Why does City College matter?
City College of San Francisco is one of California’s educational gems. CCSF has always been a national model for open access. City College must remain accessible to those who need it most in San Francisco’s communities, including low-income and immigrant communities, displaced workers, veterans and the disabled, first- generation college students, full- and part-time students in need of second—and third—chances, and students transferring to four-year institutions. City College must remain a stable community center that provides irreplaceable and affordable pathways for success like high-demand vocational and workforce programs, degrees and certificates, English as a second language, non-credit, and civic education.

What is at stake?
Deliberate and chronic underfunding is hitting our City College hard. City College’s administration and elected leaders plan to cut the college more than 50%, lay off hundreds of workers, and close the door to tens of thousands of students. This is unprecedented and will undermine City College’s essential mission: to provide an accessible and quality education to all San Franciscans, especially those with the greatest need.

In the most expensive city in the nation, our students face threats from gross racial inequity, food and housing insecurity, gentrification, job loss and more. Compounding these threats is the erosion and disinvestment in the very institutions our communities rely upon to combat these ills. From the accreditation crisis to the global pandemic and the current funding crisis, City College has been the canary in the coal mine. Public higher education and opportunities for disenfranchised communities are under threat.

As a bastion of affordable and free, accessible, community-driven higher education, CCSF is precisely the kind of institution that is most vulnerable to disinvestment in the public good. Chronic and designed underfunding of our communities' educational needs serves a conservative agenda and shrinks the public sector. The billionaires and corporations driving this disinvestment are the enemy.

How can we save our CCSF?
City College is an essential part of San Francisco’s COVID recovery plan. In this new recession we can expect demand for CCSF classes to spike as SF residents try to get back into the workforce. In order to help them, CCSF needs more resources.

Instead of accepting scarcity as inevitable and laying off swaths of workers and slashing programs, we call on the leaders of CCSF to stand with us. Now is not the time to make drastic cuts to the college. Emergency relief money is available in the short-term. Beyond that, we need our City and State elected leaders to work with us to create real, long-term solutions for funding our CCSF. We must stop the erosion of our public institutions.

We challenge our administration to rectify past failures, and develop a clear and transparent budgeting process that puts students, employees, and our community at the center.

We challenge our Trustees to demonstrate leadership and do everything possible to stop these immediate harms. We call on CCSF leaders to use emergency COVID funds to replace lost revenue, keep its workers employed, and open classes to students.

We challenge our wealthy city to help lift up our community college. We ask San Francisco Supervisors and the Mayor to find emergency funding in the City’s budget to help our CCSF stay stable in the short term and work with us to find ongoing funding to support San Francisco’s college.

We challenge our state to invest in our communities and our students' futures. We call on Governor Newsom and our State’s elected leaders to allocate emergency funding to CCSF and work to provide the sustainable long-term funding our state’s Community College system deserves.

We ask our college, city and state leaders to engage with the national conversation about the value community colleges bring to our communities and the need to increase investment. City College and San Francisco can help lead that conversation. But to do that, we need to sustain CCSF.