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Our Work

Our Purpose

all children and families deserve access to high quality education, living wage jobs, family-supporting benefits, affordable housing, and a voice in the decisions that affect us.

Since 1975, Coleman Advocates has pioneered programs and policies to expand opportunity for San Francisco’s children, youth and families. Many of these hard-won programs and policies have served as models adopted by communities all over the country.

Coleman currently focuses on building more effective, equitable, and supportive public schools in San Francisco and beyond. We believe the transformation of our educational system requires the involvement of the entire community—not just teachers, school administrators, and politicians. Our organizational model has evolved over the years and today combines the development of rigorous policy proposals and implementation plans with deep community engagement and leadership development involving youth and parents.

While we work to increase opportunity for all young people in San Francisco, our primary focus is fighting to advance rights, safety, and full inclusion of low-income people of color. We know that quality education is key to future economic security, individual well-being, and social participation.

San Francisco is considered a liberal bastion, but the racial achievement gap and racial opportunity gap indicate how far we still need to go to achieve true equity.

Our Core Values

Grassroots Community Leadership

We believe that the people most affected by a problem must be the ones who determine and fight for the solutions.

Education as a Human Right

The fight for quality education, as a fundamental human right and a strategy of upward mobility for low-income people and people of color, is central to our work to keep families in San Francisco.

Equity and Social Justice

We are actively committed to the fight for equity and social justice, as they relate to race, class, gender and other areas of disenfranchisement, in our schools and communities.

Movement Building

We must form strategic alliances with other community organizations to build a movement capable of winning long-term systemic social change because we cannot achieve our vision alone.

Unity and Solidarity

We are a multigenerational, multiracial, multicultural and multilingual organization and we prioritize creating spaces for people of different ages, languages, races, and ethnicities to learn about and from each other, build community, and develop a collective vision for change. Together, we are stronger.

Youth at the Center

Youth have been—and will always be—at the forefront of social change movements. At the same time that we centralize the leadership of young people, we understand that building community around an intergenerational model is essential to effective community organizing.

Innovation

We are working to solve some of our community’s toughest challenges and this requires bold and innovative leadership. We must consistently challenge ourselves to leverage our strengths in new and creative ways… to think, dream, and act outside of the box.

Strategies

Coleman Advocates is nationally known as a community-organizing powerhouse. We know the voices, perspectives, experiences, and expertise of Black and Brown youth and parents are essential to building equity, education justice, and racial justice in our schools and communities.
The heart of our work is leadership development and empowerment. We’ve trained thousands of young people and parents to organize for change.

Our children, youth, and parent leadership programs are highly successful. Since 1975, our children, youth, and parent member-leaders have developed, mobilized for, and won many policy and budget changes, improving conditions and expanded opportunities for hundreds of thousands of San Francisco children and families.

Build a Base and develop leaders

Coleman brings large numbers of youth and families together to build power and take action to change systems and hold systems accountable to the community’s needs and interests. We support members to take leadership in changing the conditions in their lives, develop a shared analysis of community problems, build skills and confidence, organize other leaders and supporters, and participate in collective action.

Organize Policy and Budget Campaigns

Coleman supports our members to conduct research to identify policy solutions to community problems and to choose, lead, and win policy and budget reform campaigns. We focus on developing new resources and implementing systems change to end the school-to-prison pipeline, end the criminalization and policing of Black and Brown students, and expand district opportunities for parent education and leadership.

Engage and educate voters

Coleman carries out nonpartisan voter engagement efforts to educate and empower historically disenfranchised communities in San Francisco and to hold our elected officials accountable to our communities’ interests.

Monitor Systems and Policies

Coleman members play critical system “watchdog” roles in our schools and communities, sometimes as leaders in official district and city task forces and working groups, to analyze problems, design solutions, support policy implementation, and ensure that institutions are held accountable to commitments made.

Build Alliances and Coalitions

Coleman helps to develop and lead local, state, and national coalitions and alliances to build bridges across issues and communities and grow the diverse base and abundant resources necessary for long-term systems change.

Our member-led campaigns create waves far beyond San Francisco.

Our successes have inspired similar reforms throughout the state and country.

Help us create more change.

Donate Today

Help us create a city of hope, justice and opportunity for all children & families in San Francisco!

Donate Today