Wednesday night’s Glide Annual Holiday Jam featured a surprise appearance by folk legend Joan Baez at the fundraiser for Glide’s holiday meals and service programs, and she stunned with a three-song set that featured John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

For many in the Bay Area, the holiday season really begins with the Glide Annual Holiday Jam, generally held a week or two before Thanksgiving, and often raising more than $2 million in a single evening for Glide’s charitable efforts. And sometimes news is made at the event, like last year when we learned that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was stepping in for the famed lunch with Warren Buffett auction that benefits Glide, after Buffett’s retirement from the annual fundraiser.

This may not be as newsy, but it certainly riveted the crowd that Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Joan Baez made a surprise, unscheduled appearance onstage at The Masonic for Wednesday night's 2024 Glide Holiday Jam, and started her cameo mini-set with John Lennon’s “Imagine.”    

Baez played three numbers, also performing “Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round” and “Wade in the Water.” This was followed by the announced headliners Lenny Williams (Tower of Power) and Sacramento’s The Philharmonik.

It maybe should not have been a complete shock that Joan Baez showed up for the Glide charity gala Wednesday, as she is a member of Glide’s Honorary Committee, along with Willie Brown, Michael Franti, Roberta Flack, Goapele, and others. She also performed at the Reverend Cecil Williams Celebration of Life this past May after Williams passed away at age 94, in the number seen below.

And on an unrelated note, check out these tiny Glide church buildings that were the centerpieces of all the tables at Wednesday’s Glide Holiday Jam.

Glide is of course gearing up for the holiday season, with their famed Thanksgiving at Glide that serves nearly 2,500 Thanksgiving meals to the needy (November 28, and you can donate frozen turkeys to the Glide Turkey Drive on November 26-27), the Glide Toy Drive (Thursday, December 19), and the Glide Christmas Eve Luncheon Celebration that serves House of Prime Rib to those in need (Friday, December 24). You can volunteer for or contribute to if you wish to support.

Related: Glide Primes Up to Serve House of Prime Rib Christmas Eve Feast, and Give Out More Than 2,000 Toys [SFist]

Image: Joe Kukura, SFist

You still have a little time to donate to Glide’s Toy Wonderland toy drive that will provide 2,000 toys to SF kids in need, and of course the gigantic House of Prime Rib Christmas Eve brunch is slated to serve 3,000 pounds of prime rib on Sunday.

The holidays are busy times at San Francisco’s charitable giving powerhouse known as Glide. During last month’s Thanksgiving celebration, the interdenominational church known for feeding the needy served turkey dinner to an estimated 2,400 people, according to NBC Bay Area. Then two weeks later, their annual Grocery Bag Giveaway provided 4,400 families with food for holiday meals.

But as we had into the week before Christmas, SFist spoke with some of Glide’s leaders about two of their biggest and most challenging events of the holiday season; Tuesday’s Toy Wonderland which will provide more than 2,000 holiday gifts to kids in need, and the grandaddy of them all, Glide’s House of Prime Rib Christmas Eve Brunch at which more than 3,000 pounds of prime rib will be served.

The toys are being packed in the Glide pews with care as of Monday afternoon, as we see in the photo above of new Glide CEO Dr. Gina Fromer, who along with volunteers are packing more than 2,000 gifts to be spread among around 200 kids. That means each kid gets a generous bag of multiple gifts. Volunteers will be packing and sorting toys at Glide until well into Monday evening, in advance of Glide’s Toy Sort & Giveaway scheduled for Tuesday, December 19 from 9 a.m.-12 p.m.

“The Tenderloin is home to the highest concentration of children in San Francisco,” Glide media relations manager Gabby Deyi tells SFist. “After the pandemic, with that amount of food insecurity and job loss, with the economic inflation that we’re all experiencing, a lot of families are sacrificing their holidays — especially giving gifts to their children — in order to do other things, whether that’s buy a car seat, or feed their family. There’s actually a lot of kids who may not be experiencing the holidays the way that we may have been fortunate enough to.”

