Mayor offers money to bring HBCU satellite campus to The City

San Francisco Mayor London Breed offered money Thursday — estimated to be between $500,000 and $1 million — to help establish in The City a satellite campus of one of the schools known as historically Black colleges and universities.

Breed’s administration announced the funding opportunity while issuing a request for qualifications from HBCUs interested in pursuing such a campus, an idea the mayor first touted in early February when she hosted a group of HBCU representatives to explore the possibility.

“Bringing an HBCU satellite campus here will boost our Downtown and our economy, while bringing new minds and ideas to grow within our world-renowned culture of innovation,” Breed said Thursday in a press release.

The City’s goal is to issue a grant in July or August to support preparatory work so that an HBCU campus could offer classes locally at the start of the 2025-26 academic school year, said San Francisco Human Rights Commission Executive Director Sheryl Davis , who is leading the campus development effort together with the Office of Economic and Workforce Development.

The City’s funding is meant to cover costs that would include planning, space acquisition and local accreditation, Davis said.

The hope is that multiple HBCUs would collaborate on a future campus and engage with San Francisco’s public schools and colleges to enable Bay Area residents and HBCU students from around the country to study in San Francisco, Davis said.

“The first goal would be to have our local residents, folks who are from here, who live here, participate — but I imagine that it would be open to folks from all over the country,” she said.

The pursuit of an HBCU campus is part of what is dubbed the Black 2 San Francisco initiative, which is funding an upcoming six-week program in June and July that will bring about 60 HBCU students from 20 schools to The City, where they will participate in lectures and workshops and explore career opportunities through internships, Davis said.

The vision is for that cohort of students to be the vanguard of an expected long-term future of HBCUs in San Francisco, city officials said.

The summer students will stay at the University of San Francisco’s main campus in the center of The City and take classes at the university’s downtown campus, Davis said.

Funding for the summer activities is coming from the Opportunities For All program that has offered paid internships to as many as 3,000 young people per summer. Davis estimated more than 2,000 people would get such opportunities this year.

Money for HBCU campus preparatory work will come from the Opportunities For All program and from the Dream Keeper Initiative , the $60 million-a-year effort launched by Mayor Breed and Supervisor Shamann Walton in 2021 to improve the fortunes of The City’s Black population.

Since the mayor’s February HBCU event, city officials have been especially engaged in conversations with officials from Alabama A&M University, Tuskegee University and Miles College in Alabama; Morris Brown College and Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta; Morgan State University in Baltimore; and Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Davis said.

“It’s super exciting,” said S. Keith Hargrove, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Tuskegee University, who visited The City in February.

Hargrove said a physical presence in San Francisco could promote the option of attending an HBCU to Bay Area residents and expose Tuskegee students to the region’s universities and innovative industrial players.

Tuskegee already has a summer partnership with UC Berkeley for students to study data science. The school will be sending students to participate in this year’s San Francisco summer program, which drew a lot of interest from students, Hargrove said.

Michael Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College in Dallas — which recruits students from the Bay Area — said his school “without question” would apply for the campus-planning grant money.

“This initiative by the mayor, and the way that they've thought about this, is really indicative of people who are committed to the success of this type of venture, so we're thrilled to be part of it,” Sorrell said.

“We have deep, longstanding relationships on all sides of the bay, and so to be able to deepen those is just, candidly, very exciting to us,” he said. “I hope we win.”

Sorrell said his ideas for a possible San Francisco operation have been informed by input from the local community, but he wouldn’t provide details to preserve his “competitive advantage.”

Davis said city officials would like a campus to be located in The City’s downtown, which would align with Breed’s “30 by 30 initiative,” which calls for adding 30,000 new residents and students to downtown San Francisco by 2030.

City officials have toured locations for potential HBCU use, including the giant Emporium Centre San Francisco mall and office complex on Market Street near Fifth Street, she said. That property has lost many of its tenants and is in court-ordered receivership after the owners turned it back to the lenders.

Other potential choices for space in The City are relatively plentiful, given that San Francisco in the first quarter posted record-high office and retail vacancies.

Breed is not the only one calling for recruiting a university campus as a strategy for revitalizing The City’s downtown.

Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who is running for mayor against Breed, introduced legislation in late April to create a fund to accept city and philanthropic contributions to provide financial incentives to public educational institutions for establishing a presence in key neighborhoods, including South of Market, Union Square and the Financial District.

Safaí suggested seeding the fund with $25 million, with sources possibly including bonds.

He cited the example of Arizona State University, which opened a campus in downtown Phoenix in 2006 and which sent a delegation in late February to tour San Francisco and share experiences at Safaí’s invitation.

“This is a historic opportunity to purchase buildings for educational uses,” Safaí said, highlighting the dramatic drop in real-estate prices.