Amidst the coffee shops, bars, restaurants and artisan knick-knack stores that line Divisadero these days, there remains a powerhouse for social justice that has been operating in the same location since the late 70’s. 
Welcome to PACT. Founded in 1963 by Everett Brandon, JD and Henry Lucas, Jr., DDS, PACT is a Community Based Organization (CBO) that helps low-income students in the Bay Area get into college. The name stands for Plan of Action for Challenging Times, and although the original intention of Brandon and Lucas was to provide support to the young African-American community of San Francisco, their services have always targeted all low-income and underserved populations.
We sat down with CEO and Executive Director Derek Toliver and Project Director Annette Dennett to learn a bit more about a valuable organization headquartered right here in the neighborhood.
Toliver told us that the original founders got the idea for the program while walking through the city’s Financial District back in the early sixties and seeing little to no black people whatsoever.
"They were trying to figure out a way to empower the black community in San Francisco to achieve more employment and educational opportunities,” Toliver told us. He says Brandon was actually the first African-American stockbroker in the Bay Area. Seeing the vast disparity between whites and others, both founders realized that it was critical to step in and give underserved communities a fighting chance for economic and educational success.
When PACT was formed, it was, according to Toliver, the first CBO to bring in federal dollars to San Francisco. Funded initially through SBA and HEW grants, the organization remains a 501c3 non-profit organization, but now receives funding through a TRiO Talent Search grant. This grant mandates certain performance standards, including a minimum enrollment of 2,225 students per year (although they estimate there are roughly 3,000 participants in San Francisco), and an 80% success rate in enrolling high school seniors into college each year. It should also be noted that although they are headquartered in San Francisco, PACT also has offices in Richmond and Vallejo, and serve roughly 700-800 students in those areas combined.
Although PACT initially provided support to both teenagers as well as adults either reentering college or enrolling for the first time, the main focus of the organization has evolved to serving middle and high school level students, partially due to a condition of their grant stating that participants must be under 27 years old. This, however, is slowly changing, with more and more “alternative “ clients using the office on Divisadero as a locus for services.
PACT provides both individual and group support to students beginning in the sixth grade. At that level, kids receive tutoring at their school site, as well as early advising with the aim of getting kids thinking about college as a very real possibility early on. Once in high school, participants begin attending “College 101” workshops at their schools, and also receive individual college counseling by advisors who are on site roughly twice a week. Workshop topics include financial aid, introductions to the UC/CSU system, campus tours, job readiness, and writing the personal essay. Although about 40% of the entire program in the city consists of seniors, PACT offers support to students throughout their high school career. Currently, PACT has advisors at Burton, Lowell, Washington, Balboa, Lincoln, Wallenberg, and Thurgood Marshall. They also run a summer academy out of their Divisadero location, holding workshops with many of the same components.
To give you an idea of the effectiveness of the program, just last year PACT saw 93% of seniors enrolled in their first year of college, nearly all coming from low-income households, many of them being the first person in their family to attend college. PACT has served over 60,000 students, and 36,000 of those folks have successfully matriculated into post-secondary institutions.
Those are some serious numbers.
If you really wanted to know the impact that PACT has had on someone’s life, just ask Tolliver. He himself participated in PACT at San Francisco’s Woodrow Wilson High School back in 1970. He told us how his advisor, Charlene Folsom, was the first person who told him he could go to Stanford, something he had never even considered as a possibility. He told us how her careful guidance and encouragement, including her suggestion to get letters of recommendation from his senator and state congressman, put him on a path through which he was successfully enrolled at Stanford.
“The experiences and connections I made at Stanford were life-changing and never would have happened without PACT. In my family alone, PACT is responsible for five degrees,” he told us, referring to the fact that his three daughters went on to get degrees when they came of age, a reality he feels would not have happened had he not received the initial support from PACT way back when.
Toliver spoke a great deal about how PACT is able, among other things, to truly change the mindset of a student from a challenging background and provide them with a worldview that includes a post secondary education. “It changes your entire perception of what’s possible,” he told us.
When asked how their initial goal of serving the largely marginalized African American population of San Francisco has changed as a result of the changing racial makeup of San Francisco, Toliver said that “PACT is still standing for a level playing ground, for equity,” despite dwindling numbers of African-Americans in San Francisco (in 2010, it was just 6.3%, a 35.7% decrease from 20 years prior). Due to the demographic shifts of today, PACT serves predominantly Asian students, followed by Latinos, and then African-Americans.
Despite these changes Toliver is optimistic, as is Dennett. “I believe the reason PACT works so well is because we aren’t targeting a specific group. We are not tracking the 3.0’s [GPA] … we are there to let any type of student there is a place for them,” Dennett told us.
Toliver sees the new influx of cash into San Francisco as a “tsunami of opportunities” for students in his program, stating that he’s committed to making the fields of tech, medicine and engineering available to those who might miss it without their help. He hopes to help develop a pipeline for the next generation of workers, many of whom could come from underserved communities with the correct amount of guidance.
“We want to turn needy communities into communities we need, by empowering them through education and opportunities.”
