Some drama erupted this past week over a deal, seemingly backed by a broad swath of city leaders, to hand over operational control of a beloved Fillmore neighborhood community center to a nonprofit without seeking community consensus.

A lease was ready to be signed last week with a respected local nonprofit to oversee management and programing at Ella Hill Hutch Community Center in the Fillmore, with the mayor and multiple city supervisors in support. That nonprofit is Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, which is based nearby in Lower Pac Heights, and which already has multiple contracts with the city.

Ella Hill Hutch Community Center is a 30-year-old community hub that provides youth services, healthy food assistance programs, and summer and afterschool programs for neighborhood children. Last year it became a casualty of a scandal involving the former leader of the city's Dream Keeper initiative, Sheryl Davis, and her romantic partner/housemate James Spingola, who were both criminally charged in March for a raft of alleged felonies including self-dealing and the personal use of nonprofit funds — and Spingola was the head of a nonprofit, previously run by Davis, called Collective Impact, which had a contract with the city to operate Ella Hill Hutch.

The fallout from the scandal appears to have created rifts in the Fillmore neighborhood, which has historically been a center of Black cultural life for San Francisco, and has accumulated a growing set of grievances over the city's inhumane redevelopment efforts five and six decades ago, the trauma of which has been compounded in recent years by benign neglect. The most recent grievance: the closure of the neighborhood's only supermarket, a Safeway that was built with redevelopment funds over 40 years back, and which is now slated for demolition and another redevelopment as mostly market-rate housing.

The Chronicle reported last week on pushback from community leaders over the management contract for Ella Hill Hutch Community Center, which included a quote from longtime neighborhood elder statement, the Reverend Doctor Amos C. Brown. Speaking for others in the community, Brown pointed to the director of Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, former Davis ally and former Human Rights Commissioner Shakirah Simley, saying, "She aspires to this position in the community, but she is not connected with it. She has not communicated with people nor demonstrated a sense of the history of this community or any knowledge of the collective values that truly make for strong minority communities."

So, now, just days after that Chronicle report, the city has reversed course, per the Chronicle, and that no-bid lease with Booker T has been scrapped. The Recreation and Parks Department is going to be temporarily taking over Ella Hill Hutch while community stakeholders have a chance to give input on a future operator to the city.

A spokesperson for Mayor Daniel Lurie tells the paper that while Booker T remains a "valued partner to the city," they will be pursuing a more competitive process with "thoughtful community engagement" for the next lease.

"We are ensuring our kids remain safe and no family or child is left without access to services and support this summer," the spokesperson said, regarding the temporary Rec & Parks takeover.

The board of Booker T. Washington Community Service Center also issued a statement saying, "We share a deep commitment to the Fillmore community and to ensuring that every family, senior and child in this neighborhood has access to the services and support they deserve... We believe the path forward requires a broader, more deliberate process that includes additional community input."

The neighborhood remains upset by the now seven-year vacancy at the Fillmore Heritage Center, a product of redevelopment that was completed in the mid aughts and promised to revitalize a long dormant corridor in the Fillmore — and to bring jazz music back to the neighborhood as well via a San Francisco branch of Yoshi's, the famed Oakland jazz venue and sushi restaurant. A decade later, both Yoshi's and the other restaurant in the center, 1600 on Fillmore, had closed, and the process to find new tenants for the spaces has now dragged on for nearly another decade after that.

The scandal involving Davis, who also formerly led the Human Rights Commission during the London Breed administration, cast a pall over the Dream Keeper initiative at large, which had been a racial equity effort in 2020 and 2021 to redirect city funds from law enforcement to Black-led nonprofits. It came to light in 2024 that Davis, in addition to allegedly misusing funds, had directed $1.5 million in city grants to Collective Impact in an apparentconflict of interest, given that it was run by her live-in partner, Spingola.

A city audit later found that the total amount of questionable and/or frivolous spending by Davis, via the Human Rights Commission, was around $4.6 million.

Previously: Fillmore Residents Say They Feel Ignored By City Over Deal to Keep Community Center Open