After co-founding the Tenderloin’s only public school and serving neighborhood women and children in need for the past 45 years, the Bay Area Women’s and Children’s Center is shutting down, Mission Local has learned.
Questions about the nonprofit have been swirling for months. Longtime board members say they were pushed out of their positions.
“There’s so many ‘I don’t knows,’” said Christina Huizar, a former board member and longtime teacher at the Tenderloin Community School. “There’s still a lot of need, that has not gone away.”
The nonprofit’s website appears to have stopped working at least a month ago. Until this week, its URL led to a page that read “account suspended.” Phone calls to the center went to an answering machine, another former board member said, that declared the nonprofit was not taking new clients.
Last Friday, after being contacted by Mission Local about the changes to the nonprofit’s programs, executive director Erica Burrell, an early childhood educator and children’s book writer who joined the organization in 2023, declined to answer.
Three days later, the nonprofit’s website came back online — this time with a 4,000-word announcement of the center’s closure and Burrell’s installation as board chair.
“The loss of both core programs — the Resource Center and the dental clinic — combined with compounding financial, operational, and staffing challenges, left the organization unable to fulfill” its duties, the statement read. “Continuing under those conditions would not have served the community, the organization’s donors, or the integrity of BAWCC’s mission.”
The financial challengers are well-documented. Between 2023 and 2025, the historically well-funded organization saw a steep decline in revenue, from $738,000 to $285,000, tax filings show. At the same time, expenses rose from $377,000 to more than $1 million, and the nonprofit’s assets fell from $3.73 million to $2.87 million.
The nonprofit had $2.7 million in net assets at the end of 2025, according to tax filings.
Over the same period, it drastically reduced the services it once provided in the Tenderloin, according to community members and Burell.
“I don’t see her in the neighborhood. Most stuff that’s kid related that runs through the Tenderloin — I know about it,” said Esan Looper, a director at the Tenderloin Community Benefit District and a prominent community figure in children’s affairs who briefly served on the nonprofit’s board in 2023.
Looper said there has been little sign of the organization at work since then.
“I don’t know what she’s done. I don’t know anything.”
Burrell also shared a video message directly with Mission Local, describing the nonprofit as a struggling organization that was beyond her ability to save.
“I did not walk into a well oiled machine,” she said. The initial priority was to stabilize the nonprofit, then fundraise later.
Among those problems, Burrell said: The school district shuttered the nonprofit’s esteemed dental clinic. Structural and safety issues at its resource center forced its closure. Enrollment in its school programs plummeted.
Burrell, for her part, denied allegations that she pushed out board members. As for the money left in the nonprofit’s accounts, she said, “I don’t have an answer yet.” But they will go to a nonprofit with a similar mission, she pledged. “We don’t even know what’s left yet.”
As the nonprofit’s new board president, Burrell added, she will now oversee its “wind-down” process.
The slow retreat of a once-powerful force in the Tenderloin
Midge Wilson founded the Bay Area Women’s and Children’s Center in 1981 amid an influx of Southeast Asian refugee families to the neighborhood, which at the time had even fewer services for women and children than it does today.
“Midge was a true visionary and she gave her heart for the women and children of the Tenderloin,” said Kathy Looper, executive director of Reality House West, which owns the historic Cadillac Hotel, a single-room occupancy hotel where the Bay Area Women’s and Children’s Center used to rent a ground-floor commercial space.
The center spearheaded the opening of the Tenderloin’s only public school in 1998, and its advocacy helped create several playgrounds and parks, including the Tenderloin Recreation Center, Macaulay Park on O’Farrell Street, and the Turk/Hyde Mini park.
The nonprofit initiated a census of children in the area that is considered more accurate than the government’s data. As early as 1984, its canvassers went door to door collecting occupancy data that is still used by children’s advocates in San Francisco. In its heyday the organization also ran a dental clinic at the school in partnership with UCSF, and operated several after-school programs and clubs.
A director hired to ‘get things going again’
Community members agree that when Burrell took over the Bay Area Women’s and Children’s Center, it was struggling, and had been since Wilson began having health issues and retired in 2021. Diane Van Stralen, who worked at the nonprofit for 25 years before leaving in 2023, said that Burrell was hired to “to get things going again.”
Instead, the closures continued.
In 2023, the school district shut down the full-service dental clinic within the Tenderloin Community School. In emails shared with Mission Local and Burrell’s statement, Burrell tried to persuade the district to re-open the clinic, but was unable.
Then the nonprofit’s resource hub, long located beneath the Cadillac Hotel, closed in 2024 “overnight,” Van Stralen said. It once offered a food pantry and clothing closet, job readiness support, and a gift program for children.
Burrell had begun a remodel of the space shortly after she took over. But, according to her landlord Kathy Looper, upon returning to the newly remodeled space in 2024, Burrell vacated the premises overnight without giving notice — or paying $74.50.
