San Francisco’s ‘Dream Keeper’ Equity Chief Faces a Felony Palooza

In 1887, the British historian Lord Acton, arguing in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton that the same moral standards should apply to everyone regardless of their station in life, coined a phrase that rings true to this day:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Well, yes, it does.

Another textbook example is playing out its final scenes in San Francisco right now, and, while one would think there would be some sort of warning in it to others who may be participating in similar schemes or nefarious goings-on, nothing will change. And no one will cease their greedy grabbings of power, influence, and lucre, for all the cautionary warnings of real-life fables.

Last August, I told you the story of a close associate of then-Mayor London Breed named Sheryl Davis. Ms Davis had been on the rocket glide path to San Fran prominence as a member of the city’s Human Rights Commission, eventually rising to become its head.

The SF Human Rights Commission, under Ms. Davis’s leadership, had a $44M annual budget, which was scheduled to shrink amid the city’s 2025-26 money woes to around $28M. Still pretty healthy cha-ching by any measure.

In 2021, in the aftermath of the St. George Floyd incident, she had also been personally tapped by Mayor Breed to lead a multimillion-dollar feel-good investment (described as ‘tens of millions of dollars’) that the city was making in the black community, dubbed the ‘Dream Keeper Initiative.’ 

The Dream Keeper Initiative is a new, citywide effort to reinvest $60 million annually from law enforcement into San Francisco’s Black and African-American communities. This initiative is part of Mayor London N. Breed’s roadmap for reforming public safety and addressing structural inequities in San Francisco.

Inspired by Langston Hughes’ line, the Dream Keeper Initiative seeks to address and remedy racially disparate policies so that the dreams of young African-Americans and their families are no longer deferred, and they have the needed resources and support to thrive in San Francisco. The Dream Keeper Initiative aims to break the cycle of poverty and involvement in the criminal justice system for the families in the City programs and ensure that new investments, including in youth development, economic opportunity, community-led change, arts and culture, workforce, and home ownership, are accesible to San Francisco’s families who are most in need.

That’s a lot of city money exclusively earmarked for one ‘community.’

In 2024, things started to come unglued for the toast of the San Francisco black community. 

The San Francisco Chronicle discovered a $10,000 tab paid for by the Human Rights Commission for a Martha’s Vineyard cottage rental. Worse, the invoice had been split, seemingly to evade limits on travel claims, and even worse yet, they had the email from Ms. Davis asking for the workaround.

It snowballed from there.

• the ten grand invoice was reportedly for interns (!) in the city’s Dream Keeper program who were attending a conference on *checks notes* Martha’s Vineyard.
• the SF Standard reported that Human Rights Commission executive director Sheryl Davis had signed off on $1.5 million in grants to a nonprofit led by a man she lived with, one James Spingola
• the Human Rights Commission’s Dream Keeper Initiative had granted a total of $7.5 million to Spingola’s Collective Impact nonprofit.
• Sheryl Davis got $19,000 in city money for her son’s UCLA grad school tuition, as the Chronicle reports.
• Spingola’s non-profit, Collective Impact, got $27 million in city grants, gave first-class airfare to Davis to promote her book and podcast, plus another $5,000 for Oakland soul singer Goapele to perform at Davis’s book launch party.
• Davis was Collective Impact’s executive director before taking the Human Rights Commission job

The wheels of justice move slowly, but this past Monday, Sheryl Davis surrendered to face 57 pages of legal sheet music.

Once San Francisco’s most powerful civil rights watchdog, Sheryl Davis continued her spectacular fall on Monday when she surrendered to authorities to face accusations that she misappropriated funds and engaged in “pervasive” self-dealing while leading a landmark initiative meant to benefit the city’s Black community.

District Attorney Brooke Jenkins filed a raft of felony financial misconduct charges against Davis, who oversaw the San Francisco Human Rights Commission under former Mayor London Breed, and James Spingola, the former CEO of Collective Impact, a nonprofit Davis funded.

A sweeping, 57-page affidavit supporting a warrant for their arrests outlines numerous alleged conflicts of interest, misspending of city funds and self-dealing by Davis that benefited her, her family and her allies.

“She created a scheme that she believed no one would challenge, that no one would shed light on,” Jenkins told the Chronicle. “It really is an unfortunate situation in which now the Black community has lost out on this opportunity because of this abuse of power.” 

Jenkins told reporters that Davis misappropriated about $350,000 in public funds from her department and the Dream Keeper Initiative that Breed created in 2021 to invest tens of millions into the Black community.

Sheryl Davis, the Human Rights Director. Gave money to her boyfriend, a ruse she learned from Fani Willis. There are numerous felony charges. Equity corruption reigns in San Francisco. pic.twitter.com/s4kw30qr1X

— Marcus Notrealius (@TheLieKeeper) March 30, 2026

Davis and Spingola were each held on $50,000 bail after being charged with multiple felonies related to the graft.

