Connect’s charity arm severed
By: Brent Begin
Examiner Staff Writer
January 5, 2009
A charity close to Mayor Gavin Newsom that was announced with much fanfare has dissolved with barely a whimper.
Homeless Connect is now focusing on The City’s homeless, and the three related charities it helped spawn, launched years later under the broader name of SF Connect, have been disconnected.
Homeless Connect was launched in 2004, and the bi-monthly gathering that offers blankets, health care and other
comforts to the homeless has been going strong ever since.
In August 2006, Newsom launched SF Connect to reach a wider group of San Francisco’s needy. It was lauded as way to link volunteers and donors with homeless residents.
Newsom launched the charities with a press conference, and noted it as one of his successes in an “accountability matrix” located in his section of The City’s Web site. SF Connect was launched by Alex Tourk, Newsom’s deputy chief of staff at the time. Dariush Kayhan became the executive director.
For a while, the charities looked like they would work. Trees were planted by hundreds of volunteers from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and CitiGroup. Third-graders received dictionaries. Last January, Newsom announced a program for low-income families to purchase computers.
In November, however, officials announced they were canceling SF Connect to focus soley on the homeless component.
Tax records obtained by The Examiner show that the charity had been raking in donations in 2007, but officials said donors were specifically giving to Homeless Connect, not the three offshoots. Still, SF Connect was far from struggling, according to 2007 records filed this month with the Internal Revenue Service. SF Connect had raised $949,533 from donors, about $150,000 more than what was claimed in 2006.
The problem was that donors were sending in checks and specifically asking that their money go to the Homeless Connect branch of the charity, SF Connect officials said when asked about the IRS filings. All the time and effort spent on recruiting volunteers for the three spinoffs of Homeless Connect wasn’t being matched by dollars.
Kayhan, the SF Connect manager and major fundraiser, left the position to be Newsom’s policy director on homelessness shortly after the mayor’s re-election. Months later, SF Connect moved from its office on Spear Street.
Thousands of volunteers still show up every other month for Homeless Connect. It was something that didn’t catch on as well for the other charities, according to Tourk, who is now trying to keep the popular Homeless Connect running as president of the Board of Directors.
“I think, at the end of the day, Homeless Connect was the pillar,” Tourk said. “It was just a question of capacity. We just felt it was time to focus our efforts and do one thing incredibly well.”
