Every nonprofit organization in the Bay Area has contended with a similar goal over the past decade: attracting a new generation of civically minded people to its cause. San Francisco is home to a long lineage of philanthropic titans, but the question lingers: Who will step up to carry the torch? With no shortage of talented people doing good work in the Bay Area, the Gazette answers that question with 12 noteworthy champions across sectors. Each is bringing a renewed sense of energy and urgency to the challenges faced by our communities. From the heirs of legacy families charting a new course to the tech set bringing ROI metrics to philanthropic investments and the community organizers who are rolling up their sleeves to better the City, these established and emerging leaders are tackling pressing challenges to create a better future for all.
Ben Kaplan
One of the main projects of WE San Francisco, a new nonprofit organizing and advocacy group, has been recruiting volunteers to poll 1,000 residents in each of San Francisco’s 11 districts on their concerns and desires for the city. “If we are a community-led movement, everything we do needs to be informed by what the community wants,” explains its cofounder, who lives on Lone Mountain with his wife, Virginie Eskenazi, an attorney, and their two toddlers.
The CEO of global marketing agency TOP, Kaplan grew up in Oregon, went to Harvard and moved to the City in 2012. He founded the group this summer with friend Seema Sri, a marketing strategist and political activist. “We were both trying to do things to improve the city,” says Kaplan, who likes to spin a well-known saying of President John F. Kennedy, “Ask not what San Francisco can do for you, but what you can do for San Francisco.” He also took inspiration from Eskenazi’s stories of the citizen-led En Marche movement in her native France, which ultimately saw the election of President Emmanuel Macron.
Kaplan and Sri started organizing volunteers through happy hours and other social events, including the recent Autumn Moon Festival and the Diwali Festival of Lights on November 5 at the Foundry, featuring Bollywood youth performers, LED light dancers and stilt walkers. “To have a sustained movement grow and be successful, it’s got to be fun,” he notes. Those two cultural events also purposely reflect his East Asian heritage (his mother is Thai-Chinese) and Sri’s South Asian heritage, Kaplan says. “We thought we should bring together communities that are really related but don’t connect as much as they should. Let’s unite the Asian community, which is a third of San Francisco but doesn’t have a huge seat at the table.”
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
The daughter of one of Stanford University’s most generous benefactors in its history clearly considers philanthropy to be a gift worth regifting. Long before the loss in early 2022 of her father, John Arrillaga, a notable Silicon Valley real estate developer and loyal Stanford alumnus, this similarly proud Cardinal with four Stanford degrees — five, if you count an on-campus nursery school, as she likes to note — had built her own impressive résumé. Equally inspired by the volunteer work and philanthropy of her late mother, Frances Arrillaga, who died of lung cancer in 1995, Arrillaga-Andreessen founded and served as chair of SV2 (Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund), created and taught philanthropy and leadership courses at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and cofounded the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, where she still serves as chair.
Married since 2006 to Netscape cofounder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and based in Atherton, Arrillaga-Andreessen wrote 2011’s Giving 2.0: Transform Your Giving and Our World, a New York Times bestseller. She also has a long history of serving on boards of trustees for private schools and nonprofits, currently including the National Gallery of Art and the Arrillaga Foundation, created by her parents in 1978. The education-focused Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Foundation provides its founder’s Stanford syllabi for other instructors’ use and promotes her free “Giving 2.0” online class for Stanford on Coursera. She notes in an introductory video: “I know this from my personal experience: Even after 20 years of giving, we all could always be doing better.”
Jeff and Erica Lawson
At a time when some companies are giving up on San Francisco, the Twilio CEO and billionaire philanthropist and the UCSF professor and pediatric rheumatologist are envisioning its rebirth as a more equitable city.
Their story unfolds against the backdrop of the Giving Pledge, a 2010 initiative spearheaded by Bill and Melinda Gates along with Warren Buffett. The ultrawealthy commit to giving away the majority of their fortunes during their lifetimes. The aim is to transform charitable giving by encouraging early and impactful donations. In 2019, the Lawsons embraced the campaign: “We find ourselves blessed with resources greater than we could have ever imagined,” they wrote in their pledge. “We believe that with these resources comes a responsibility to put them to good use.”
They got their chance midpandemic, as companies were leaving the Bay Area and San Francisco was reeling. Jeff kept his family and company rooted in San Francisco and passionately urged tech leaders to do the same, tweeting: “What San Francisco needs now … is for tech leaders to step up and give back.”
Leading the way, the Lawsons committed $500,000 to support Give2SF, the City’s COVID relief fund, and then followed up with a pledge of $8 million to HelpKitchen, a nonprofit that helped local restaurants provide meals to those in need during the pandemic.