They’ll still be accepting and sorting toys until 8 p.m. Monday night, and you can drop by and make toy donations. (Note: They don’t take toys that represent guns or weapons, and they prefer toys that reflect the diversity of the community.)

Then Sunday, December 24 is Glide’s famed House of Prime Rib Christmas Eve Brunch (11 a.m.-1 p.m.), where the hungry are styled out with a meal from one of SF’s most famed restaurants.

“Joe Betz, the owner of House of Prime Rib, has donated just about 3,000 pounds of prime rib to our meal service,” Glide Foundation chief impact and strategy officer Jean Cooper tells us. “Which he’s done for the last 25-30 years.”

It’s the full meal with prime rib, mashed potatoes, a vegetable and a dessert. Glide will serve both breakfast and that prime rib brunch on Christmas Eve. “The whole day on Christmas Eve should be 2,500 meals,” Cooper says. Glide will also serve a Christmas Day meal on Monday, December 25, which will provide 2,500 people with “Christmas meals of ham, turkey and all the fixings.”

On both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, a program called Glide on the Go will also deliver hundreds of meals for free to those on the streets. “We prepare 250 to-go boxes,” according to Cooper. “They’re take-out boxes filled with prime rib, same thing we’re serving here at brunch that day. We send them out in our outreach vans, and they take them to people who are in encampments or living on the streets throughout San Francisco, so they can enjoy a nice prime rib meal as well.”

Glide’s minister of celebration Marvin K. White has big plans for Glide’s interdenominational Christmas Eve services before the House of Prime Rib brunch. (Services are scheduled for 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. Sunday).

“This year, as opposed to just having the choir sing to the congregation, we are having a sing-along. So we’ll have all the lyrics projected on the big 30-foot screen,” White tells SFist. “The invitation is for you to join your voice with other people, to hear yourself.”

And there’s one Christmas Day service Monday at 10 a.m. “We’re going to celebrate light,” he adds. “The Tenderloin could always use the hope that something is getting ready to radically shift. So everyone's going to get battery-operated candles, we’re going to dim [the lights], and we’re going to bring the light in, and we’re going to do it through song.”  

None of these toy giveaways or massive meals can happen without volunteers, and you can sign up to volunteer at Glide online. “On Christmas when we’re serving meals, we need as many hands and bodies as we can get,” Deyi says, noting that Glide serves three free meals a days, every day, 364 days a year (the only exception being January 1). “You can come with your friends, you can come with your family. I've been on a date to do it.”

If you’re not able to donate to the toy drive or volunteer, you can also support their mission with an online donation to Glide.

Related: Exclusive: Warren Buffett’s $53 Million Glide ‘Power of One’ Lunch Auction Taken On By Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff [SFist]

Top Image: Glide Memorial Church via Facebook

The annual Glide auction for lunch with Warren Buffett will now be an auction for lunch with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, as Benioff is taking over the annual charity auction that has fed San Francisco’s neediest residents to the tune of $53 million.

Many San Francisco residents are probably aware that the local charity powerhouse Glide Memorial Church feeds hundreds of needy San Franciscans every day, especially during their Thanksgiving meal drives and House of Prime Rib Christmas Eve dinners that provide quality holiday dinners for families in need. And you may realize that this is to some degree paid for by wealthy financier and philanthropist Warren Buffet’s power lunch auctions where people bid on a lunch with Buffett himself, which last year fetched an astonishing $19 million, and has raised a highly respectable $53 million over the course of the last 21 years.  

You may also realize that the 93-year-old Warren Buffett had said 2022 would be his final lunch auction. But he announced at Thursday night’s Glide Holiday Jam at the Masonic in SF that the annual Glide fundraiser Power of One Charity Auction Lunch is officially being handed off to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who will handle these annual power-lunch fundraising duties going forward.

“I’ve got good news for you tonight, Cecil,” Buffett told Glide’s Reverend Cecil Williams via video address. “I’m particularly impressed that Marc Benioff is going to do a wonderful job in the years to come, raising money having the lunch and improving on what I was able to do over the years.”

