Guardian Photo by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover Photography
Barry Hermanson doesn't just talk about doing the right thing. He's spent his career as a temp agency owner trying to increase pay for temps, and as a small-business person trying to raise the minimum wage.
When Hermanson opened his employment business in 1980, his primary goal was to share the wealth.
"I was doing temp work in 1979 and ’80, and while I was paid only about $4 for clerical work, like filing, the temp agency was billing at $6.80," Hermanson recalls. He turned around and opened Hermanson's Employment Services, where he managed to keep billing rates competitive while paying 20 to 30 percent more than other agencies.
Hermanson's temp agency grew rapidly through the 1980s, mostly through word of mouth. By the 1990s, he was making good money - and giving a lot of it away to the local community. Among other things, he funded a computer training center in the Tenderloin for a nonprofit housing group.
He also became active in local politics, particularly in the campaign to mandate a living wage for San Francisco workers.
"As I became increasingly involved in community work in the ’90s, I began to see that legislative work had a far greater capacity to improve people's lives than my individual efforts," he says.
Hermanson donated more than $100,000 of his own money in 2003 to the living-wage initiative, which required San Francisco businesses to pay considerably more than the state minimum wage and helped 54,000 local workers get raises. "It was the best investment I ever made," says Hermanson, whose donation translated into an estimated $100 million being transferred into the pockets of low-wage workers. "You can't get a better return."
These days Hermanson is a big supporter of Sup. Tom Ammiano's health care legislation. He points out that many of the business arguments against the law, which would require employers to pay for health insurance, are similar to charges he heard against the minimum-wage increase.
Hermanson says he'd be happy to pay a 50-cent surcharge on his lunch tab, if it meant the people serving him could have health care.
"I think we need to put it in those terms," he says. "Providing health care is also a commitment in terms of consumers and which businesses they decide to patronize."
Hermanson, who closed his temp agency in March, is running on the Green Party ticket for Assembly District 12 against Sup. Fiona Ma, who won the Democratic primary this June. He hopes to build up the Greens as a progressive alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.
And, because he's Barry Hermanson, he's helping others too: He's renting a large building on Mission beyond Ocean, where he plans to offer free space to candidates and measures with a similar vision to his own.
While many of her wide-eyed peers were challenging racism and the Vietnam War from picket lines nearly four decades ago, Eva Paterson was taking on then-vice president of the United States Spiro Agnew. Literally.
The Nixon administration hoped to depict student activists nationwide as dangerous radicals, so Agnew and a team of White House officials were dispatched to debate Paterson (who was then a student leader at Northwestern University) and others on national television.
"Apparently, John Mitchell, who was the attorney general - he may have been the Karl Rove of his day - said, 'No, no, no, no. We can use this as law and order. These people are crazy. Let's use it to our advantage,'" Paterson recalls. "[But] they hadn't done very good research on me and just thought I was crazy, and I wasn't. So [Agnew] just looked really bad."
During the debate, Paterson explained the frustration of the students without calling for anything to be burned down. To Agnew's apparent surprise, as Paterson tells it, she disarmed him with a show of reason.
Agnew would eventually resign in shame amid a bribery scandal, of course, while Paterson was just beginning a 30-year leading role in the nation's civil rights movement. She spent much of those three decades at San Francisco's Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, where she served for 13 years as executive director. More recently, in 2003 she founded the Equal Justice Society, which provides free legal services to low-income individuals and litigates class action civil rights cases.
Born into a military family, Paterson grew up in France and England before attending Northwestern, where she became the school's first African American student-government president. After graduating from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, she worked for the Legal Aid Society of Alameda County and cofounded A Safe Place, a shelter for battered women in Oakland.
She has appeared perhaps most visibly as a spokesperson for several key statewide campaigns. Proposition 54, a 2003 ballot measure backed by some of the nation's wealthiest conservative ideologues, was shot down in part by a broad coalition of groups that included Paterson in a leading role. A UC regent named Ward Connerly had proposed that state and local government agencies should not collect racial data - arguing curiously (and perhaps disingenuously) that such a move would help pave the road toward a color-blind society. Paterson and her allies argued in return that the measure would destroy California's ability to address racial disparities in education, health care, and law enforcement.
Beyond Prop. 54, however, Paterson has with ceaseless conviction (and no small amount of fiery wit) weighed in on some of the most controversial and complex civil rights issues faced by the nation's legal system over the past half century. And coincidentally, she has found herself back in the ring with Connerly on more than one occasion. In 1996, with the support of millions of dollars from Republican donors, Connerly (and then-governor Pete Wilson) pushed for the passage of Prop. 209, which greatly limited affirmative action in the UC system and in statewide hiring and contracting.
