Marc Benioff, Tony Robbins boost SF’s soup-kitchen nuns

The sisters of the Fraternite Notre Dame Mary of Nazareth Soup Kitchen have been hoping for nearly a year that Robbins and other powerful friends who jumped in to help them when they were served an eviction notice in the Tenderloin can prevail.

Robbins got involved in the nuns’ plight in February after being moved by a story in The Chronicle about how the landlord of their soup kitchen intended to raise their rent more than 50 percent and then evict them out a short time later.



[...] the nuns have talked to hundreds of residents in the Mission District, walking door to door and attending neighborhood meetings, and Robbins and others assembled a volunteer team of lawyers and supporters to advocate for the soup kitchen.

The neighborhood around the proposed new soup kitchen has been a nexus for rough street life for decades, and tent camps and poverty-level residential hotels dot the area.

The city’s first Navigation Center, an intensive aid and shelter center for the homeless, is next to the building that would house the soup kitchen.

Some residents say they are afraid food lines would draw more homeless people and reduce their property values, and an appeal for a public hearing from the homeowners association for 1930 Mission St.’s residents is reason the Planning Commission is hearing the matter today.

The Planning Commission’s staff has recommended approval of the Mission Street soup kitchen, noting that the city’s Food Security Task Force has determined that 31 percent of the people living in the neighborhood “are at risk for food insecurity” and that city policy encourages support for human service providers in the area.

Opponents of the project wrote to the commission that the soup kitchen would draw a clientele “proven to bring crime, graffiti, substance abuse and panhandling,” and would cast a “long, dark shadow” over the Mission District.