Greetings! Want to be part of bringing more greenery to the gritty streets of San Francisco?  Last week DISH tenants and staff celebrated Spring by installing our first of six sidewalk gardens. Check out the transformation on Mission Street where we rolled up our sleeves with the help of our landscape architect, Jane Martin, and planted a bright new beautiful garden! See all of the fantastic progress documented in our Facebook album. These green spaces will provide not only a break from the concrete but also create opportunities for our tenants to care for the gardens and their community.

The garden includes African daisies, yucca trees, and white alyssum groundcover, among other varieties of hearty plants.

We need your help to bring this project to all of our buildings!

This spring, our tenants and friends will help us plant shade trees and sustainable sidewalk gardens at all six of our DISH buildings, breaking up the monotonous concrete jungle of the Tenderloin creating clean, green spaces in our City! We are grateful for the generous support of the City and County of San Francisco’s Community Challenge grant but we need about $15,000 to fill our current funding gap. Here’s how to help:

Bay to Breakers

Visit our “DISH-Breakers” page and join our Bay to Breakers team! Bay to Breakers is a “San Francisco Original.” Kind of like DISH–we were founded 6 years ago with the goal of providing quality housing to homeless San Franciscans who had a rough time succeeding anywhere else. Not only that, but we wanted to do it with a focus on improving the living conditions in the buildings, and creating supportive and welcoming communities to help people leave the streets PERMANENTLY. To help us do that, join our DISH-Breakers team for the 7-mile Bay to Breakers race on May 19. You can walk, run, or stumble your way to the finish line while raising funds to support DISH’s gardens. You commit to running the race and raising a few bucks for DISH, and we’ll get you registered for the race.

Drinks for DISH

Bay to Breakers not your idea of fun? Not to worry! Join us for an evening of wine, delicious food and conversation on May 8, 6-9pm, at the Press Club (20 Yerba Buena Lane). Join us for a non-hosted party where 10% of all purchases will be donated back to the DISH garden project. “Another round, bartend!”

Cheers and Happy SPRING!!!

Greetings, Friends!

We hope your year is off to a fantastic start! We are reaching out for your support today as we report on some exciting news at DISH.

Our tenants have given us a giant boost to start the year right in our Annual Tenant Satisfaction Survey. We’re proud to report a very positive 91% overall satisfaction rate with 88% of our tenants responding to the survey. We are humbled and encouraged by the positive feedback, and are eager to address issues where we can improve.

We know that our great results are the product of an incredibly dedicated team, which strives to provide the best customer service in the industry. In the mission to end homelessness in San Francisco, we continue giving our best to provide excellence with our property management services to San Francisco’s most vulnerable. We have a lot of dreams for ways to improve our buildings and services….here is where you come in!

Volunteers from Charles Schwab brightened up the Camelot Hotel with a fresh coat of paint!

Ending homelessness is a big job, and we’d love your help!

Check out these opportunities to get involved with ending homelessness!

Tenant Community Events

Volunteers are a welcome addition to our parties, meals, and other community events, helping make the festivities run smoother by wrapping gifts, serving food, providing live music, taking photos, and of course, helping clean up! We have regular events including:

• “Tenant Appreciation Party” (late Spring)
• Health and Wellness Fair (Fall)
• Activity groups and classes
• Thanksgiving community meals
• December holiday meals

Facility “TLC” Events  

Like getting your hands dirty? Large volunteer groups are great for helping us cover facilities projects to keep our 100-year-old buildings looking good and feeling like home!

• Painting projects
• Spring cleaning
• Sidewalk gardens planting and maintenance

Organizational Capacity Building

As an organization, we strive to get stronger every day. We love using volunteers who are experts in their field to improve our services!

• Fund development
• Promotional materials production
• Social Media strategy and guidance

You tell us! How can YOU help our mission? 

We’d love to have you!

For more information, contact one of our Directors:

Lauren Hall at LaurenHall@DISHsf.org or 415.776.3474 x101

Doug Gary at DougGary@DISHsf.org or 415.776.3474 x103

Wishing you the best!

Lauren and Doug, and the DISH crew

We hope your holiday season is full of fun, laughs, good eats, and lots of love. We have much to be grateful for as we reflect on 2012 and look forward to 2013! We love a top ten list at the end of the year, so here are, drumroll please…

DISH’s Top Ten Successes for 2012

1. ENDING HOMELESSNESS! In 2012, 104 tenants moved into a DISH building, and now have a safe place to call home. Our tenant communities at our six supportive housing sites continue to thrive. One tenant described his    experience during his first year at DISH as “the chance I needed to get back to where I want to be in life. Before I was at the Camelot my life was a mess. I was using and homeless and couldn’t get it together. Now that I am at the Camelot I have started taking care of myself and am volunteering out in the community.” At DISH we get to see firsthand the incredible opportunity that supportive housing provides for people to get back on their feet.