Emails reviewed by Mission Local show Burrell confirmed to Looper and the property manager that she vacated the space at 318 Leavenworth St. in August 2024, and offered a $10,000 donation “in lieu of pursuing legal action” to officially break the lease, which was valid through 2028.
“I truly regret that this is the outcome, and I apologize for the circumstances that have brought us to this point,” Burrell wrote in one of the emails Mission Local reviewed.
The nonprofit then relocated to the Tenderloin Community School’s “family room.” According to Burrell, the family room also needed renovations. Meanwhile, she added, logistical delays in signing a new contract with the school and insurance requirements “created ongoing challenges” and caused further reductions to the nonprofit’s services at the school.
Confusingly, as the nonprofit scaled back services, it appears to have spent more money on programs and salaries: Reported “program” costs rose from $120,000 to $457,000 within the last fiscal year 2025, and salaries jumped from $257,000 to $566,240.
It is unclear whose salaries the nonprofit has been paying: In a recent tax filing from 2025, Burrell’s salary is listed at just $107,000, though a prior filing shows a higher salary of $162,500.
Burrell did not directly address questions about rising salaries or who the nonprofit employs. Hiring is “inconsistent” and benefits are costly, she said. When she joined the Bay Area Women’s and Children’s Center, she said, she sought to make salaries equitable among employees.
A mysteriously abrupt shutdown
In an April email reviewed by Mission Local, Burrell announced the end of the center’s longtime partnership with the Tenderloin Community School.
The announcement came a year before the expiration of the nonprofit’s contract with the San Francisco Unified School District. By several accounts, the center’s programming had not followed the contract agreement for at least a year.
According to the contract, the nonprofit was expected to provide daily services at the Tenderloin Community School. While it did pay the salary of Mimi Hoang, a school recess coach who was at the school daily, it was also supposed to host a yearly “beautification day” at the school, employ a “family advocate” to help connect parents and caregivers with resources, and provide “financial support for TCS initiatives and expenses not covered by the school’s budget.”
The family advocate, Dr. Kara Wright, left the organization in 2024, and her position was never filled.
Scott Bravmann, a longtime volunteer at the Tenderloin Community School, said Burrell rarely showed up on the school campus, and that the “beautification day” didn’t happen this year. “People would show up looking for her,” Bravmann said.
Hoang, the school recess coach, said the door to the nonprofit’s space on school grounds was “always closed.”
According to the nonprofit’s most recent tax filing, Burrell works 50 hours per week. And according to Burrell, programs like tutoring at the school, the Tenderloin Connections Program which offers monthly field trips to families, and a holiday gift program were still ongoing.
By April of this year, Hoang was the only known Bay Area Women’s and Children’s Center employee working at the school. Then she got a call from Burrell. “You work until the end of May, that is your last day, and then no more BAWCC,” Hoang recalls Burrell saying. Hoang said another local nonprofit has stepped in and offered to fund her position through the end of the school year.
The center’s board voted to terminate the agreement with the school at the end of May, according to Burrell’s post.
The school district did not respond to a request for comment.
A board “pushed out”
During Burrell’s tenure, several longtime board members stepped down — or say they were pushed out.
In her statement, Burrell wrote that in July 2025, the three remaining members of the Bay Area Women’s and Children’s Center board “stepped down” and made way for a new board of directors. She denied any involvement in forcing them out.
Former board member Huizar disagrees.
“We found out via email that our term was severed,” said Huizar. “We did not voluntarily step down. We were pushed out.”
Mission Local reviewed an email sent by a lawyer on Burrell’s behalf in July 2025 that corroborates Huizar’s account. The email is dated two days after new board members were approved.
Mission Local reached one current board member, Fredrika Keefer of Dance Mission Theater. Asked if she was still on the board of directors, Keefer said: “Technically, like on paper, I am.” She declined to comment further.
Keefer and her fellow board members voted on Friday for Burrell to take over as the chair, according to the statement on the nonprofit’s website. “This decision was made to ensure continuity and accountability.”
While Burrell denied the allegations, she did write in an email to Mission Local: “As my grandmother used to say, there are three sides to every story: your side, their side, and the truth, the shiny part that divides the two.”
A super loss
Losing the Bay Area Women’s and Children’s Center, said former board president Jeanne Comaskey, is a tremendous blow to the Tenderloin.
“It had the perfect location, Leavenworth and Eddy — it’s the corner where a lot of stuff happens,” Comaskey said. “Kids get off the bus there from school. Everyone knew it, [would] just get off and have a cup of tea.”
Burrell, for her part, said that the neighborhood was changed.
“When clubs began there were not many afterschool programs within the Tenderloin,” her website statement reads. “Now – families have alternatives.”
Now, community members hope the millions of dollars left in the nonprofit’s accounts are handled appropriately.
Christina Huizar, once the organization’s interim executive director who says she and two other board members were forced out last year, said that, “ultimately, we just really want to be stewards of the money that is meant for the families of the Tenderloin.”
