(Bloomberg) – San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has turned to some of the country’s wealthiest philanthropists to raise his homeless agenda, while the city faces a tough budget deficit.
The $37.5 million fundraiser includes $10 million from the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, and another $10 million from the personal foundation of billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz.
Lurie is Levi Strauss & Co. Fortune’s heirs, making philanthropy a key part of its tenure, said the city’s business leaders and Ultrarich should play a key role in addressing the homeless crisis. Earlier this year, San Francisco’s supervisory board allowed the mayor to raise up to $10 million from individual donors, even if they had operations before the city.
“This work is much more than money,” Lurie said in a statement. “It’s about getting rid of failed strategies, building more effective systems and services to break the cycle of homelessness, addiction and government failure and restore San Francisco’s status as the world’s greatest city.”
The money will be used to meet a critical sports commitment: equipped with 1,500 shelter beds to help people leave the streets and enter drugs and mental health treatments.
Lurie turned to the wealthy as San Francisco faced a budget deficit of more than $800 million over the next two years, which could force jobs and program cuts across the city. His homeless fundraising campaign also includes $11 million from Tipping Point, an anti-poverty nonprofit he founded; $6 million from prominent San Francisco philanthropists Keith and Priscilla Geeslin; and $500,000 from the New York-based Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.
For Moritz, a former Sequoia Capital leader, the donation is part of spending more than $300 million on civic and political causes since 2020.
Lurie is largely due to public anger at homelessness and public drug use. Dissatisfaction with the city’s downtown spaces penetrated San Francisco’s technological and financial elites, who discovered common reasons with small business groups and many middle-class residents. The mayor has invested more than $9 million in his campaign.
“This fundraising campaign is an encouraging indicator of collective will in our city to achieve a crisis that lasts too long has left our community suffering too long,” said Bilal Mahmood, regional director who was disappointed last year’s most progressive member of the board. “I look forward to continuing to improve to address our homelessness and behavioral health crisis.”
– Assistance with Biz Carson.
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