2. HOLIDAY CHEER!  Our holiday season celebrations are in full swing. At each building we served a Thanksgiving feast partially donated by Whole Foods to over 400 tenants with live entertainment from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  Tenants came out in droves to enjoy a meal together and share thoughts about being thankful. We look forward to more parties in December! This year, thanks to our donors, we will be giving all of our tenants a bag of gifts to brighten up their holiday.  If you’d like to be part of our December holiday celebrations as a volunteer or sponsor, contact Quang Nguyen (quangnguyen@dishsf.org). We’d love to have you!

3. A HEALTHY COMMUNITY! Thanks to the work of our Community Builder, Jennifer Park, DISH launched our first Health and Wellness Fair to emphasize the importance of self-care and to link tenants to resources in the community. Our tenants got together for an afternoon of fun that included acupuncture, massage, flu shots, a photo booth, goodie bags, a dance party, and more! We had great support not only from our donors, but also our community partners at Salesforce.com,Walgreens, the Red Cross, Care through Touch, ClownZero and many others!

4. TENANT APPRECIATION PARTY! Thanks to the generosity of our donors and our great staff, we celebrated our tenants again this past year in May and had a great turnout. Highlights of the event included a display of amazing talent during the open mic and many raffle prizes including a flat screen TV! This event is quickly becoming a DISH tradition and our turnout increases each year. We love seeing our tenants get out of their homes and into the community where they can connect with other tenants and be celebrated.

5. GOING GREEN! DISH was awarded a grant from the City of San Francisco Community Challenge Grant Program and the Public Utilities Commission to install sidewalk gardens in front of our buildings. We will be getting started on the gardens very soon and look forward to adding more green spaces to the Tenderloin and Mission!

6. SOCIAL MEDIA!  We are trying to get the word out about our excellent work in new ways and are now on Facebook and Twitter.  You can become a DISH evangelist by liking us on Facebook and following us on Twitter.  We’d love your feedback and your help in getting us to 300 likes on Facebook by the end of 2012!

7. BUILDING UPGRADES! We have made great progress on our goal to make improvements in every tenant unit. By the end of this year, we will have fully renovated 90% of our units.  Thanks to our partnerships with our building owners, we continue to make major upgrades to our building systems to improve the lives of our tenants. At the Windsor Hotel our new elevator is running beautifully, and we were able to move in 50 new tenants this year! We continue to make progress on a major overhaul of the Empress elevator and look forward to getting that project fully underway in early 2013.

8. COMMUNITY RECOGNITION! We were delighted to be profiled inPhilanthropedia‘s reviews of Bay Area organizations addressing homelessness. One of DISH’s peers gave us this glowing review: “The organization provides property management services to formerly homeless individuals with some of the most significant barriers to housing stability. They have exceptional results for the field as far as promoting long-term housing stability.”  We look forward to accomplishing even more in the future.

9. HAPPY HOUR! DISH loves a party almost as much as we love our tenants, and we had a blast celebrating our 6th anniversary with many of YOU – our supporters. We raised over $30,000 and enjoyed inspiring remarks from our speakers District 6 Supervisor Jane Kim, Director of HOPE Bevan Dufty, and DISH’s own advisory board member Nancy Ortberg. We will be celebrating our 7th anniversary in the fall of 2013 and we hope to see you there!

10. YOU! Thank you so much for your continued support for DISH. We are honored to have your financial and moral support! Please consider a year-end donation for DISH.  Every dollar we raise helps DISH welcome our tenants back home. Your tax-deductible gift is very important to us, whether $1,000, $500, $250, $100, $50, or whatever! You can make a donation by returning the enclosed envelope or online-just click the DONATE NOW! button on our homepage. You can also make an in-kind donation by purchasing something for our tenants on our DollarDays Wishlist. Thank you for your commitment to social justice and providing  everyone with a home this season.

Happy Holidays!

Lauren and Doug, and the DISH crew

The DISH Central-ites: Doug, Kirk, Lauren, and John Mark

DISH was a risk from the beginning. “We left our jobs to do this!” says Lauren Hall, Director and co-founder of DISH. “That really set the tone in our minds, as we were pushing out of what already existed to create DISH from nothing.” So if the very creation of DISH itself was born from a mixture of risk and necessity, I had to go to the people who have been around DISH Value #8 the longest, the crew at DISH Central.

DISH Value #8 reads “Be open: to different opinions, challenging discussions, and taking risks.” What does that mean exactly? “It means that you have to realize that others have answers as well,” says Kirk Larson, Deputy Director. “There’s some great input out there from other people. It also means personally taking the risk of sounding stupid in order to get the best result for DISH.” Says Lauren: “It means being able to put your ego aside and have a conversation whose goal is the best end result.” It’s also “a reminder to be earnest and seek feedback,” says Doug Gary, Director and co-Founder of DISH. “It means we’re willing to take big steps to accomplish big things,” says JM Johnson, Operations Manager.