Alysha Lee
Lee is used to the spotlight. The 17-year-old San Francisco native is a ballet dancer, accustomed to performing in front of crowds of more than 1,000 people. In September, Lee was center stage again, as one of the six recipients this year of the Surgeon General’s Medallion for Health, the highest honor that the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy — who, during his two stints in the role, has raised awareness about connection and social isolation — can present to civilians. Murthy bestowed Lee and the other awardees with their medals at a first-of-its-kind ceremony at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
The award’s youngest recipient won for conceiving and spearheading a project called “1,000 Paper Cranes” — Lee’s own personal spin on the Japanese origami tradition of the same name learned during visits to her grandmother and great-grandmother in their Russian Hill home — as part of her work with the Marin nonprofit Beyond Differences, whose mission is to develop social and emotional skills for middle school students and combat social isolation.
Lee, who is Chinese American, created the art-based curriculum in response to the rise in anti-AAPI hate crimes during the pandemic. San Francisco received 60 reports of hate crimes against AAPI people in 2021, a more than 500 percent increase from the previous year. Advocates say there are likely more that weren’t reported. Lee’s project encourages students to fold origami cranes and inscribe them with a written tagline about hope or an aspiration of what they would like to see from their community. All the individual cranes, which represent hope and happiness in East Asian cultures, are then tied together on a string as a symbol of unity and hung across homes, classrooms and hallways.
Lee sensed that the surge in hate crimes created a division between the Asian American community and the rest of the population, furthering the feeling of “otherness” often present in the culture. She hopes her project tears down those walls and promotes unity and togetherness by championing people’s uniqueness. “I knew that as an Asian American girl, I needed to make a change,” the high school senior says. “I hoped that the visual would make students know that they should celebrate their differences, their backgrounds, their heritage, their ethnicities, everything about them, and not use that as a way to divide each other. Everyone should just love themselves for who they are.”
More than 10,000 schools have adopted the 1,000 Paper Cranes curriculum, including several in San Francisco. Roughly 9 million students are learning from the program.
Marlene Martin, MD
While she was still a medical student at Stanford, Martin grew concerned that patients with substance use disorders were being treated at emergency departments for problems such as pneumonia or skin infections — but rarely the substance problems that could have caused them. To change this, she specialized in addiction medicine and, in 2019, founded San Francisco General’s Addiction Care Team.
An associate professor of clinical medicine at UCSF and hospitalist at SF General, Martin now directs ACT, a team of doctors, nurses and patient navigators that provides guidance and services to any patient wanting help with an SUD. For someone with an opioid use disorder, they might prescribe life-saving medications, such as buprenorphine or methadone, for example. Or they might find a bed at a treatment center for someone struggling with alcohol.
At a time when overdoses are happening at a record-setting pace in the City, the team is more crucial than ever. Since ACT was founded, they’ve cared for more than 15,000 people. Seventy percent of their patients with opioid use disorder have started on medication, compared with 15 percent at hospitals nationwide. And this summer, after years of surviving on grants and philanthropy, the team secured permanent funding from San Francisco’s Department of Health — an acknowledgment of how vital ACT is to public health.
A first-generation Mexican American, Martin has also partnered with organizations such as Dolores Street Community Services to provide Spanish-language, culturally informed information about SUDs and resources throughout the City’s Spanish-speaking community.
A big measure of her success is word on the street: People now specifically seek out SF General for help with addiction. “The patients we’re caring for are just so thankful that somebody will speak empathetically and compassionately to them, and that we know what the resources are,” Martin explains. “They know SF General is where you go if you want excellent care.”
Yoyo Murphy
Stephen Curry may be the Warriors’ MVP, but off the hardwood, Yoyo Murphy is the undisputed team champion.
In Murphy’s sixth year as senior vice president of government and community relations, her role with the organization is challenging and ever-changing. During the pandemic, she was pivotal in the reopening of Chase Center and keeping communication channels open with the City.
But what sets her apart aren’t the pandemic-era challenges. It’s her talent for cultivating something magical: public-private partnerships. “Opening Chase Center has given us a whole new opportunity and platform to invest in the economic vitality of San Francisco through our community work,” Murphy says of economic and workforce development. One of her proudest accomplishments with the Warriors is the Franchise Fund, a collaboration with United Airlines. The program provides training opportunities to small and minority-owned businesses, ensuring their long-term success in the Bay Area.
“As a native San Franciscan, Yoyo has had a significant impact on the Warriors’ civic engagement efforts,” says Warriors President and Chief Operating Officer Brandon Schneider. “As the Bay Area’s team, it is critically important to us that our impact is felt daily across the region, from food donations, to reading programs, to supporting small businesses and advancing educational equity.”
For those who want to give back but aren’t backed by a multimillion-dollar sports franchise, Murphy has advice: “Financial support is great, but there are myriad ways to make a difference. You can raise awareness, volunteer your skills or connect with community leaders on the ground to understand where help is needed most.”
