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Congratulations to our Employee of the Month! We are proud to announce our Employee of the Month - Tina Tran Tina has been a rock star on the Development team since she joined us in September 2019. She jumps in to help her colleagues whenever possible and is always coming up with new ideas for how we can be more effective. Tina came up with the concept for a new staff resources webpage and built it single-handedly! This webpage streamlines staff access to all sorts of materials that have historically been hard for everyone to keep track of. She's also in the process of building something similar for clients to access. Tina also manages most of Compass' social media platforms and most website updates and has taken those important online assets to new heights. This includes managing a communications internship program for the development team. She has a great eye for design and quickly whips up beautiful flyers, card designs, event invitations, and even does beautiful book layouts! Tina is also a great photographer, snapping many of the photos you see for Compass. On top of all of that, Tina has been critical to transitioning the Development team from our old donor database to Salesforce; a process that started in December and completed in July - a very complex project! She is the primary database administrator for Development and even came up with the name for the Development side of Compass' Salesforce: Boba! Tina is always focused on Compass' mission and how Development can support the work of programs. She is incredibly thoughtful, kind, helpful, and flexible. None of us can remember how it's even possible that we were able to get things done before she joined the team! Thank you Tina for all you do to keep us going every day - we appreciate you!

Compass teams up with San Francisco SPCA to help Compass families adopt kittens. The Covid-19 pandemic has been an extremely stressful time for everyone. Many Compass families who have worked hard to reach housing stability, and were succeeding, were suddenly faced with loss of income and childcare when the shelter-in-place order began. Three Compass families all had kittens on their holiday wish lists. They all shared similar stories of children stepping up during the pandemic to help their families by taking on more responsibilities. So Compass teamed up with San Francisco SPCA to make their kitten wishes come true. One Family shared their story… Roselyn is 14 years old and has two younger siblings. Her family have been clients at Compass Family Services for two years. Last March her parents lost their jobs at the start of shelter-in-place and the family faced serious financial challenges, including a growing back-rent debt. They were able to get back to work in July, but that meant Roselyn needed to take on the big job of taking care of her siblings while her parents were working. Roselyn was balancing her online schoolwork, housework, and making sure her siblings were fed and keeping up with their online education. She told us that she began to feel isolated and lonely. Roselyn missed going to school with her friends very much. As the holidays were approaching, her Compass case manager helped them fill out their Adopt-a-Family wish list and Roselyn asked for a kitten. Her parents approved and wanted very much to make their daughter’s wish come true. Compass reached out to San Francisco SPCA about Roselyn’s wish, along with the two additional families who wished for kittens. And despite a very high demand for pet adoptions this fall, they were all matched with loveable kittens just in time for the holidays. All three families are reporting that their new family members are doing well and have been joyful additions to their families. The 2020 Compass Adopt-a-Family project matched 546 families with donors in our community who fulfilled their wish lists for the holidays. We’d like to thank these families for sharing their stories and photos with us. And we’d like to give San Francisco SPCA a special Thank You for helping us make the holidays especially bright for these children and their families.

Late last year, we said goodbye to our beloved External Affairs and Policy Manager, Anthony Carrasco who completed this fellowship with us through the University of California, Berkeley During his time at Compass, Anthony worked on various projects to advocate for and support the homeless and at-risk families we serve. Many of Compass’ client families are of an undocumented status. Anthony has provided incredible support to protect the rights, safety and freedoms of our families through adapting policy principles to Compass’ operations and providing training to staff in preparation for a possible ICE visit. Anthony also supported Compass amidst changes in the public charge policy by updating staff of the impact of policy changes and facilitating an information session at the Twitter NeighborNest. Data plays an important role in Compass’s work to end family homelessness and Anthony was a pivotal figure in conducting a point-in-time count of Compass’ undocumented family community to better evauluate and meet their needs. When shelter-in-place began, many of our families were among those most impacted with loss of employment, income, healthcare and economic and housing stability. Anthony helped establish new cleaning standards, compiled resource guides and educated families and staff about the stimulus payment process. His adaptability and resourcefulness was essential in helping Compass case managers provide meaningful support to their client families at the onset of this public health crisis. Anthony also strived for representation of our unsheltered families through his efforts to “Get Out the Vote” during the 2020 election and collaborated with the U.S. Census to ensure that every Compass family is counted! We will greatly miss Anthony’s friendly face, his fierce advocacy for our families and his dedication to dismantling the systems of poverty and inequity! We appreciate you so much, Anthony, and can’t wait to see the impact you will make in the future!!!

