

An email grows to a group text and the Latino Task Force emerges
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how the Latino Task Force first emerged in March, but several members say it began with an early email Veronica Garcia, a policy analyst at the Human Rights Commission, sent Tulier-Laiwa, her one-time mentor. Garcia, 35, was seeing the crisis unfold firsthand as her father, a dishwasher, got laid off. That email quickly morphed into a text message chain and conversation with others: Roberto Hernandez, known unofficially as the Mayor of the Mission, who is generally working on Carnaval at this time of the year; Tracy Gallardo, now a legislative aide to District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton; and Gloria Romero, who now works at Instituto Familiar de la Raza. Except for Garcia, they were all elders with years of experience in community-based organizations and city government. Seeking a voice on education, they reached out to Gabriela López, the vice president of the school board — and, at 30, less than half the age of some of the founding board members. López had never worked in a community-based organization (CBO), an experience that Tulier-Laiwa and Gallardo view as foundational. But Gallardo had worked on López’s campaign for the school board and had a hunch she would be effective. “She didn’t come from a Mission CBO,” says Gallardo, “but she has been kicking ass and doing super amazing incredible work.” Early on, the group found ready backing from Garcia’s boss Sheryl Davis, the executive director of the Human Rights Commission, a Black leader who has a strong belief in grass-roots enterprises. You need staffing? Check. Fliers? Check. Relief from your regular duties? Let me call your boss. “She leveraged her position to help us,” said Garcia. And Davis, who is delighted with the results, plans to continue. She has her eye on the city’s August budget process and has already asked the mayor to think about funding from-the-ground-up community partnerships. She is preparing to go into the budget negotiations armed with input from multiple town halls on how the city should spend the money it plans to re-allocate from the SFPD. Walton, who along with District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen has worked closely with the task force noted another reason for the task force’s early and continued visibility. “They came together to respond without relying on philanthropy or waiting for the government to come in,” Walton said. In other words, they took the lead. And many followed. The task force has ultimately spun off 13 committees and various subcommittees, many of them staffed with people who work for community-based organizations. It’s a bench deep with talent ready to jump in and play, but the executive board is picky. “We don’t have time for people to be on a committee so they can put it on their resume,” said Tulier-Laiwa, a one-time lowrider with multiple degrees who others talk about with a mix of respect and just a little bit of fear. “We ask, ‘what can you bring in?’ We’re very action-oriented.” Added Romero, who once rode a dirt bike, and also accumulated degrees and experience: “We’re Latina women — community workers. We are essential. We have been, throughout history. We get things done.” That is clear during the hour-long Monday morning calls the executive committee has with its committees, more than 30 community-based organizations and a cadre of local elected officials. What could easily have been a case of too many well-meaning people running in too many directions, is instead a well-oiled machine under Tulier-Laiwa’s control. Each speaker gets one minute. “Do not mess with Valeria and talk over your time limit,” says Ronen, who often participates and has watched the force take charge. “It is truly not an exaggeration to say that their work is extraordinary.” For Ruth Barajas, who is on the labor committee, runs the Resource Hub, and is also director of workforce and education programs for the Bay Area Community Resources, the task force works because of what she witnesses on those Monday morning calls. “It doesn’t matter if it is an organization, an elected official or someone who works for a state officeholder,” she says. “We’re all held to the same standard of accountability.” It’s on the Monday calls and on other committee Zooms that ideas become reality. Early on in the crisis, for example, monolingual Spanish speakers lacked information about COVID. Some kept their stores open because public service announcements were often only in English. Some parents wondered how their children would attend school online when they had no internet connection. Susana Rojas, the president of Calle24 Cultural District, and Oscar Grande, who works for Mission Housing, staffed the task force communication committee. They put out Spanish language ads on local radio and volunteers went out to talk to residents. But they had a problem: Information changed so fast that ads and fliers became outdated in hours. Grande talked to Julio Lara, his colleague at Mission Housing. What would you do, he asked? Lara understood the problem because he too was having trouble updating Mission Housing’s one-page resource page. Lara suggested a website. Suddenly, he and others became the Latino Task Force’s website subcommittee. Five weeks later in mid-May the website launched with oversight by Grande, Rojas, Tulier-Laiwa and Gallardo (the latter two may not be techies, but they know what it is like to be “linked to death”). When Lara’s work popped up on Mission Local’s social media stream, it was a gift – comprehensive and easy to use. At Mission Local, we understood the difficulty of the task – our own resource page had become unwieldy.Food came first
Early on, as the task force heard from community-based organizations and Hernandez fielded calls from people in need, it became clear that the weekly deliveries from the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank would not be enough to meet the demand. Hernandez first started handing out food from his garage, but “word got out,” he says, and more people showed up, so he moved to the Food Hub on Alabama Street. By the second week the numbers jumped to 1,000 and by late April the Latino Task Force was handing out 7,000 boxes of food week, working Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays with 113 volunteers. Hernandez spent hours between pantry days making calls to find new donations, but often food – steaks, bread, milk – arrived unbidden.




A collaboration with UCSF researchers and doctors
In early April, UCSF researchers and doctors at San Francisco General Hospital watched aghast as the Latinx population, generally, 40 percent of its patients, climbed to 80 percent – nearly all with COVID-19. UCSF researcher Dr. Diane Havlir, wrote in an email that they wanted a study “to understand COVID-19 transmission at the community level, in an affected community (in the backyard of where I work at SFGH) and to use the information to both help the community and to advance the science.” The question was, how to pull it off. One of Havlir’s first calls was to Diane Jones, a retired HIV nurse she knew well and someone with deep roots in the community including a long-time friendship with Gallardo. They knew one another through LocoBloco, a drumming and arts group that has been around for more than 26 years and has turned many a Mission youth into a drummer. It wasn’t long before UCSF was talking to Supervisor Ronen and the Latino Task Force. The idea met with some resistance. Would this be top-down? Why only one Census Tract? Why a study and not just testing? Trust – the community’s trust in Gallardo and Gallardo’s faith in Jones – won out, and the Latino Task Force jumped on board. “Everyone switched into emergency mode, thinking we have to get this done now,” said Jon Jacobo, head of the task force’s health committee, who marshaled more than 300 recruits to distribute fliers and go door to door in the district to talk to residents. At Mission Local, we too had heard resistance from residents, so getting a visit from locals who spoke Spanish and could answer questions meant that more people were likely to show up for tests that would then be used to measure indicators such as the prevalence of COVID-19 in the Mission, the population most impacted and the strains of the virus.
