When a massive blackout hit San Francisco in December, Golden Gate Senior Services sprang into action. With so many older adults stranded without power for hours, the nonprofit organized volunteers to do hundreds of wellness checks by phone, food deliveries and other needed outreach.
That service is threatened by proposed city budget cuts, according to Christine Ness, director of the organization’s Richmond Senior Center, whose clients are mostly extremely low-income and some Cantonese-only speakers. The organization’s Community Bridge Program is slated to lose $92,000 in funding over the next two years, 50% of the program’s budget. It isn’t the only nonprofit bracing for cuts.
Community-based organizations, older adults and people with disabilities across San Francisco are sounding alarms about the Department of Disability and Aging Services’ latest budget proposal, which includes millions of dollars in cuts for programs serving those populations, including case management, community outreach, legal aid and workforce development.
Providers say these reductions do not align with the city’s own assessment of the needs of seniors and people with disabilities, in addition to decrying a possible reduction in funding of services for communities of color.
People over age 60 make up roughly 23% of San Francisco’s population, according to the department, and that percentage is expected to grow in coming years. Instead of instituting cuts, nonprofits and community members said, the city should dip into its reserves to preserve programs for older adults and people with disabilities.
The budget proposal comes amid the city’s $643 million projected deficit, with Mayor Daniel Lurie directing the Human Services Agency, which houses the department, to slash $10.5 million. About $3.1 million of those cuts will affect 16 community-based organizations.
Deep Cuts
On Wednesday, more than 200 people packed a Board of Supervisors Budget and Appropriations Committee hearing about how the proposal would impact older adults and people with disabilities. City officials discussed the processes for determining cuts and the programs losing funding, while community members spoke against the reductions.
The department responded to Public Press questions with an email stating that San Francisco’s growing deficit is forcing difficult decisions on budget reductions. “Not one department is spared from these considerations,” it said, noting the budget process remains fluid and it’s working with the Mayor’s Budget Office to maintain essential services.
At the hearing, Cindy Hoffman, deputy director of community services, said the department tried to leverage state and federal funds, pause new programs and right-size budgets based on spending and reviewing performance. “Unfortunately, those efforts did not get us to our target,” she said. “So we had to make deeper and harder choices.”
She said the department sought to maintain services but “trim them back to their core,” in addition to eliminating overlapping services. But the service providers say they want officials to know the proposed cuts will hurt vulnerable communities.
“We’ve been told it’s highly unlikely that we have any ability at this point — no matter what advocacy we do — to prevent the cuts from happening,” Ness said. “However, we’re going to do whatever we can.”
Before the hearing, groups of older adults and people in wheelchairs, many of them sporting T-shirts for various nonprofits, sang as they marched down the hall to deliver handwritten notes to Lurie’s office calling on him to reverse cuts.
“We relish none of these cuts. But we were kind of saying, it looks to us, looking at your portfolio, that these programs would perhaps be some of the least impactful to take them away,” Sophia Kittler, the mayor’s budget director, said during the hearing. “That’s not to say that they do not have impact.”
Some hope remains that a portion of program funds could be restored in Lurie’s budget proposal, which is due by June 1. Community members were heartened that the city will be setting aside an extra $3 million for the voter-approved Dignity Fund dedicated to residents over age 60, as well as people with disabilities. However, the department did not answer questions from the Public Press about how this money will be spent.
“Cutting programs that prevent crisis does not save money, it simply guarantees that the crisis is going to come later at a far greater cost,” Jenny Belway, executive director of San Francisco Village, said in a March meeting of the Department of Disability and Aging Services Commission. “Budgets are moral documents, and this decision will shape how San Francisco ages.”
Racial Inequities
Over 80% of the department’s clients are low to moderate income and are more likely to be people of color compared to the general population.
Nonprofits that serve some of the city’s most vulnerable residents pleaded with the department to not implement cuts, including staff and clients of the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center.
The center, which has served the Fillmore community for 106 years, faces a $141,437 cut to its neighborhood-based programs each of the next two to three years. The move will gut the organization’s seniors program, which serves 300 older adults each year, said Brett Martinez, the center’s Senior Wellness Program manager. Over 90% of the program targets Black seniors and people with disabilities.
“This population is overrepresented in almost every disparity in San Francisco, from increasing homelessness, food insecurity, health outcomes and life expectancy,” he said at the March meeting. “Booker T. is a lifeline for our community.”
Martinez asked the department and city “to not balance their budget on the backs of poor people and off the necks of Black people. This is racist and unacceptable.”
Navigating complex housing and healthcare systems can be a struggle for older adults and people with disabilities, according to the 2026 Dignity Fund Needs Assessment by the Department of Disability and Aging Services.
“An assumption that a lot of people have is that when you get to be a certain age, everything’s gonna be taken care of because we have this great aging system,” said Vince Crisostomo, director of aging services at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and a member of the Dignity Fund Oversight and Advisory Committee. “I found that not to be true.”
It’s not the only example of cuts slated despite the findings of the assessment, providers noted.
Mismatch of needs and cuts
One major finding is that isolation is a significant challenge for older adults and people with disabilities.
Several “village model” programs, which foster social connectivity among seniors and build infrastructure to support adults before their health severely declines, are among those losing funds. Village nonprofits questioned how these programs could be deemed inessential when their core focus is combating isolation.
“While many programs respond after a crisis occurs, we work upstream, preventing isolation, health decline and loss of independence by strengthening social connection, care navigation and community support,” said Belway of San Francisco Village. “The need for this work is growing faster than our system is prepared for.”
Other survey findings stated that legal aid services are an unmet need for older adults and people with disabilities, and that geographic concentration of services in the city’s central neighborhood is a higher barrier for people with mobility concerns.
Staff at Senior and Disability Action, which faces a loss of $143,435 that will eliminate its healthcare action team and in-home care stakeholder workgroup, scrutinized increased funding for the San Francisco Police Department as well as the Sheriff and District Attorney offices.
Nonprofits and community members encouraged the city to reconsider its current allocations, suggesting that they tap into the city’s $1.4 billion in reserves to cover the costs of programs facing cuts.
“We have so many different reserves in San Francisco that some of them are very easily accessible and don’t require a board vote,” said Anya Worley-Ziegmann, coalition coordinator of the People’s Budget Coalition. “They can just be automatically released at the whims of the board or the mayor, and what we let folks know is that this is really the time.”
Glenda Hope, a 90-year-old retired Presbyterian minister who attended the hearing, called on elected and appointed officials to respect their elders and provide them with the most basic kinds of mental, emotional health, and physical health.
“When you take away our support services,” she said, “it is violent.”
