Tenderloin teens channel life on the street into stories of hope

SAN FRANCISCO – A group of young people is working hard to flip the script in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood often criticized as being a bad part of San Francisco.  

They’re a part of organization 826 Valencia at 180 Golden Gate Avenue in the Tenderloin, where young people from all over the Bay Area come to learn to tell their stories for podcasting, writing, and public speaking purposes with the hopes of becoming published authors. Quran Samad is a part of the program’s Black Student’s Initiative, led by teacher Precediha Dangerfield. Dangerfield told our news team her students are “worthy of every resource.”

Samad travels in the afternoons and evening hours to develop her writing talents under Dangerfield’s direction.

“I think I’ve got it in me,” she said as she penned her essay, titled “It’s expensive to be poor.” Samad, like the other students, was assigned to write about social justice, and prepared her essay about what she feels like when she sees her mother get bills in the mail. 

She read her completed essay aloud at The Museum of African Diaspora, saying, in part, “when the bills come I see my mom struggling and I feel her pain. Our leaders need to make pay rate equal to living rate comfortably and confident.” Halfway through her reading, Quran began to cry, with audience members saying out loud, “we love you,” and “you’ve got this.” 

Once finished, she said, “For me telling this story, this is going to be something amazing. Something great is going to come out of this.”

It’s stories like these that keep Quran’s teachers coming back to the sometimes mean streets of the Tenderloin, saying there’s hope where there are children willing to learn and tell their stories. Precediha Dangerfield says people should remember about the Tenderloin that it is home to thirty five hundred students, something she says our city should be proud of.