Can community organizations be too big to fail?

You may have heard the news early last month about money troubles at the Economic Opportunity Council (EOC) of San Francisco. It’s an agency that runs a dozen subsidized childcare centers in the city. It also runs the Potrero Hill Family Resource Center and helps low-income residents make their homes more efficient, called weatherization.

In early November, Laura Chick, the state Inspector General charged with tracking stimulus dollars, said the EOC’s management problems were so bad that it shouldn’t get $159,000 in promised federal stimulus funds. She cited $540,000 in disallowed expenditures—in other words, things the agency’s federal, state and city grant money didn’t allow for—like luxury retreats for board members, and hundreds of dollars spent on coffee and flowers for the office.

The EOC provides services for hundreds of San Francisco’s most needy residents, so the city and state have been trying to keep the agency from collapsing completely. But they’re having a hard time.

Last night, I showed up at the EOC’s main office for a planned board meeting to find out what was happening. I had talked to some parents and employees at the Potrero Hill Family Resource Center a few weeks ago, and was surprised at how little they seemed to know about the agency’s troubles. What they did know, they were reluctant to share on tape.

So when I got to the office, on the third floor of a new building on Fillmore Street near Geary (quite a contrast to the badly rundown, Potrero Hill housing projects), I was blown away to find dozens of angry parents and employees crowded into the narrow hallway outside the boardroom. In all, there were about fifty adults and over a dozen small children, and it was hard to tell which age group was more riled up.

The city had given the EOC board of directors until Monday, November 30 to get rid of the deputy director and one other top-ranking staff person, or lose their funding. Parents and employees had shown up to several previously planned board meetings, only to have them cancelled because of lack of quorum.