Seems like a minuscule amount for the accusations, but then again, murderers get off with less out there, too.

…Davis faces 13 counts of having a financial conflict of interest in a government contract, one count of misappropriating public money, three counts of perjury, one allegation of accepting a gift from a restricted source, and one count of having a financial conflict of interest in a government decision. If convicted, she could face prison time, fines and a permanent ban from public office. 

Spingola is charged with four felony counts of aiding and abetting a financial conflict of a government contract.

It is a litany of double-dealing and self-enrichment.

…The probe found that Davis engaged in numerous acts of self-dealing. For example, prosecutors said Spingola made rent payments to Davis while she signed off on the city contracts that paid his salary. She used city funds to pay a public relations firm for work on her “personal website and her personal ‘brand management,’” according to the affidavit. She allegedly arranged the sale of 1,500 copies of her self-published children’s book, “Free to Sing,” to the San Francisco Public Library, costing taxpayers $10,000 and netting Davis about $5,000 in profit. 

Prosecutors unearthed bank records that revealed another alleged conflict of interest with a different Dream Keeper recipient, the Homeless Children’s Network. Davis signed contracts granting the nonprofit $3.5 million around the time it paid her son nearly $140,000, depositing the money in a bank account Davis jointly held with him. Prosecutors called the payments to her son questionable and said he often got to set his own pay rate. 

Before becoming one of the city’s most powerful officials, Davis worked as a teacher and on literacy initiatives and other programming for youth in the Western Addition. She became the executive director of Collective Impact in 2011. Former Mayor Ed Lee appointed her director of the Human Rights Commission in 2016. 

Spingola began his tenure at Collective Impact in 2004, a week after he finished serving a sentence for bank robbery, and eventually became the organization’s executive director. He moved in with Davis and her son in 2015 after he was diagnosed with cancer, according to depositions the duo gave in 2018 as part of a lawsuit. Davis said she rented Spingola a room for $3,000 a month because she wanted to help him.

To this day, the two insist they are not romantically involved.

Prosecutors really didn’t care one way or the other, as they had enough evidence of what the pair did share to charge them for all of it.

The San Francisco Ethics Commission had already taken a dim view of Ms. Davis’s management style last November.

…The San Francisco Ethics Commission in November brought its own charges against Davis, formally accusing her of more than 30 conflict of interest violations, including unlawfully accepting first-class flight upgrades and other gifts from city-funded nonprofits around the same time that she funded those organizations with taxpayer dollars. Each of the 30 counts carries a fine of up to $5,000.

Naturally, in the Chronicle’s report, there is a tiny frisson of concern that this truly appalling and egregious example of a public official’s malfeasance is going to cause the baleful, anti-DEI eye of The Bad Orange Man to turn towards the city and the remnants of the program, which are trying for a revival under new mayor Dan Lurie.

…The criminal case is likely to draw national attention given President Donald Trump’s opposition to anti-discrimination programs. The head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, reacted on social media this month to a conservative activist’s attack on the Dream Keeper Initiative, which continues at a smaller scale under Mayor Daniel Lurie. Dhillon responded to the piece, which described the program as a “race-based slush fund,” with one word: “what.”

The city is well aware of what the Dream Keeper pile of money, set aside exclusively for ‘the black community,’ appears like to people on the outside looking in.

…Jenkins said she was well aware of the fraught racial dynamics of the case, and the criticism San Francisco might face for “even setting aside those funds for the Black community.”

Amusingly enough, the unnamed ‘conservative activist attacking‘ the Dream Keeper Initiative was none other than Chris Rufo, who must be so haram in progressive circles, that he’s apparently been raised to ‘he who cannot be named’ status. What a hoot in itself.

It’s also most probably why Harmeet paid attention to that Xweet, as Rufo didn’t hesitate to call the initiative the ‘race-based slush fund‘ it looks to be, and reportedly was for Davis and Singola.

It’s Dream Keeper with a new name. Same race based NGOs getting funded — many Lurie funded with his nonprofit Tipping Point. None have ever been audited and he still supports some of the people and their grifter orgs. https://t.co/zoit4MCmRp

— 💥Susan Dyer Reynolds🗞️ (@SusanDReynolds) March 13, 2026

Oh, well, RATS.

A couple of extra-greedy buggers always ruin a good thing for everybody.

It is so tough to keep friendly, under-the-table local corruption, and tidy giveaways running smoothly when suddenly everyone’s paying attention.

The tell was part of the Chronicle’s headline, though:

 ‘abuse of power’

All that power accumulated and was utterly corrupt.

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