Although the measure passed and the US Supreme Court has since declined to hear a challenge to 209 drafted by Paterson and other opponents, she met Connerly (and the Bush administration) again in Michigan during a similar debate and won. Paterson filed an amicus brief in Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 case in which the Supreme Court upheld the race-conscious admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School.
Guardian Photo by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover Photography
N'Tanya Lee has had an impact on San Francisco and its progressive movement that seems disproportionate to the mere six years she's lived here. But maybe that's because this 37-year-old firebrand has brought with her a lifetime of training and a passionate dedication to pushing for fundamental social change from the bottom up.
Lee grew up a hybrid of two worlds, spending most of her childhood in the Midwest with a mother on welfare before moving in with her father, who was on the faculty of a medical school in Connecticut. "Having those two profoundly different class experiences really shaped my view of the world," Lee says, noting that with her mom she "saw up close what poor folks struggle with."
Lee got involved in the peace and antinuclear movements in high school, then in racial justice movements while attending Brown University. She went on to run a homeless youth center in Michigan for five years and spent another five years as an activist with a school-reform organization in New York.
"I came to San Francisco as someone who had been an activist for 20 years and was pretty frustrated with the state of progressive politics in the country," Lee says.
She also came with a desire to work for legendarily effective Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth ("they had a history of winning," Lee says), which the equally notable Margaret Brodkin ran for 27 years before taking a job with the administration of Mayor Gavin Newsom last year.
Coleman didn't have any openings, but that didn't matter to this determined young woman. With her solid résumé, sharp intellect, and winning charm, Lee got a job with the Youth Commission, then bounced over to Coleman as soon as there was an opening.
"N'Tanya is a brilliant, effective, young, African American, gay leader," says Coleman's board chair, Mauricio Vela. "She's compassionate about her work, she's committed, works long hours, and she's just relentless."
Lee quickly proved herself to the organization, its constituents, and the community. She had a different approach than Brodkin, who is known for her uncanny budget expertise and ability to get what she needs from the political process. Lee says she's more about "building a political base of low- to moderate-income families." The two women didn't always agree, but their approaches turned out to be complementary. And when Brodkin moved on, Lee was the logical choice to replace her.
Since then, Lee has focused on good old-fashioned community organizing to broaden Coleman's political base and in turn to try to redefine the "family agenda" for San Francisco as one focused on providing housing and services for the neediest families.
"We are trying to create a model that preserves the best of what we've done but brings in a bottom-up approach," Lee says. "What has to happen to move a progressive agenda forward is to organize low-income families."
And that's exactly what she's done. Demonstrating the new model as the Board of Supervisors was winding up its budget process last month, she brought 150 people from low-income families to testify at City Hall about their needs. And in the end Lee got what she wanted from the budget.
It was impressive, but mostly just a preview of what's to come.
"We're now letting our beneficiaries run our organization," Vela says approvingly. "The decisions will come from the bottom up, and that's one of her visions.... It's true representation."
Before, Brodkin had the ear of city leaders, and her main base of support was the various social service providers. That helped establish Coleman Advocates as an important institution in town. Now, under Lee, they're trying to take the next step and lead a broad-based progressive political revival. And we're confident that if anybody can pull it off, it's N'Tanya Lee.
Guardian Photo by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover Photography
In the late 1990s, when Greenpeace dropped the ball on its environmental justice campaigns and hacked its staff from 400 to a mere 65, Bradley Angel's final direct action for the organization was to quit in protest.
He immediately founded Greenaction and went down to Needles, California, for a standoff with five native Colorado River tribes against a proposed nuclear dump in Ward Valley. It became a 113-day protest, surpassed Wounded Knee as one of the longest Native American-led occupations, and resulted in a bill signed by Gov. Gray Davis prohibiting any nuclear dumps in Ward Valley.
It was the first of dozens of victories for the now 10-year-old nonprofit. The most recent was the closure of the oldest, dirtiest, most unnecessary power plant in California, the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. facility at Hunters Point.
On April 11, Greenaction activists gathered in the rain and physically blocked the front gates of the plant for a final direct action against the outdated operation, which eight years after its promised date of closure was still spewing 600 tons of pollutants into the air annually and slushing a toxic cocktail into the bay.
"We nearly always win," says Angel, who made a point of partnering Greenaction with the local groups who've been involved on this project for 25 years to carry out the toxic surveys, protests, direct actions, and harping at city and PG&E officials it took to close the plant.
