Richmond Residents Tell the City What Works, What Doesn’t and What’s Missing

Community Richmond Residents Tell the City What Works, What Doesn’t and What’s Missing By San Francisco Richmond ReView on November 10, 2026 • ( Leave a comment ) By Neal Wong Roughly 60 neighborhood residents gathered at the Richmond Recreation Center on Oct. 22 to tell city agency representatives what the City is doing well and what it could do better. The evening was one of 14 Family Summits the City is holding as it prepares its first joint plan for children and families. Information gathered from the summits and a citywide survey, open through the end of the year, is set to help the City shape a plan for children and families. The Board of Supervisors will also consider the information in the next City budget. District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan, who represents the Richmond, said the series of summits is meant to check that City’s budget of nearly $17 billion is funding what residents actually need. “Across our City, we want to make sure that those dollars are actually well spent. Meeting needs and the demands,” Chan said. Kimberly Wicoff, director of San Francisco’s Our Children, Our Families Initiative, said the effort grew out of Proposition J in 2024. She said it is the first time the City has had a concerted effort to do joint planning with the school district, the mayor’s office and 13 city departments. “We can’t do planning without listening to our families first,” Wicoff said. “It’s so critical that any plans that we make, especially when we really want to coordinate so many different areas, are grounded in the voices and experiences of our families.” The City is posting summaries of each summit online a few weeks afterward. Those summaries, along with survey results and other focus groups, will feed into a formal needs assessment to be completed next spring. “Then the City is actually going to develop a plan to respond to all those recommendations,” Wicoff said. Cliff Yee, a Richmond resident and the Richmond Neighborhood Center’s Chief Strategy Officer, wants to see a clear, hyperlocal emergency plan. “When we had the weekend-long blackout in December, it became clear to me that with my professional hat as the acting executive director, at the time, of the Richmond Neighborhood Center, that we were responsible for homebound seniors,” Yee said. “I’m not sure who is looking out for them if we’re not.” Yee said part of the answer is helping neighbors get to know one another, such as through block parties paired with Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT) training. Yee said he sees participatory budgeting – where community members decide how to spend a portion of a municipal budget – as another way to build connection. Residents in District 7 use the process, and he proposed a version for District 1. “There’s not enough opportunities for people to gather in spaces like this to just have the conversation,” Yee said. Bessie Natareno oversees the Richmond Neighborhood Center’s Beacon afterschool programs at Roosevelt and Presidio middle schools. Natareno is also a parent. She was able to attend the event because her son’s school in another neighborhood runs a similar program. She loves the school but worries about class sizes. “Fourth graders in a room of 28 kids is not going to be conducive to academics,” Natareno said. “We need more teachers. We need more schools.” She said other parents at her table praised City services such as afterschool programs and expanded transitional kindergarten, but they also described a system that is hard to use. “The City has these really great programs, but it’s just not enough for everyone,” Natareno said. Staffing is part of the problem. According to Natereno, one school’s afterschool program can’t take more students because it can’t find more staff, and some schools have no morning care. Natareno asked the City to put more money into community-based organizations, so they can fill gaps like those. For BART District 8 director and Richmond resident Janice Li, her goals at the event were to take part in the process and meet her neighbors. “It might take five, 10 plus years of living on your block before you start to really get to know your neighbors, even on your own block,” Li said. “But when the PG&E blackouts happened, suddenly we’re sort of forced to check in on one another.” Li said she was encouraged by the turnout, but after attending hundreds of similar community meetings on various topics, what matters to her is if and how the city will follow through. “I think at this point the real question is how is the City going to take in all the feedback coming from all these different family summits and turn that into something actionable,” Li said. “There’s a lot of optimism and energy here, but ultimately, you have to do something.” Share this: Share on X (Opens in new window) X Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Like this: Like Loading… Related Categories: Community Tagged as: Community , Richmond District , Richmond Recreation Center , Richmond Review