The Nonprofit Behind San Francisco’s Pay-to-Play Scandal Wants Another Supervisor Seat

For fifteen years, one nonprofit in Bayview-Hunters Point has sat at the intersection of public money and political power, and the people running it keep turning up in City Hall, in the headlines, and now on the ballot.

The nonprofit at the center of this story is Young Community Developers, or YCD, a workforce-development organization that has become one of the most prolific beneficiaries of the SFPUC “Community Benefits” program, which gave contractors bidding on public projects extra credit for donating money or time to nonprofits like YCD. Journalist Susan Dyer Reynolds first exposed the pay-to-play dynamics of that program in the Marina Times in July 2020, identifying YCD’s longtime executive director as a middleman who steered SFPUC contractor donations toward nonprofits tied to him, including one called the Southeast Consortium for Equitable Partnerships. She’s continued reporting on the players involved ever since.

It’s a program with a documented design flaw at its core: a 2021 city audit found it “poorly designed” and at risk of abuse. Firms bidding on large SFPUC contracts were effectively encouraged to steer donations to favored nonprofits, and those donations helped shape who won the work. Public money went in a circle, and a small circle of people decided which way it turned.

The Line of Succession

YCD’s executive director from 1998 to 2003 was Dwayne Jones, who went on to found the consulting firm RDJ Enterprises. Jones didn’t just benefit from the Community Benefits program — city records show he partnered with the SFPUC in 2011 to help write it, and an NBC Bay Area investigation later found his firm was paid $7.1 million as a community-benefits consultant on five public projects, while at least seven firms bidding on SFPUC work hired him to help draft their own community-benefits proposals.

That’s separate from the criminal case against him. In August 2023, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins charged Jones with 29 felony counts in the original filing, including bribery, misappropriation of public money, and financial conflict of interest, alleging he funneled roughly $190,000 in kickbacks to Lanita Henriquez, director of the city’s separate Community Challenge Grant Program, to steer more than $1.4 million in contracts to his own companies — not to YCD. The City Attorney suspended and moved to debar Jones and five affiliated entities, and the city barred him from any new contracts. In other words, Jones ran two separate pay-to-play arrangements through two different city programs — one that funneled developer money toward YCD, and one that funneled a grant director’s favor toward his own private companies.

Reynolds had, in fact, raised alarms about Jones years before his arrest: in her July 2020 exposé, she wrote she had “a feeling at some point the FBI will knock on the doors of” Jones and others in his circle, and returned to the theme in a February 2022 column headlined “Despite years of ethical missteps and ties to corruption, the city keeps giving him millions.”

YCD’s next leader was Shamann Walton, who ran the nonprofit from 2010 until he took office as District 10 supervisor in 2019. From that seat, Walton became the loudest public voice demanding that developers negotiate “community benefits” before building in his district, the very mechanism at the heart of the scandal. Susan Dyer Reynolds later reported that Walton had quietly formed a for-profit LLC arm of YCD tied to a shipyard housing project. Walton is now termed out and cannot run again. He also recently faced an ethics fine for accepting gifts from nonprofits above the legal limit and failing to disclose and recuse.

Which brings us to the third name. Dion-Jay “DJ” Brookter runs YCD today. He was deputy director under Walton from 2010 to 2016 and has been chief executive since 2019. And he is now running to replace Walton in District 10, endorsed by the man he replaced at the nonprofit. “DJ is the real deal,” Walton says on Brookter’s campaign site.

The Seat Is Tied to the Money

District 10 is not an ordinary supervisor’s office. It is where “community benefits” dollars are concentrated, and the supervisor who holds it has outsized influence over how that money moves through the neighborhood. For years, that supervisor was YCD’s former director. Now YCD’s current director wants the seat.This is not a small nonprofit passing a small favor: YCD’s most recent federal filing shows roughly $17.1 million in annual revenue, almost entirely government contributions and grants, with Brookter compensated about $240,000 a year.

