A Conversation with Mission Local’s Joe Rivano Barros (Part 2 of 2)

The senior editor talks to Michael E. Hartmann about staff turnover and accusations of mismanagement in the San Francisco DA’s office, including in grants administration, and more broadly, the underappreciated role of philanthropy in local government, in terms of both the size of its funding and its influence.

Joe Rivano Barros is senior editor of Mission Local, a nonprofit news site based in the Mission District of San Francisco. He first joined the site as a reporter after graduating from Stanford University, then spent time at YIMBY Action, a housing advocacy group, and as a partner of The Worker Agency, a pro-labor public-relations firm. He rejoined Mission Local as an editor in 2023.

For the site, Rivano Barros has been covering philanthropic support of criminal-justice projects in San Francisco, including its District Attorney Brooke Jenkins’ office’s contentious relationships with major private foundations about them. His reporting last year on the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s decision to withhold $625,000 in grant funds from the office of the DA, an elected position, caught the attention of several of us here at The Giving Review. The incident, we thought, offers insights into the tenuous relationship between philanthropy and democracy; San Francisco voters’ and MacArthur’s views on criminal-justice policy and the need for reform seem to have diverged greatly.

After the DA-MacArthur controversy, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office took over as the grant’s administrator. Also subsequent to the MacArthur dustup, as reported by Rivano Barros as well, Jenkins’ office had similarly antagonistic conflicts with the private Crankstart Foundation about a restorative-justice project. And the public California Victim Compensation Board declined to renew its contract with the office for a time, too, citing the office’s mismanagement of its funded program services. High staff turnover in the DA’s office’s Victim Services Division dating back to before Jenkins’ tenure only worsened during her tenure.

Rivano Barros was kind enough to join me for a recorded conversation last week. In the first part of our discussion, which is here, we talk about Mission Local, the visions and aims of MacArthur’s and Crankstart’s criminal- and restorative-justice grantmaking in San Francisco, and the backlash in the city and state against aggressive criminal-justice reforms that began in the 2010s.

The less than 12-minute video below is the second part, during which Rivano Barros discusses staff turnover and accusations of mismanagement in the DA’s office, including in grants administration, and more broadly, the underappreciated role of philanthropy in local government, in terms of both the size of its funding and its influence.

“Dozens of staffers have left the office and while certainly many of those were for ideological reasons—you have a new DA, it’s very common to have a changing of the guard—a lot of folks just said that things are just not working as well anymore,” Rivano Barros tells me. “But again, they said the same often during” the tenure of previous DA Chesa Boudin, who was recalled in 2022.

The office’s troublesome relationship with the California Victim Compensation Board “speaks more to the mismanagement of the kind of lack of just pushing forward paperwork,” he says. “Because of what we’ve heard is just kind of ordinary lack of getting the approvals and lack of communicating with the state at the right time, they lost out for a few weeks on this” under DA Jenkins, “and they had no victim services for those few weeks, and they got it back.”

More broadly, regarding voters’ perceptions on the place of philanthropy in the city’s governance, “I’m not sure the general public has much of a view on the philanthropy here. I mean, I think if anything, people would be surprised to even learn that foundations support a government agency,” according to Rivano Barros.

I mean, even I was a little surprised at the amounts that they support particular programs and that they do have a say in or at least, because of the funding, can have an influence on how those government programs are run. That would be a surprise in and of itself, I think, more than anything.

He concludes by saying “I think there’s more work to be done by us and other local media on, well, how much of a city budget is foundation-supported, private-supported.”

This article first appeared in the Giving Review on March 4, 2025.