It’s become such a core part of operations that it’s “a driver of our operations,” says Kirk. “Our success is based on it. The I in DISH is for innovation, and while some things work, some don’t, the day we stop taking risks is the day we stop improving.” But what does it look like when you implement Value 8 in your work at DISH?

“You’ve got to let people know that you’ve got their back,” says Lauren. “And that you’re not going to judge personally. Encourage others to speak up and appreciate their opinion.”  “Support others in their decisions,” says Kirk. “Say ‘I trust you’.”  “Remember to slow down and ask questions,” says Doug. “Remind people that new ideas and challenging feedback helps get DISH to the next level.” “Try to check your own attachment,” says Lauren. “And remember that every person is different, every idea is different, every personality is different.”

Being open to different opinions and challenging discussions is pretty clear-cut: you can commit whole-heartedly to the idea without creating a negative impact. But sometimes the taking risks part of Value #8 can be tricky. How do you moderate the risks that you take in order to make sure that you don’t go too far?  “You’ve got to rely on others to reel you back in,” says Lauren. “That’s the beauty of a team, the other people can say ‘hey, that’s not a good idea’.” Says Doug: “It’s all about assessing risk. Who is helped, what is the potential fallout. You need to very carefully weigh all of those things, thinking about the payoff versus the cost. Whenever you’ve got a big risk, get a second opinion.

“Taking risks can be a push outside of your comfort zone,” says Doug. “It can be difficult because what you’re saying might be going counter to what others are saying.” But still, “DISH is a place to make and learn from mistakes.” So open up to risks, challenging discussions, and different opinions!

Allyson, Alcides, and LaVerne

Continuing the series on DISH values, this issue’s piece will examine DISH Value #7, be respectful and hopeful: With tenants, partners, coworkers, and ourselves. But the atmosphere of the Tenderloin makes this a challenging proposition, especially at the Camelot Hotel on the 100-block of Turk Street, which sees the most crime of any block in the city. How can you take hope and respect and apply them to an angry tenant or someone whose life seems hopeless?

It all starts with the mission. “You have to commit, you have to get behind the mission,” says Tony Baldwin, Camelot General Manager. “And you support the mission via modeling. If you’re wondering how, you look around you, and you get the techniques from the other staff. We’re all here to encourage each other, and talk about anything that comes up. We know that DISH is behind us, and we’ve got to walk the talk.”

There are also other ways to help nurture hope. “You’ve got to live and breathe our tenants’ challenges to really understand what’s going on,” says Tony. “You have to have real sensitivity.” Take care of yourself. “A healthy staff person makes a healthy environment,” says Tony. “If we respect ourselves, that respect ripples out to the tenants. You have to model respectful behavior.” Excellence. “Excellence brings hope,” says Alcides Beltran, Janitor. “Respect is a process,” says Allyson Ulrich, Assistant General Manager. “It’s not a demand.” And keep at it. “Respect is all about positive reinforcement,” says Tony. “You show respect, it lays the ground work for a better rapport and relationship with those around you.” It’s an outlook. “I come in looking for good things,” says Eugene Irby, Maintenance Worker. “Noticing the positive uplifts a person’s spirit.”

But what do you do when a tenant is really angry? How can you respectfully get them to calm down? “You have to stay grounded,” says Tony. “Don’t get caught up and put your customer service at risk. Keep your perspective, and afterwards you can debrief with the other staff.” “It gets easier with experience,” says Allyson. “You understand better how to handle explosive tenants, and you remember that you’re making a difference in people’s lives and that the community and the people do care about that.” But still “sometimes to keep hope alive you have to sit down, breathe, and say ‘It’s OK,’” says Allyson. But sometimes “you can’t work with everyone,” says Eugene. “Maybe someone else can. If you’ve been talking or listening to a tenant for a while and they’re still upset, respectfully disengage.”

Finally, what does hope look like? “You can see hope by the physical state of the tenant’s unit,” says Tony. Sometimes “the tenant will have tears in their eyes, and they’re willing to try again with rehab or something else that can make their life better,” says Eugene. “It’s that look of hope that shows up when you can see them trying for something better in their lives.” This can even result in “tenants who have made a big change,” says Laverne Hawkins, Desk Clerk. “And they’re moving into a better environment. They came from the streets, and now they’re finally ready to live more independently.”

The Camelot Hotel: bringing hope into the 100-block of Turk.

DISH is celebrating 6 years of service to San Francisco’s homeless population – and we want you to celebrate with us. No pony rides, no silly hats (other than the one in the logo), just a few adult beverages with some of our best friends.

You can grab your tickets for the event here. And, let us know you’re coming on Facebook. September 6 @ 5pm, Gallery 4N5 (863 Mission Street). We can’t wait to party with you!