A team of roving nurses known for their outreach work in San Francisco’s Tenderloin is pausing its operations due to Trump’s federal funding cuts, Mission Local has learned.
The Roving Community Health Initiative, which was founded in 2021 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, has become a regular fixture in the neighborhood, with clinicians and community volunteers often seen walking the Tenderloin and offering medical services to people on the streets.
Code Tenderloin ambassadors accompany the nurses as a first point of contact, and since the nonprofit has lost its grant funding, the entire program’s future is up in the air.
“It means that we’re not going to be able to send teams out in the fashion that we did,” said a source familiar with the operation, which involves “meeting people at their tents, at their street corners.”
The program, led by University of California, San Francisco nurses since 2021 and operated in partnership with Code Tenderloin and GLIDE, offers various vaccinations, wound care, overdose prevention, and referrals to services on on the streets and at pop-ups on Thursdays and Saturdays.
“This week we were notified by The Center at Sierra Health Foundation that federal funds supporting the Covid-19 Mitigation Project had been terminated by the federal government,” said GLIDE’s Chief Program Officer, Lillian Mark. “Without this funding, Code TL had to sunset their roving staff to assist with this low-barrier, street-level access to these critical services immediately.”
The Code Tenderloin ambassadors served as liaisons between the medical workers and the community. The grant, Mark said, was expected to end on April 30, but it is unclear whether it could have been renewed. Messages to Code Tenderloin were not immediately answered.
A UCSF spokesperson said that the program “is not being shut down — we are evaluating options on how best to serve our community clients and will have more information soon.”
But it’s unclear how the program will proceed. For now, Mission Local has learned that Saturday operations are on hold, but workers have not lost their employment.
This grant is just one of many federal funding cuts from President Donald Trump’s administration affecting San Francisco programs, including a cut of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to the California Department of Public Health and the California Department of Health Care Services, as well as a grant to UCSF on March 23.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi said this week that San Francisco’s regional Department of Health and Human Services office will close this spring, reducing services for California and nearby states.
In 2024, the team provided about 5,000 vaccines, and the source said that if the roving program ceases to operate, vaccination rates are sure to drop among the homeless population. Even in late 2022, when many had already been vaccinated against Covid-19, the teams were still vaccinating 50 people a day.
“It’s just another disruption to the patchwork of systems that [residents] have to access to receive the care they need,” the source said. “If it’s an uncomfortable place they have to go … they will opt not to do care.”
Where is Mayor Lurie on this? New D5/Tenderloin Supervisor Bilal Mahmood? This is a matter of public health and safety. Both individuals campaigned on “clean” “safe.” Here is a clear need, with a clear solution for well connected million and billionaires.
It’s incredible how much money is spent babysitting dysfunctional people.
Just look how much Trump lost for the country in only 2 days of BS tax hikes on the poor?
Yeah, heaven forbid we offer basic human needs, like healthcare, to people who are suffering 🙄