Adam Swig
Given his love of parties for a good cause, you’d think that the founder of Value Culture, a San Francisco nonprofit encouraging young people to support art, community and Jewish spirituality initiatives, would have plans to celebrate the fourth anniversary of its November 2019 debut. But this member of a famously philanthropic family — including parents Rick and Sari Swig, grandmother Cissie Swig and late great-grandfather Benjamin Swig, to name a few — has in recent weeks helped stage everything from Value Culture’s free reggae concerts in Golden Gate Park and a Sukkot celebration at University of San Francisco, where he sits on the board of trustees, to a youth climate action summit in Bayview.
“I want to bring attention to their causes and inspire people to think of themselves as donors, volunteers and even leaders to help with these causes,” says Swig, who earlier this year received the Jewish Community Federation’s Dinkelspiel Award for Young Leadership and spent part of the summer in Ukraine for a documentary he is working on with American History X director Tony Kaye. Even during the “emotionally tense period” after the Hamas attacks, Swig was working on a 10th-anniversary Hanukkah Toy Drive. A resident of Rincon Hill, Swig notes that a lot of people “love San Francisco and want to make a difference … I bring different people together to break through cultural and racial barriers and understand that we can all work together to solve problems and create the future we want in San Francisco. We are in this together.”
Kathryn Cahill Thompson
Thompson, the newly minted board chair of San Francisco’s Chamber of Commerce, assumed her role at a time when city businesses are facing daunting challenges: chronic homelessness, dirty streets and near-empty office buildings, which companies would love to fill with employees.
Because she wants San Francisco teeming with tourists, shoppers and workers again, Thompson — CEO of Cahill Contractors — and her board have partnered with local organizations to support Mayor London Breed’s efforts to revitalize the City. They’ve advocated making it easier to start a business and encouraged more arts and culture to bring folks downtown.
“Historically, San Francisco has not been super-friendly to business, but I think we’re finally at the point where we’re all pulling together in the same direction, in the best interest of our city,” says the San Francisco native, who has sat on the board since 2014 and whose father, Jay Cahill, served as board chair in 1995. “That’s a great place to be.”
Breanna Zwart
When Mayor London Breed appointed Zwart to the San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission in September, it was an acknowledgement of how much the Microsoft executive had already given the City.
Zwart, who served eight years on San Francisco’s Commission on the Status of Women and as its president from 2019 to 2022, helped increase the department’s staff and budget to aid more women, girls and nonbinary people. She and fellow commissioners made sure that city buildings had lactation rooms for nursing mothers. They partnered with organizations such as the 49ers to battle human trafficking. And Zwart pressed the department to lean more into research and data when deciding which programs to fund — a skill she’s honed in global-reaching jobs at Google, YouTube and Microsoft.
The Carnegie Mellon grad credits her paternal grandparents for her sense of civic duty. Raised on farms, they became educators and are still social justice activists in San Diego today. “They were great role models,” she explains. “Because of them, service is at the core of my being.”
José Quiñonez
Quiñonez channeled his own experiences as a Mexican immigrant into creating the Mission Asset Fund. His journey from undocumented status to UC Davis and Princeton University graduate fueled a deep commitment to helping people facing similar challenges.
A leader in consumer finance, Quiñonez created the Mission District nonprofit in 2007 to help low-income and undocumented workers gain access to basic financial services by building credit histories. “For those invisible to the credit system, these are enormous barriers to getting loans, jobs, cars and apartments,” he explains of a program that has since served 5,100 clients in the Bay Area with $7.8 million total in loans.
MAF builds on the tradition of people uniting to save and lend with each other. In Mexico, these informal loan clubs are known as tandas. “A group of eight or 10 people agree to contribute a certain amount of money in a pot, and then a member of the group takes the total sum. They do that again and again until everyone has the chance of taking the total sum,” he says. MAF then services the social loan and reports the payments to credit bureaus to help clients establish or improve their credit scores.
In 2016, Quiñonez received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (colloquially known as a Genius grant). “The MacArthur award took our work to a whole new level. The recognition and attention that follows the award is incredible, allowing us to demonstrate that our community-based approach to social change is better.”
Tim Reardon
Reardon, a fourth-generation San Franciscan, has led Archbishop Riordan High School through a significant transformation. A history teacher–turned–principal and president since 2022, he navigated an era of financial instability, the challenges of the pandemic and the transition to coeducation in 2020.
The 74-year-old school serves all San Francisco communities, with many students receiving financial assistance. Under Reardon’s leadership, Riordan expanded enrollment, developed a stable business model, invested in campus improvements and introduced academic initiatives, including biomedical and engineering programs. Another innovation is the House System, Riordan’s divisional philosophy that separates students into four houses with equal membership from each grade.
As Reardon explains, “This strategy provides amazing leadership opportunities and daily prospects for mentorship, as each student is a member of a mentor group that includes freshmen through seniors.”
In the Marianist tradition, the school emphasizes adaptation and change. “Working at Riordan can sometimes feel like working at a startup,” Reardon says. “We cherish our traditions, but we also have the freedom to keep evolving. That’s an exciting atmosphere in which to work, and I think our teachers appreciate it.”