New president and CEO of Glide Dr. Gina Fromer confirmed the news to SFist. “Warren Buffett has basically passed the baton to Marc Benioff at Salesforce,” Dr. Fromer told SFist Thursday night. “He’s an amazing community guy, we’re so excited to work with him. And Warren will always forever be in our hearts.”

Benioff himself also confirmed the news in a video address to the Glide Holiday Jam audience Thursday night.

“I’m delighted to extend that program with all of us at Salesforce into the future, and be part of this amazing program,” Benioff said in his video segment.

It’s not clear when the bidding will start for the 2024 lunch with Benioff, but eBay has committed to continuing to host the auction on their platform.

Related: GLIDE’s ‘Lunch With Warren Buffett’ Auction Fetches Record $19 Million [SFist]

Images: (Left) NEW YORK, NEW YORK - OCTOBER 24: Marc Benioff attends the 2023 Time100 Next at Second on October 24, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Taylor Hill/FilmMagic via Getty Images) (Right) Figlinus via Wikimedia Commons

The annual Glide auction of a lunch with legendary investor Warren Buffett just finished its last-ever bidding, and it goes out on a high note of raising $19 million for poverty and hunger programs.

We knew six weeks ago with the announcement of this year’s annual Glide auction of a lunch with Warren Buffett that the 2022 auction would be the last. Buffett, the world’s eight-wealthiest person has done this auction 18 times now to benefit SF’s nonprofit GLIDE (formerly Glide Memorial Church), and GLIDE announced Friday that the auctions have “raised more than $53 million to support GLIDE’s transformative programs and services that lift people out of poverty, hunger, and homelessness, and advance equity through systems change.”

Nearly half of that $53 million came from this year’s winning bid. According to a press release from GLIDE, the auction “ended at 7:30 pm PDT on June 17, with a winning bid of $19,000,100.”

“On behalf of GLIDE and those we serve, I thank Warren Buffett for his unwavering generosity, partnership and dedication, and for his incredible contribution to our mission,” GLIDE President and CEO Karen Hanrahan said in a statement. “GLIDE continues to turn this generosity into opportunity and impact for thousands of people most in need."

For perspective, the last time they did this auction in 2019, the winning bid was just $4.6 million.

The winning bidder has chosen to remain anonymous, and we don’t know the date of the lunch. According to GLIDE’s release the lunch “will take place at a mutually beneficial date and time in the coming months.” We do know, though, that lunch will take place 3,000 miles away, at New York City’s Smith & Wollensky steakhouse.

Related: Warren Buffett Auctioning Off Lunch With Him in Benefit for Glide, One Last Time [SFist]

Image: The White House via Wikimedia Commons

2022 will offer your final opportunity to pay millions of dollars for a steakhouse luncheon with Warren Buffett, as the billionaire investor says he’s doing this Glide fundraiser for the final time.

Billionaire investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett is one of the good ones among the world’s wealthiest people, having pledged that “More than 99% of my wealth will go to philanthropy during my lifetime or at death.” (As opposed to, say, him just buying Twitter on some dick-swinging whim.) And Buffett has always had a special interest in Glide, the Tenderloin church formerly known as Glide Memorial Church, annually auctioning off a power lunch with him to the highest bidder.

Buffett started this tradition back in the year 2000, and through some of these years, Buffett has been the wealthiest person in America. (He’s now No. 5 in the world.) And over these 21 years of auctioning off lunch with the “Oracle of Omaha,” Buffett has raised $34,2 million for Glide and its homelessness support, free meals, and recovery programs.

And the 2022 auction is coming up, but Reuters reports that 2022 will be the final Warren Buffett lunch auction. Per Reuters, the bidding will be on eBay, and will be a six-day auction from June 12 to 17, 2022.

“Mr. Buffett’s treasured friendship with Glide will continue, but 2022 will be the grand finale of this particular event,” Glide president Karen Hanrahan said in a statement. It is not reported why this is “the grand finale,” but people, the man is now 91 years old.

Interested in bidding? Well, the bar is set at 2019’s record $4.57 million bid from cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun (the auction was not held in 2020 and 2021). And in another barrier to your winning this contest, the dinner is not even in San Francisco. It’s at Smith & Wollensky steakhouse in New York City.

