Politics Didn’t Matter to Him When He Was Homeless. Now He Organizes His Neighbors.

Solomon Bukenya has never lost hope for very long. At 64 years old, he has survived a civil war and genocide in Rwanda, a transoceanic move to seek asylum in the United States, the loss of his leg, homelessness and addiction.

These days, his hope is for his community to make themselves heard through civic engagement. And in the wake of a local election that saw unimpressive turnout, his resolute focus on the next step remains.

“Life does not stop with elections, life goes on,” he said a week after the polls closed. “Whatever the case may be, we have to engage. We have to get out and motivate our friends, our people, our communities, and work together.”

Bukenya had just wrapped up his second stint as a poll worker and neighborhood organizer. It’s a new element of his life in San Francisco, but he is committed to it. He was unhoused for 16 years and didn’t have any interest in voting. Money was his initial motivation to participate in elections — the city compensates poll workers — but eventually, he began to see value in engaging. Even in the wake of the 2024 election, which has been fraught with anxieties about voter apathy and the country’s future, he is undeterred in his mission to connect with disenfranchised neighbors and push them to get involved.

“You cannot do without politics, whether united or not, because we live in politics. We survive in politics,” he said. 

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He didn’t always feel this way. For a long time, civics didn’t factor into his survival. In 2005, a small cut on his big toe caused an infection that resulted in the loss of his leg. His wife didn’t want to live with an amputee, he said, and forced him to leave their home.

He had nowhere to go, and his life unraveled after that.

“Living on the street, living in the shelters, in my car, I lost my job, lost my family,” he said. He turned to drinking and drugs to cope. At his worst point, his license was revoked following multiple citations for driving while intoxicated. He eventually got sober, but he was still unhoused.

During that period, politics felt pointless. “I didn’t know why I should vote when I’m starving,” he said.

Bukenya was not alone in that sentiment. A 2012 report by the National Coalition for the Homeless found that only 10% of eligible unhoused voters cast ballots.

That could be in part “because it’s not at the top of their priority list, or because they’ve had adverse experiences with the system and are disillusioned,” said Zak Franet, director of policy and public affairs at Episcopal Community Services. The nonprofit organizes events for disenfranchised voters.

Read also: Encampment Sweeps’ Uptick May Hurt Homeless People’s Access to Services, Voting

Things eventually turned around for Bukenya. In 2022, he got stable housing. This March, he was lured into civic engagement. It started with the offer to become a poll worker for the primary election.

What piqued his interest? “First and foremost, money. I wanted some bucks,” he said.

Once Bukenya began the training, his perspective shifted.

“I became more interested and even excited to join the program outreach — trying to call people, to invite people to come, especially these people now I live with,” he said.

Bukenya is a strong salesman. With a wide, toothy smile and positive tone, it’s hard to not lean in and listen when he speaks.

“I’ll tell them that ‘You are part of the system. We are all in this together,’” he said. “Everything you can touch involves politics. So when you say you are not involved, it’s like you are not involved in life.”

His charm was on full display one October morning as he spoke to a small gathering of his neighbors at 1064 Mission St., the city’s largest site of permanent supportive housing, which the government makes available to formerly homeless tenants. Episcopal Community Services, which operates the site, and the Department of Elections had arranged a voter education workshop for residents.

In his pitch, enticing them to work at the polls on Election Day, Bukenya included the same hook that had caught him: the stipend. “That is good money, I’m telling you — because when I got that check, it was heavy,” he said, to raucous laughter.

But he followed up those comments with earnest reflections on how this work led him to relationship-building and amplifying community voices.

“We don’t know each other,” he said. “But once you get into that kind of activities, the community gets bigger. We get to know our voices. We have to, because this is the one way of putting out your voice: voting.”

It was a message Bukenya shared repeatedly with neighbors when canvassing, or at nonprofit-backed voter registration events to mobilize underserved communities throughout October.

That’s how he came to stand in front of dozens of people on a closed-down section of Golden Gate Avenue the morning of Oct. 30, urging them to vote. His audience included people experiencing homelessness, formerly incarcerated people and non-English speakers.

They were there for Walk with Windy, an election tradition to boost voter turnout in the Tenderloin neighborhood and led by Windy Click, a formerly incarcerated woman who was ineligible to vote for years due to her sentence. After her parole ended, Click was eligible but nervous to vote for the first time, so she convened a group in 2018 to go to the polls with her. Thus, the tradition was born.

This October, attendees marched to City Hall, jubilantly casting their ballots to chants of “Tenderloin pride, Tenderloin power, we’re voting strong, this is our hour!”

The walk prompted Tariq Johnson, a third-generation San Franciscan who experienced homelessness for several years, to re-register and vote.

“I haven’t voted for nothing but Obama, but this right here brought me back,” he said. “My mama, my grandmama and my great grandmama would roll over in they graves if I didn’t get up and vote, especially in this historical election.” Johnson’s mother was a Black Panther who helped start a free lunch program in Bayview-Hunters Point, he said. 

After the event, Bukenya sat next to a young woman near the steps of City Hall, and the two talked at length. “She has a similar story to me,” he told me, smiling, after I approached the pair.

Making connections like this one drives Bukenya to keep going.