This is an exceedingly heartbreaking time. Our Black communities are grieving because institutionalized racism is literally making it impossible for people to breathe. White supremacy is the common thread connecting unspeakably horrible incidents: from the police officer taking George Floyd’s life, to the three other officers standing silently by, to the police officers opening fire unannounced on Tony McDade two days later, to the day in March when police officers stormed with a no-knock warrant into Breonna Taylor’s apartment, to the arrests—months later—of the armed men who chased Ahmaud Arbery down on a tragic day in February. White supremacy is behind the recent Central Park incident, in which a woman called the cops and weaponized her whiteness against a local birder who had simply asked her to leash her dog. ​ Police kill: Black and Latinx communities and other people of color are disproportionately targeted in public space and in the privacy of their homes. These deaths are a terrifying betrayal of justice, and they must stop. There are related betrayals of justice, too. We see them in the ways that—by action and omission—actors within the legal system and police unions have protected and perpetuated police and state-sanctioned violence. We see them in the ways that protestors are treated and talked about: how armed protestors of shelter-in-place are tolerated in state capitol buildings, while police in riot gear spray tear gas and fire rubber bullets at protestors who simply and desperately want systematic police murders to stop. ​ There are still more betrayals of justice submerged beneath the surface of what seems like a vast and silent iceberg. White supremacy is at the root of why our Black communities and all our communities of color are suffering a disproportionate share of COVID-19 infections and fatalities. It is why racial disparities exist in health outcomes, from preterm birth to premature mortality. It is why the net worth of a typical white family is about ten times more than that of a typical Black family; it is why more than 50% of homeless families across the United States are Black. It is why we don’t talk about these things as urgently and purposefully as we should; it is why they are realities and not history lessons, never to be repeated. ​ Poverty kills: it often kills more quietly and insidiously than outright murder, but it devastates communities of color just as systematically as state-sanctioned violence against them. These things that kill—police murders, poverty—are part and parcel of a structural devaluation of Black lives across our public life. In the era of COVID-19, our partners at Hospitality House and the California Preterm Birth Initiative have called out: “Racism is the pandemic.” We cannot un-see the racism that COVID-19 has laid bare. ​ This roiling moment in our nation’s history is a moment of reckoning for us all. Will it be a moment of incrementalism, or will it be a movement towards large-scale transformation? Will we reform white supremacist systems to make them less racist, or will we, in the words of Audre Lorde, dismantle and rebuild our systems in the image of safe, inclusive, multi-racial, and anti-racist communities. ​ Compass Family Services stands in solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives and with Black families and communities in the Bay Area and beyond. We resist with them and we roll up our sleeves as allies and partners with them in the work of anti-racism. As an agency with a white executive director, we are mindful to use the power and privilege that comes with whiteness to end rather than perpetuate white supremacy. Our senior leadership team is partnering with our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging workgroup to explore specific actions and strategies our agency will pursue across programs and departments to bring a racial justice lens to our work with homeless families. ​ The COVID-19 public health crisis has revealed our fates as profoundly interconnected. So are the solutions: public investments that put resources directly in the hands of impacted communities; public processes that hear their input and build on their ideas and needs; and public systems that intersect to lift people up rather than keep them down. We need public budgets that reflect public priorities such as schools and social services, and we need public values that value families and the work we have called “essential” throughout this pandemic. ​ There are no words to express our outrage, or the empathy and solidarity we hold for the grief, rage, and trauma that Black communities across our country are experiencing right now, and have lived with all their lives. But we will not be silent, and we will not give up the fight. ​ For more context about what we’re reading and how we’re reflecting on white supremacy and racial equity, please refer to the following resources: Dismantling Racism Racial Equity Tools