The Streets and Alleys of San Francisco

This urgent act of solidarity is what came to mind when later on a friend and I walked by rows of unhoused people standing, sitting, squatting, coughing or hunched over with the fentanyl fold, also known as the ‘fenty bend’ or ‘nod’, an often physical reaction to high dose fentanyl consumption. We were in the heart of the Mission, 16th Street on our way to the BART station, San Francisco’s version of the Tube. I had a plane to catch in two and a half hours. Fetching my luggage at a hotel three stops from the 16th Street BART station before boarding a flight to London loomed large as a priority. 

We paused just long enough to consult Google Maps on our phones and were struck by the sight of a couple lighting an orange pipe in front of a Pollo Campero restaurant. A skateboarder zigzagged by, expertly avoiding urine and other waste on the sidewalk. My friend commented on how she no longer recognized the Mission District from when she was a city planner in the 1990s. She described a scene from a Kensington documentary on forgotten streets and broken lives, asking me if I’d seen it. I nodded at her distinguishing Kensington Philadelphia in the US, from Kensington Palace in the UK. The coincidence was not lost on me in the context of the summit’s call to understand the reality of other lives as fully as our own. “Dying on it and trying to get off it” is how Anthony, a 27-year old man in the documentary describes, verbatim, his life to counselors from Savage Sisters. Savage Sisters is a nonprofit providing trauma-informed services and wound care to people like Anthony, whose life matters equally as that of the skateboarder’s on 16th Street, and that of the attendees’ representing 45 countries at the Global Philanthropy Leadership Summit. 

The word philanthropy has roots in the Greek language: to love (philein) humankind (anthropos). As I touched down at the Heathrow Airport the following day, I visualized the enormous impact $450B in charitable assets could make on people living on the streets and alleys of San Francisco, Philadelphia and other cities, as well as those in the global south. At the Social Change Nest, we are fortunate enough to be able to support philanthropy impact both at home and globally, both of them equally as vital and neither less in their ambition and vision. 

The next few months as we tour around the conferences, talking about the systems of philanthropy, we will be acutely aware of the changing challenges and restrictions of giving and receiving for impact, both at a local and global level. Our aim is to ensure that resources can flow to exactly where it needs to go and remove the barriers for changemakers to create impact.