The San Francisco Business Times regularly features a profile of local business or nonprofit leaders. The March 27, 2009 issue featured an interview with our CEO, Tess Reynolds.

Organization

• Milestone: We hit 1,500 youth clients served — 356 of them last year. All of our youth clients live below the San Francisco self-sufficiency standard, which is $25,693 for a single adult, and 80 percent live below the federal poverty level.
• Corporate support: Businesses can support us three ways: (1) giving grants or sponsorships; (2) buying printed apparel from Ashbury Images; (3) hosting a job intern at their site. Altogether, about $1 million of our revenue comes from the corporate sector, including grants from Wells Fargo, Bank of America and The Capital Group, and revenue (for Ashbury Images services) from You Tube, Peet’s Coffee and Whole Foods.
• Employees: 31 staff members; 70 youth intern clients.
• Volunteers: Over 200.

Office issues

• Recent challenge: Unplanned facilities expenses. Just this winter, we came in after the holidays and the roof had leaked and the bike shop water heater exploded — right there that’s $20,000 in expenses. Nobody wants to pay overhead for a nonprofit.

Measures of success

• Most important is that 92 percent of our youth interns last year went on to other jobs or college.

Professional insights

• Personal path to nonprofit work: My first job was at Proctor & Gamble and I worked high tech for 20 years, but I reached a point where I wanted the output of my work to be more about people than products. I was volunteering, serving on boards, when I got a call about New Door’s search for a CEO and my heart got excited.
• Greatest pleasure: Seeing a young person grow before my eyes.

Introspections

• Best recent moment: I bumped into a former client a few weeks ago and she’s now in nursing school.
• Worst recent moment: That moment six months ago when one of our youth clients got shot.
• Greatest inspiration: Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest who left a prestigious teaching position at Yale to live among developmentally handicapped adults, and that was so inspiring: to walk humbly but to act boldly.
• Causes: Helping Menlo Park Presbyterian Church grow and helping dying children get better care. I lost a son to cancer nine years ago.

—Sarah Duxbury (SF Business Times Reporter)