Our San Francisco Context
As beautiful as it is conflicted, San Francisco celebrates cultural diversity while pricing it out and revels in social progressiveness while luring the upwardly mobile with wealth, prestige and Pacific Rim entrepreneurialism. Competing visions, ideologies and pursuits clash to produce a city characterized by divisiveness, inequity and an inability to take care of its most vulnerable.
With the advent of the 21st century came new challenges. The dot-com boom and bust further inflated housing costs. Post-9/11 preoccupation with national security (and global ambitions) sidelined domestic concerns, and a political climate of suspicion adversely impacted ethnic minorities and the immigrant poor. Meanwhile, lingering economic crises at the state and local levels undercut vital services.
It is in this context that GUM assists local congregations in their ministries and service and prophetic witness.
Did you know?
San Francisco and the Bay Area has more millionaires per capita than any other major metropolitan area in the country, while 14% of our city’s children live in poverty. Nearly 40% of our children lack mom or dad, almost half of whom have neither.