go here for more information.

And if you have feedback or ideas for how to improve the flyer, tell us. Email: hello@tlvoice.org. We’ll keep this story updated with the latest version of the flyer.

So feel free to bookmark this story in your web browser.

Understanding the budget

Many groups here are bracing, and fear the effects of these proposed cuts could deeply hurt not just the Tenderloin, but the entire city. That’s because if the services go away, the needs for them will still remain, but go unaddressed. For instance, someone who didn’t receive relatively inexpensive preventive health services could see their condition worsen, until they’d have to go to the emergency room — a much more expensive response that the medical facility might have to absorb.

Mayor Daniel Lurie has proposed these and other cuts across the city to close a deficit in the hundreds of millions, due to lost tax revenue from declining downtown real estate values. The mayor will release his full draft budget June 1. Then city supervisors can suggest changes, and they’ll have until July 1 to approve some version of the budget.

How we are responding

Why is the Tenderloin Voice producing a flyer for a rally? In conversations with some of our key contacts here, it became clear that raising awareness of impending budget cuts and how to stop them would benefit the community, and so they asked us to help with that. People in the Tenderloin can face tech and connectivity issues, which makes ink-on-paper vital to spreading information and getting locals involved.

We’re also stuffing the flyer into all copies of Issue No. 3 of our zine, which is out now. We’re trying to keep the public library’s main branch stocked with copies, on the ground floor near the information desk, so you can go there to get one. Check the kiosk labeled “Tenderloin Community Resources.” We’ll be stocking our other distribution sites in the next few days.

For the next few weeks, our whole team is going to be focusing on the budget issue. Some of that work will be behind the scenes — talking with people face to face, connecting people and groups with one another, learning about residents’ funding priorities, collecting feedback and updating the flyer, and so on. We will also do our best to report on the budget. This means you will likely see fewer of our usual stories as we concentrate fully on this urgent topic.

How you can help

The way we see it, our role is to inform this community in a way that empowers people to more effectively advocate for what they need. We are working with this community to get results. 

Here’s how you can help us.

First: We’re looking to work with locals to translate this flyer into other languages. If you are multilingual and would like to help, reach out! So far, we’ve been told that some of the most important languages here are Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Arabic.

We are seeking philanthropic support for this work to compensate translators and others whose work could enhance this project, to help it reach its full potential. But we haven’t secured that investment yet, so for now we are working on a shoestring budget. Just know you can expect  a fundraising push from us soon. 

We know it’s a hard time for everyone. But our runway is shortening, and we’ll need to get major funding if we want to keep operating. 

If you like what we’ve been doing, please consider making a donation today, or even becoming a monthly donor.  

It’s as easy as clicking or tapping this button:

And if that’s just not an option for you, we understand. You can absolutely still help, by sending the flyer, or this or any of our other stories, to the people you know. Seriously, this helps a lot! Tell people about us, so that we can expand our reach and find the support we need to continue doing this important work for and with the Tenderloin.