"And we don't drop out," says his coworker Marie Harrison, a longtime Bayview resident and neighborhood organizer who's been working to close the plant since 1995.
Harrison crossed paths with Angel in that struggle, and in 2001 when he needed another staff member at Greenaction's headquarters, she got the job. With the help of one other full-time employee, two part-time workers, and a crew of interns, they've played a key role in improving the quality of life for the residents of Bayview-Hunters Point.
Why is Greenaction so successful? "We believe in sharing the stories of victories," says Angel. "We let everyone know about the PG&E shutdown. It teaches people they have the power." Every victory adds clout to the organization. Angel says, "There are numerous examples of companies finding out that Greenaction was involved and dropping whatever they were pursuing."
While Harrison holds down the fort in San Francisco, Angel spends most of his time in the field, circulating throughout the southwest as a de facto member of 20 other primarily low-income and minority communities that constantly find themselves in the crosshairs of environmental racism. This kind of networking benefits all of their campaigns. "Because Greenaction works in so many communities, we're able to bring groups together to share information and form alliances against these corporations," Angel says.
An ethical attitude about fundraising also differentiates Greenaction from the 501(c)(3) masses. "Unlike some other organizations that solicit funds in the name of a cause without actually partnering with that community, we only work where we're invited," Angel says. Rather than identifying a problem and trying to rally the masses around the nucleus of concern, Greenaction stands back and lets the community define what it needs and how the organization can help.
It’s approached nearly every day. "We try to do whatever we can, but we can't say yes to everyone," laments Angel. "At the very least, we spend some time helping them to strategize. We're not a group who says not in my backyard. We say not in anybody's backyard."
Greenaction is now preparing a campaign to reduce diesel pollution in southeast San Francisco from the port, the staging area of Moscone Center, and the crossover of freeways 101 and 280. Eventually, Greenaction will take on the city's Southeast Sewage Treatment Facility.
"We're taking some time to prepare that one," says Angel with a winning smile.
Guardian Photo by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover Photography
"Theater," says Tony Kelly, "isn't a bad metaphor for community organizing."
We are sitting in a little Thai restaurant on Potrero Hill, the place where Kelly makes his home and runs his life's work, Thick Description Theater. The Hill is also where Kelly got his start in community politics, and we're talking about how someone who had dedicated his life to art wound up as one of the city's more effective community leaders.
It certainly wasn't a role he had intended to play: "I'm an accidental activist," he says.
Born in the Mission at St. Luke's Hospital, Kelly left San Francisco as a boy when his father, an accountant for US Steel, was relocated to Pittsburgh. He moved back to San Francisco after graduating from Stanford and got a job at the Julian Theater. It was the perfect fit: "I had always wanted to be an artist, and I'd even thought about art school, but I couldn't draw," he explains.
He moved back to the East Coast for graduate work at Carnegie in New York, and he and some friends started Thick Description there. They moved the operation to San Francisco, and after floating around for a while wound up building the anchor theater space on 18th Street at the new Goodman Building, the reincarnation of a legendary San Francisco arts center.
"We joined the Potrero Merchants and Potrero Boosters because that's what you do," he says. "It was just our idea of public service."
He quickly found out that Potrero Hill is near the epicenter of one of the city's biggest and most important land-use battles, over the rezoning of the eastern neighborhoods. The city planners want to add tens of thousands of market-rate housing units, threatening the last remaining blue-collar jobs in the city - and Kelly, who is now the head of the Boosters, slipped quickly into the political fray. His background, he says, prepared him well.
"In theater, you're creating something through shared effort," he explains. "You have to work with everyone else and listen to each other."
His work with the Potrero Hill community attracted the attention of Sup. Sophie Maxwell, who named him to the city's Arts Task Force, which could easily have been nothing but another well-meaning group that faded off into the ozone without accomplishing much. But with Kelly and artist Debra Walker as cochairs, the group has put forward a dramatic plan to reshape the way the arts are funded in San Francisco. The plan has set off a heated debate at city hall and could lead to some profound policy changes that will help smaller, community-based arts groups. Kelly has also helped create the Arts Forum, an artist-based political group that now has 1,000 members. "We're organizing the artists in a way that's never been done before," he says.
And the arts agenda he wants to promote will be about a lot more than just grant money. "Universal health care and affordable housing are big issues for the arts community," he notes.
Soft-spoken and friendly, Kelly can wax philosophical about art and politics, and his attitude is likely to sustain him for the long haul. "Theater has this great, nourishing kind of failure," he says. "It never turns out exactly the way you thought it would, but many times it's better. And along the way, it changes people's lives."
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