San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has revived a benefit program once lauded as a step toward “reparations” for black San Franciscans. Known as the Dream Keeper Initiative, the relaunched program will grant $36 million to “community-serving organizations,” including some that have offered “Afri-centric” mental-health services, African ancestry DNA testing, and free doulas for “African American birthing people.”
Supporters say the initiative will deliver racial “equity”; a civil rights lawyer says the program may violate federal law.
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The Dream Keeper Initiative was founded by former San Francisco Mayor London Breed in 2021, fulfilling her promise to redirect police funding to “the African American community” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. In February 2021, Breed announced that the city would divert $120 million from its law-enforcement budgets to fund the program, which would in turn funnel money to a web of left-wing nonprofits. The Board of Supervisors president hailed the initiative as the “first step towards true reparations for the Black community here in San Francisco.”
The mayor pledged to use the program to “make a difference” for “African Americans in the city.” She wasn’t kidding. Dream Keeper funded a down-payment-assistance program that made “homeownership dreams real for a growing number of Black people in San Francisco”; a $2.2 million grant to “Black trans-serving organizations” that promised to “improve outcomes for Black transgender people”; and a program that recruited black educators to teach the city’s black students.
Despite its lofty ambitions, Dream Keeper was troubled from the outset. San Francisco poured $60 million per year into the program with little apparent oversight or quality control. Nonprofits took advantage, reportedly spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on black-tie galas and salary increases. Other funding reportedly disappeared into a web of shell companies, raising fraud concerns.
At least one Dream Keeper leader allegedly sensed an opportunity for self-enrichment. According to a city ethics report, Sheryl Davis, former Dream Keeper program director, greenlit more than $1 million in grants to a nonprofit run by her housemate, James Spingola. Spingola’s nonprofit, in turn, reportedly invoiced the city tens of thousands of dollars for Davis’s personal expenses, including a luxury trip to Martha’s Vineyard, production costs for her podcast, and tuition expenses for her son. The district attorney reportedly launched a criminal investigation into the matter in 2025.
Daniel Lurie, the Levi Strauss fortune heir who campaigned for mayor against Breed in 2024, criticized his opponent for the fiasco. “London Breed handed a blank check to her closest allies with zero oversight,” he said at the time. “Hundreds of millions of dollars were mismanaged that could have been spent to solve the city’s safety, drug, and economic recovery crisis. . . . As your mayor, I will bring a new era of proven, accountable leadership to City Hall.”
Under pressure, Breed said she was “appalled” by the reports of misuse and froze all Dream Keeper funding. But the damage was done: Breed found herself ensnared by the perception of corruption, and Lurie won the election.
Instead of abandoning Breed’s scandal-ridden program, however, Lurie seems eager to revive it. In March 2025, the new mayor quietly relaunched the Dream Keeper program as part of the new “RFP [request for proposals] 100” initiative, and approved $36 million to, among other things, “advanc[e] equity.” The Lurie administration’s list of RFP 100 recipients, published last month, shows that the city is still committed to identity politics, with payouts for a “culturally affirming wellness” initiative, programming “rooted in a Black feminist healing framework,” and other dubious social-welfare initiatives.
One of these is the Homeless Children’s Network, a black-led organization that has secured $1.1 million in RFP 100 funding, about half of which will support “Afri-centric, trauma-informed community health and wellness services.” HNC also operates the Ma’at Program, a form of “Afri-centric” therapy named after the “ancient Egyptian concepts of truth, balance, order, harmony, and justice.” This program, also funded by the original Dream Keeper Initiative, employed black therapists to treat black patients purportedly suffering from “trauma brought about by racism and homophobia.”
The Lurie administration also earmarked $450,000 for “The Transgender District Company” to provide “safe-space programming,” “legal name and gender marker clinics,” and an annual “wellness fair connecting participants to affirming care.” The organization, founded by three black trans-identifying women, also hosts an annual “Riot” party to celebrate the “Compton’s Cafeteria Riots” of 1966, during which “transgender and queer” activists clashed with police in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. Last year’s “Reparations is a Riot!” party featured a lineup of all-black drag queens and listed the City and County of San Francisco and the Mayor’s Office of Housing & Community Development as sponsors. Entry was free, but TDC told patrons to “pay your reparations” with tiered ticket levels—for $20, they could even meet the drag queens.
Other Dream Keeper grantees had similar sensibilities. The Lurie administration awarded $600,000 to SisterWeb, which gives free doula care to pregnant “Black women and birthing people”; $250,000 to Because Black Is Still Beautiful, which has offered massage therapy and African ancestry DNA testing to formerly incarcerated black women and a trans-identifying man; and $400,000 to Queer Women of Color Media Arts, which previously used Dream Keeper funds to support “queer and transgender Black filmmakers,” including one who followed two “black transmen . . . through their first pregnancies.”
Lurie’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
It is distressing that Mayor Lurie, who campaigned as a moderate, has revived the radical Dream Keeper initiative. Even more troublingly, the revamped initiative may also violate federal law. Though the Lurie administration has been careful to create the appearance of a legally compliant program, promising that it would “not consider any demographic data about the racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, or national orientation makeup” of applicants’ staff, leadership, and boards, the RFP 100 is arguably a form of soft reparations.
The city’s Human Rights Commission, which administers RFP 100, released its funding guidelines for the program in 2025. The guidelines state that the city will assess applicants’ “commitment to cultural responsiveness, inclusivity, and equity” and—while they require grantees to “serve eligible participants regardless of race . . . or other characteristics”—they also command grantees to “ensure that outreach efforts include . . . the Black community.” HRC also asked applicants to provide two examples of past projects that served “historically marginalized communities, including the African American community, in a way that was culturally affirming.” (In a statement to City Journal, HRC claimed that “Nonprofits which enter into grant agreements with the City to provide services are required to ensure services are open and available to all.”)
The grantees’ racial commitments are even more explicit. The Homeless Children’s Network program published an advertisement pitched exclusively to black individuals and families. To qualify for SisterWeb’s doula services, an individual must “identify as Black/African American.” (Below the list of requirements, the group claims that “No one is turned away on the basis of race or ethnicity”; SisterWeb did not respond to our request for clarification.) And the Queer Women of Color Media Arts claims its 2025/2026 cohort “will serve LBTQIA+ Black/African descent filmmakers.”
It’s hard to see how anyone in San Francisco politics could miss this race-based slush fund. Indeed, in the RFP 100 press release, District Supervisor Shamann Walton said that the initiative made “good on the promises made to the Black community in San Francisco.” Mawuli Tugbenyoh, the new director of the Human Rights Commission, echoed the sentiment: “This new funding opportunity and reformed grant making process will ultimately lead to generational change in economic and social outcomes for the Black and other marginalized communities.”
Despite the euphemism and legal disclaimers, the program may violate federal law. “The courts have been extraordinarily clear for decades that ameliorating generalized societal discrimination does not constitute a compelling interest for the purposes of strict scrutiny, so cannot justify race-based action,” said Dan Morenoff, executive director at the American Civil Rights Project. (Morenoff is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.) “Intent is always hard to prove, but where San Francisco tells us that it runs a program to do just that, it’s hard not to infer that—whatever disclaimers it otherwise attaches—the program’s grants do what the city says it’s trying to do, leaving the program with serious constitutional problems.”
The Trump administration might take note. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon has been aggressively dismantling racially discriminatory programs. As a former San Francisco resident, she’ll be intimately familiar with the euphemisms and shell games. If Dhillon’s office decides to take action, Mayor Lurie might have more problems than wasting public funds on doulas and drag queens: he could find himself in court for violating the Civil Rights Act.
Top Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images