I recently got a chance to read a list of the favorite organizations of some people (mostly in San Francisco) and here is a summary

Question: What’s an organization you love?

Answers: (moderately verbatim, minimal redaction)

  1. Lesbians Who Tech
  2. The Children’s Tumor Foundation
  3. The National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS)
  4. Al-Anon family groups. The groups can be problematic in ways, so I don’t think they’re for everyone
  5. SF CASA
  6. Access Women’s Health Justice
  7. Asian Women’s Shelter
  8. Muttville Senior Dog Rescue Muttville’s mission is to change the way the world thinks about and treats older dogs and to create better lives for them through rescue, foster, adoption, hospice, education, and advocacy.
  9. Sogorea Te’ Land Trust - a women-led indigenous group working towards returning the East Bay to indigenous stewardship
  10. Buffalo Field Campaign - a group founded by native folks and environmental activists, working towards saving the last couple thousand genetically pure, continuously wild plains bison. Most bison these days are actually interbred with cattle, and haven’t been taught to migrate by their families because they’re raised in captivity.
  11. Dykes with Drills - what it sounds like! Workshops, meetups, and projects for folks that want to learn to build or already build.
  12. KPOO 89.7FM - volunteer-run, non-profit/non-commercial community radio in SF featuring some of the most iconic local musicians, DJs, and programming, including live broadcasts of community meetings and the Coltrane Church “Uplift” broadcast every Tuesday from 12 noon to 4pm; they operate on a shoestring budget ($75k annually) and every donation really does matter
  13. Immigration Institute of the Bay Area - offers free and low-cost legal services (including deportation defense and DACA workshops) to immigrants in the region, as well as training/tutoring for citizenship exams
  14. Immigrant Families Together - all-volunteer group of everyday citizens working to reunite families separated at the border, paying bonds and organizing transit from detention centers, paying living expenses, and generally offering rapid response help to traumatized families in a unique, horrifyingly necessary way
  15. Project Homeless Connect They get a ton of different services together under one roof (showers, haircuts, dentists, reading glasses and other eyeglasses, food stamps and other benefits, DMV, a cafe to eat lunch, legal resources, food pantry to take food with them, and more) and homeless people can come in and do a ton of things at once. It’s especially great because of the way that it makes a multi-step process (1)getting legal help to 2)get a government id from the DMV when you don’t have an address to 3) get enrolled for benefits) go from a nightmare that will never get handled to a simple process that takes a few hours.