Fired SF SAFE director Kyra Worthy worked for Dwayne Jones on Gavin Newsom boondoggle
After two years and nearly $4 million, Communities of Opportunity had little to show for it except overpaid consultants and a performance by Def Jam
When Mission Local reporter Lana Tleimat snapped a photo of Dwayne Jones exiting a courtroom after pleading not guilty to bribery charges for her Sept. 1, 2023, article, she likely didn’t realize that the woman to his left was Kyra Worthy, who is now facing charges of her own.
Jones, who ran RDJ Enterprises alongside his wife and friends, was arrested this past summer on multiple charges, including six counts of bribery and 23 counts of financial conflict of interest. Worthy has directed San Francisco Safety Awareness for Everyone (SF SAFE), a nonprofit launched in 1976 to provide crime-prevention services to the San Francisco Police Department, since 2018, where a recently released report by the city controller’s office alleges she spent $80,000 in grant money on “ineligible or excessive expenses” including an over-the-top trip to Lake Tahoe, luxury gift boxes, limo services to an exclusive club, and more. So why was Worthy in court supporting Jones? Like many others in the ongoing City Hall scandal, she worked with him.
Jones’s reputation at City Hall precedes him. Former San Francisco supervisor Chris Daly once said, “If you are going to have an operation where you’re buying political support in the southeast part of the town, Dwayne Jones is the guy.” I’ve written extensively about Jones being a kingpin in San Francisco’s southeast corruption corridor, working alongside former DPW director Mohammed Nuru (serving seven years in prison for fraud), District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton (who calls Jones “his mentor”), and former SFPUC general manager Harlan Kelly (headed for sentencing this summer after a jury convicted him of fraud). Jones also worked closely with Kelly’s SFPUC chief strategy officer and assistant general manager of external affairs (and real life romantic affair) Juliet Ellis, who stepped down after Kelly’s arrest. Most of Jones’s scamming happened as Ellis’s favorite middleman in the SFPUC Community Benefits pay-for-play program, which I wrote about in a July 2020 Marina Times exposé, but Jones got his start working for the city in 2004 as director of the Mayor’s Office of Community Development under Gavin Newsom, where, in 2006, he rose to the rank of deputy chief of staff.
In 2004 during his State of the City address, Newsom announced the Communities of Opportunity program, patterned after a similar endeavor in New York's Harlem, to help families living in public-housing projects with after-school tutoring, job placement, health care, and addiction treatment. Newsom also ponied up $370,000 in city funds to cover the cost of providing a top mayoral deputy to oversee the program. His name? Dwayne Jones.
In October of 2007, Jones hired Kyra Worthy as his Community Education Manager, tasked with “ensuring the implementation of effective, mission driven, culturally relevant programming that serves the youth in the community.” It wasn’t Worthy’s first gig in San Francisco. From May 2002 through Sept. 2003 she served as director of program services for the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco, and she took over as director of the Bayview Hunters Point Center in Sept. 2003, leaving in Sept. 2007, just one month before Jones hired her. During the course of Jones’s and Worthy’s tenures, Communities of Opportunity spent lavishly:
— $570,882 for conferences (mostly for hosting a gathering in San Francisco in 2007 for community development professionals).
— $162,000 for events, including a Comedy Shop performance with six comedians and the hip-hop group Def Jam.
— $464,823 for consultants, including $300,000 in public relations.
— $399,000 for a program office and community staff.
— $298,637 for assorted community outreach.
The program also spent $1.6 million on funding for "community-based organizations and other services" — in other words, money that went right back into the pockets of Communities of Opportunity leaders and the providers they hired for the job.
In 2008, then-president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Aaron Peskin, ordered an audit of Communities of Opportunity, and as you might imagine, it wasn’t pretty. According to budget analyst Harvey Rose, the eight programs operated by a dozen nonprofits had spent nearly $4 million in private foundation and grant money with little to show for it (except, perhaps, memories of that private Def Jam performance).
Newsom’s spokesperson Nathan Ballard said at the time that the mayor made “no apologies" for his pet project, perhaps the biggest boondoggle of his San Francisco political career. Ballard also accused Peskin of being “on a vendetta” against the program, only ordering the audit because he knew it was “near and dear to the mayor."
For his part, Jones insisted both donors and program participants were happy with it, telling reporters Phil Matier and Andy Ross, "They knew coming in there would be no overnight miracles, and there would be lessons to be learned.” That, however, was just another one of Jones’s many lies. Newsom and sponsors soon pulled the plug on Communities of Opportunity, steering over 1,200 families at the housing projects into services already offered by the city.
You would think Newsom would have fired Jones and blacklisted him from working with the city in the future, but in typical City Family fashion, Jones continued to serve in Newsom’s office until 2010. In 2011, then-Mayor Ed Lee appointed Jones to serve on a subcommittee that monitored contracts (you can’t make this stuff up) under the Human Rights Commission.
As for Worthy, she landed on her feet, too, as manager of programs and services at Parent University at the Edgewood Center for Children and Families, where she worked from April 2009 through July 2010. Her job duties included “providing guidance and oversight in the development and implementation of multi-disciplinary, high-impact programming for Bayview Hunter’s Point residents” and “building the future constituency and leadership of the program by engaging Bayview Residents, young people and other marginalized communities in San Francisco.” From there she spent a year as student support services supervisor in the community engagement department at the West Contra Costa Unified School District (Aug. 2010 through June 2012), and then went on to the executive director position at the nonprofit For Richmond (Aug. 2013 through Aug. 2018) before taking the job as executive director at SF SAFE.
In a 2019 article in the San Francisco Examiner, newly elected District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton is pictured walking with Worthy in the Bayview after bringing SF SAFE onboard to help gather input from the community, inform policy, and create written protocols for issues including truancy, traffic safety, and violence. Worthy and Walton said they also planned to conduct an audit of the services provided by local nonprofits — a sort of “accountability report card,” as Worthy described the endeavor.
“It’s auditing the services, because all of these nonprofits are being funded and there still are these persistent gaps in service,” Worthy explained. Yes, Walton agreed, “audits should be done.”
Fear of intimidation and political correctness have taken over! The “flock” thickens! Thanks as always