About

Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates, established in 1994, is a grassroots organization founded, governed, and operated by long-term members of the vulnerable Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco. Our programs combine community organizing with education, advocacy, and direct services. We seek to build the neighborhood’s capacity as a self-determining, fully autonomous force for social change in today’s San Francisco.

The Advocates’ work has always connected residents with environmental justice issues in our neighborhood, seeking to increase community participation in environmental decision-making and to build skills in the community to support a cleaner environmental future.

The longstanding history of broken promises in Bayview Hunters Point underscores the need for an organized, unified community voice to shape important public issues. Our organization’s primary areas of focus are the adverse health impacts experienced by neighborhood residents due to poor air, soil, and water quality; crisis-level displacement pressures; and under-employment.

We aim to help Black people and immigrants remain and thrive in Bayview Hunters Point by taking strategic action to slow and reverse the rapid displacement of diverse working class populations from San Francisco. Through environmental advocacy as well as workforce and economic development, we hope to preserve the diversity of our historic neighborhood.

We have launched several programs in recent years, including:

  • Southeast Community Council: We train community members in policy advocacy and organizing, following environmental justice principles.
  • Community Toxic Index: An initiative to comprehensively catalogue neighborhood hazardous waste sites requiring environmental agency regulation.
  • Co-op Startup Hub: A mentorship and business development program for cooperative and public-serving enterprises.
  • Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates Collection: An online library of documents related to Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a toxic waste site, in partnership with UCSF.
  • COVID-19 pandemic outreach: Multiple programs supporting marginalized, immigrant, and unhoused neighbors. We distribute PPE, food, and information about public health.
  • Bayview Co-op: We are in the planning stage for a community-owned grocery store. Our current work includes:
    • Free-food programs serving hundreds of unhoused and food-insecure families each week.
    • Supplying San Francisco’s Food Pharmacy program.
    • An affordable CSA-style produce box program for neighborhood residents.
    • An extensive online and print-based marketing study on local food access and buying habits.

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