Related: Generous Souls Willing to Donate Millions to Glide, In Exchange for a Steak Dinner with Warren Buffett [SFist]

Images: Left: USA International Trade Administration via Wikimedia Commons; Right: Figlinus via Wikimedia Commons

Every week SFist's Tenderloin correspondent brings us Urbane Studies, in which we investigate the finer points of city lore on individual street corners. This week: the angels of Glide Memorial Church, Mercy Housing, and a ministry of donut holes at the intersection of Taylor & Ellis.

"I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning."
--William Blake

How to speak about the unlovable, the difficult and defiled, that which the rest of the world judges as fallen? Far be it from us to preach the word, but if we may be so bold, the marriage of heaven and hell is never so evident as in the Tenderloin, especially at the intersection of Taylor and Ellis. Here is a place where cruelty is undercut by kindness, where the lost seem at times to outnumber the found. And yet we are not the ones who would pass judgment--neither is a certain church whose name is synonymous with social justice.

What can one say of Glide Memorial Methodist Church that has not been said before? They feed, they lead, and they attempt to make a difference in the lives of a population that has been judged by so-called better angels.

Some historical context: prior to the Great Depression, rich widow Lizzie Glide funded the construction of the church in memoriam to her husband, wealthy cattleman H.L. Glide. At the time, this part of the city was Lower Nob Hill, respectably middle class. We cannot guess what Lizzie would think of the church today, but given that the folks at Glide walk the walk of Christian compassion, even heathens like us get a little religion when we reflect upon its history. Radicalized in 1963 by Cecil Williams (you’ll remember him from our column two weeks ago), the church sought to address concerns within the community: poverty, substance abuse, mental health. If you’ve complained about it, chances are they've done something about it.

If you want to learn more about the good work of Glide, pick up a copy of Beyond the Possible: 50 Years of Radical Change In A Community Called GLIDE. If reading's not your bag (then why are you still here?), you could buy a Glide t-shirt. It'll make you look compassionate--so fashionable right now.

Strangely enough, due east of Glide is a big, fancy hotel. We'll leave off commenting on the Hilton this week, since the thing takes up an entire block, but it's worth remembering that BART didn't always run to SFO, so here could be found the Airport Bus Terminal. A 1985 New York Times travel piece noted that a trip to SFO cost $6 in 1985. A current trip from Civic Center to SFO will set a traveler back a little over $8. No wonder BART's broke.

Of Mercy Housing, we’ve written before. To date, the organization has renovated numerous crumbling SROs and helped foster a sense of belonging for those who tend not to belong. On the southwestern corner of our intersection, Mercy's Presentation Senior Community is a big, modern-looking affair, clean and fluroescently lit. But from 1869 until 1906, this was the Sacred Heart Presentation Convent and school, where girls of all races were educated, and where Irish who struck gold paid their soul-debts, gradually founding a small empire of Irish piety. As pioneering as the miners they set to civilizing, the hardy Irish nuns who first arrived in San Francisco in 1854 managed to carve a little Catholic heaven into this, the wickedest of cities. Today, the Sisters of the Presentation minister their message of service and literacy from the Bay Area south to Central America, proving that San Francisco is not nearly as wicked as everyone supposes.

At the southeast corner, Happy Donuts is of a piece with Tenderloin doughnuterias: few frills, ever-ready pots of coffee-scented water, a dependable selection of sweetly lacquered confections. Perhaps we are naturally a little suspicious of anything that purports to deliver happiness. Is Disneyland the happiest place on earth? Is heaven a place on earth? Can dough deliver the pleasures not found elsewhere in life? And yet online reviews of Happy Donuts belie claims of mirth, nevermind the senselessness in expecting freshness past 9AM. No matter the time of day, quality control can be assured if you follow the simple rule of surface area glazing. A glazed raised at 4PM? This is for rookies. Get a couple doughnut holes, for Happy Donuts' little nuggets are some of the better in the neighborhood, properly fluffy and perfectly glazed. If you're feeling flush, pick up a few dozen. Hand them out to everyone down the street. It's not part of the teaching a man to fish school of social skills, but "you are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them."