That figure does not capture every stream. Reynolds also documented that YCD was one of two nonprofits awarded a share of a multimillion-dollar “Interrupt, Predict and Organize” (IPO) violence-prevention grant, worth up to $5.8 million across fiscal years 2022 through 2024, to provide “transitional employment services” to program participants. The results raise hard questions about what that money bought. Reynolds reported that IPO participants kept committing crimes while drawing city paychecks through the program: two men placed into city jobs earned nearly $700,000 combined in Department of Public Works salary and benefits across years in which they had documented violent criminal histories.

City employees told Reynolds the program’s oversight was lax to the point of dysfunction, describing being warned to “leave it alone” when they flagged participants collecting pay for work they never showed up to do. YCD, paid millions to handle the “soft skills” and case-management side of that program under Brookter’s leadership, was one of the nonprofits responsible for exactly the oversight those workers say was missing. The organization that received the money and the office that helps direct it have stayed inside the same circle for a decade and a half.

YCD’s city funding runs through more than one troubled pipeline. Its own list of funders includes the Dream Keeper Initiative, the roughly $120 million equity program. That program’s former director, Sheryl Davis, was charged in March 2026 with 13 felony counts of financial conflict of interest, along with misappropriation of public funds and perjury, after prosecutors and a city audit found what the District Attorney’s office called a “pervasive pattern of self-dealing” — more than $4.5 million in Dream Keeper funds allegedly steered to a nonprofit Davis personally controlled.

While there is no indication YCD was involved in that misconduct, it’s one more example of a pattern that keeps repeating in San Francisco: large pools of public money, distributed through programs with thin oversight, flowing to a small, overlapping set of nonprofits and the people who run them.

A History of Conflicts of Interest

Brookter’s career is a study in serving on the public bodies that are supposed to check the very system his nonprofit depends on.

Throughout the entire Community Benefits era, from 2010 to the present, Brookter has led or helped lead a nonprofit whose revenue is overwhelmingly city and government funding. Even as he rose at YCD, he took on public roles that touched the same money. From 2016 to 2018 he served as executive director of the Southeast Community Facility Commission, a city body whose work overlaps with the same southeast-district development dollars.

Then came the sharpest conflict of all. In September 2018, Mayor London Breed appointed Brookter to the San Francisco Police Commission, the civilian body that sets policy for the Police Department. During that same period, he sat on the board of Urban Alchemy, the nonprofit paid millions in city contracts to deploy “ambassadors” doing street-level work explicitly meant to reduce the role of police. Urban Alchemy’s IRS filing lists Brookter as a board officer, and Susan Dyer Reynolds reported in the Marina Times that he served as its chief financial officer, writing that he was “essentially running money out of SFPD and into a nonprofit where he controls the finances.” A sitting police commissioner holding a leadership role at a city-funded organization built to substitute for police is a conflict that never should have been allowed. Brookter left the Police Commission in October 2021.

That organization has not aged well either. Urban Alchemy has faced mismanagement allegations in city after city: as the Santa Fe New Mexican reported, Austin severed ties with the group in 2025, Denver’s council approved a new $30 million contract only “reluctantly,” and a Portland audit flagged the organization for failing to register as a lobbying entity. Yet the overlaps did not stop with the Police Commission. Breed next appointed Brookter to the Sheriff’s Department Oversight Board, where he served from 2022 to 2025 and rose to vice president, once again overseeing a law-enforcement body while running a nonprofit whose reentry and workforce programs operate around the justice-involved population. Now comes the natural endpoint of that trajectory: a run for the District 10 seat, the very office that helps direct the money his organization receives.

The Choice District 10 Faces

None of this is about just one person’s guilt. It is about a pattern, and whether voters want to extend it. The same organization, the same district, and the same handful of names—endorsing each other, funding each other, and passing the public offices between them while the public money moves in a circle.

San Francisco already knows where that road leads. The Community Benefits scandal was not an accident. It was the predictable product of a closed loop in which the people who dispense public money and the people who receive it are the same small group. District 10 voters have a chance to break that loop instead of handing it the keys. They should take it.