Meet Windy Click and Dewayne Cobb, both of whom came to Hospitality House by different paths – but similar journeys. Both faced significant hardships early in their lives, and both spent many years in prison. While some may have seen them as irredeemable, at Hospitality House we value life experience as a source of knowledge and wisdom to be shared with others. As Windy says, “Hospitality House takes pride in second chances.”

Since we opened our doors almost 50 years ago, Hospitality House has been a leader in hiring and developing peer staff – people from our communities with similar life stories, similar lessons, and similar triumphs to be shared with those who utilize our programs. Because we have an abiding belief in the transformative power of equals helping equals, we have invested deeply in this model. As a result, nearly all of our staff are peers.

Economic inequality threatens peer staff model

 Although Hospitality House’s peer staff have a deep and unmatched connection to our community, they also face incredibly daunting challenges in their work. The economic pressures of San Francisco’s affordability crisis affect our staff more urgently than ever. The work itself has also become more intense, as the heightened pressures of physical and social displacement in our Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods have led to ever-increasing stress, palpable desperation, and most recently, increased violence upon those in our communities already marginalized by poverty and inequality.

Crisis calls for bold response

Hospitality House is taking bold measures to invest in our most important asset, our peer leaders. We have launched a unique staff development initiative encouraging and supporting continuing education. We’ve invested organizational resources in an innovative peer-to-peer coaching model to enhance internal wellness as we build community resilience. We’ve just completed an intensive, organization-wide visioning and planning process that produced a ground-breaking Theory of Change blueprint to guide our work as Hospitality House enters its next half-century of peer development and community building.

Hospitality House needs YOU

Ensuring our sustainability into the foreseeable future depends on renewed staff resolve and resilience, improved organizational capacity, strengthened internal infrastructure, sharpened focus on solutions -- and you.

We’re asking you to join us as we continue to fight to ensure that those who dedicate themselves to making the heart of San Francisco a better place for all, our peer leaders, can continue to live in the City while it becomes that better place.

Above all, we’re asking you to join Windy and Dewayne – and dozens like them – as they continue to take pride in the place that takes pride in second chances -- Hospitality House.

Please help us reach our goal by making a donation today in honor of second chances. Or make a donation on behalf of someone you believe needs a second chance.

You can also help us by sharing this campaign with your friends and families on your social networks using the buttons to your left.

Keep the conversation going about the power of second chances!  Share your personal "second chance" stories in the Join the Conversation section below or on our Facebook page here. 

UPDATE 

Our friends at Zendesk have agreed to match every donation, dollar for dollar, until we reach our campaign goal! Please help us reach our goal by donating, or sharing this campaign with your own second chance story with us here or on facebook