Urbane Studies with the Tenderloin Geographic Society appears every Monday. If you've missed any previous episodes, you can always catch up here.

On Saturday night at the Regency Ballroom the GLIDE Legacy Committee hosted a loosely black tie affair to celebrate several prominent San Franciscans who represent Glide Memorial Church's "legacy of love, leadership and community." Hundreds of guests, some of whom purchased their tickets at a discount through a group buying website, indulged in the opportunity to support Glide's charitable efforts by drinking sponsored Ketel One in the general vicinity of celebrity Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom.

Newsom's wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, was honored with this year's Janice Mirikitani Legacy Award for her work as director, writer and producer of the critically acclaimed documentary Miss Representation. Lite Gov. Newsom, on the other hand, was honored for his carefully styled coif with an endless barrage of cellphone-snapped photo opportunities.

San Francisco Forty-Niners star and all-around class act Vernon Davis was honored with the Cecil Williams Legacy Award for his many philanthropic efforts. So busy is Mr. Davis with his various projects including the Vernon and Vontae Davis Family Foundation, the Starkey Hearing Foundation, Pros for Africa and his own interior design agency, that he was unable to be honored in person at the event. For his efforts working to end child poverty and human trafficking, Giants pitcher Jeremy Affeldt was honored with the foundation's Community Hero award.

After all the awards were handed out and graciously accepted, Glide co-founders Cecil Williams and Janice Mirikitani made a short speech before shuffling offstage to make room for acclaimed (we're told) DJ King Most. The older attendees departed the scant few tables in the center of the ballroom in favor of an early bedtime, but the well-dressed twentysomethings at whom the party was aimed came to life under a striking picture of the second lady of California. DJ King Most played a set of Adele remixes and Montel Jordan tracks that most of the attendees last enjoyed at their eighth grade dance.

The night carried on until Midnight, when the more-sauced attendees who had carried on Glide's longstanding tradition of philanthropy-through-celebration by making quick work of all those gallons of free Ketel, spilled out on to Van Ness Avenue and slipped in to taxis and Uber Cabs ready to take them to their afterparty of choice.

When we checked in late yesterday afternoon, the bidding on lunch with Warren Buffett — auctioned off every year to benefit Glide's efforts to help the homeless in San Francisco — was hovering around $420,000. Not a bad haul, by any stretch, but kind of paltry compared to the $2.6 million Ted Weschler paid two years in a row to have lunch with the mind-bogglingly rich Nebraskan. (Weschler, it should be noted, ended up getting a job with Berkshire Hathaway afterwards, so the investment paid off?) Anyhow, a flood of last minute bids pushed the final charitable donation up to a record $3.45 million this year.

Unlike Weschler, this year's donor wished to remain anonymous, and Buffett doesn't expect to find his next big hire during the lunch at Smith and Wollensky's steak house in New York. Either way, it's always good news for the organization that Buffett called, "...maybe the most effective organization I've seen for people down on their luck."

If you're one of three people in San Francisco not familiar with Glide and the organization's work, here's that scene from The Pursuit of Happyness in which Will Smith and his kid attend their revelatory church service:

Previously: Generous Souls Willing to Donate Millions to Glide, In Exchange for a Steak Dinner with Warren Buffett
[BusinessWeek]

Every year Warren Buffett, the richest person in America to make his billions on something other than software we all despise, auctions off the opportunity to dine with him and seven friends at a New York power lunch for charity. The beneficiary of this year's charity auction is San Francisco's own Glide Memorial Church which Buffett has called, "...maybe the most effective organization I've seen for people down on their luck."

The charity stands to pull in a lot of money from Buffett's support — as NBC Bay Area points out, last year's lunch with Warren auction topped out at $2.6 million. As of Monday afternoon, bidding has already broken $2 million on the steak lunch at Smith & Wollensky's in New York City. Interested rich people have until Friday at 7:30 p.m. to top the current bidder, who seems pretty hungry for that prime rib.

[eBay Listing]
[NBCBayArea] via [Curbed]