Mission Graduates

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Mission Graduates Making college the expectation not the exception since 1972.

Mission Graduates is a nonprofit organization that increases the number of K-12 students in San Francisco who are prepared for and complete a college education.

🌱 Our latest Quarterly Impact Report is here.Meet Faith. As a little kid, she was a watcher, hanging back and studying e...
10/07/2026

🌱 Our latest Quarterly Impact Report is here.

Meet Faith. As a little kid, she was a watcher, hanging back and studying everyone before she’d decide who to befriend.

“I watch people before I hang out with them. If I like the way that they act, I become friends with them.”

Today, that same careful kid is the one others follow, helping first-graders with homework and teaching the little ones how to calm down when they’re upset.

What changed was a Wellness Room, a trusted adult, and the tools to navigate big feelings.

“Before, she’d bang on the door. Now she can say, ‘I really need a break.’ She’s using the skills.”

💛 Read Faith’s story, link in bio.

MentalHealthMatters Bessie Carmichael

Calling all high school juniors, this one’s for you! 🗣️At College Connect, we walk alongside first-generation students o...
10/01/2026

Calling all high school juniors, this one’s for you! 🗣️

At College Connect, we walk alongside first-generation students on the path to higher education, and we don’t stop at acceptance. From your college applications all the way through graduation and into your career, we’re with you (and your family) every step of the way.

We’re accepting applications for our next cohort right now, and our priority deadline is October 9th, just around the corner! ⏰

Juniors, if you’ll be the first in your family to go to college and you’re ready to make it happen, this is your moment.

🔗

🫰 Food for Thought closes tonight.We work with 3,800 students and families here in San Francisco. Here’s what your gift ...
09/30/2026

🫰 Food for Thought closes tonight.

We work with 3,800 students and families here in San Francisco. Here’s what your gift pays for:

🔸A fifth grader at Flynn who has somewhere to go when the day gets to be too much, because a Wellness Coordinator runs a room where she can reset.

🔸 A junior at Mission High working through a college application nobody in her family has filled out before, sitting with a volunteer who’s been reading her drafts since September.

🔸 A parent learning to run an ELAC meeting, so she can walk into her child’s school and ask for what he needs.

🔸 A College Connect student in her third year of university, still checking in with the same staff member who helped her apply.

Kindergarten through career, right here in our community.

Educational access and immigrant rights are under real pressure right now. This is a way to do something concrete about it.

Hours left. Every gift enters you to win:

🇲🇽 A week in San Miguel de Allende from House + House Architects 🏀 Warriors VIP seats from the Golden State Community Foundation 🏈 A trip to Thursday Night Football from Mutual of America

$10 = 1 entry · $25 = 3 entries

🔗 Link in bio

🏀 Warriors tickets, and the people behind them.The Golden State Community Foundation has been supporting Mission Graduat...
09/29/2026

🏀 Warriors tickets, and the people behind them.

The Golden State Community Foundation has been supporting Mission Graduates for years. They back education and youth development across the Bay Area, working toward thriving students, schools, and communities.

This year they’ve donated a Warriors VIP experience as one of our Food for Thought prizes: premium box seats, the kind of night out most families don’t get.

Every gift to Food for Thought is an entry, and we draw tomorrow.

$10 = 1 entry
$25 = 3 entries

Thank you, Warriors In The Community, for showing up for Bay Area students year after year. 💛

🔗 Link in bio

🎓 Meet a Food for Thought sponsor: the University of San Francisco.About 42% of USF’s incoming class identifies as first...
09/25/2026

🎓 Meet a Food for Thought sponsor: the University of San Francisco.

About 42% of USF’s incoming class identifies as first-generation, and the campus is built around that.

With roughly 5,200 students, USF is small enough that students know their professors and their classmates by name.

“That higher-touch classroom setting really contributes to success,” says Victoria Gonzalez, Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admission. “Having that built-in network of people to ask questions has been beneficial for a lot of students who might feel overwhelmed by higher education.”

They’ve also built programming specifically for first-generation students, including a summer bridge program that brings students to campus before their first semester begins.

Victoria is a first-generation student herself, and when asked what actually helps students graduate, her answer wasn’t about money or academics.

“Sometimes it can be difficult to even know what resources are out there and available to you. It can be difficult to ask for help, or know what questions to ask.”

That’s the gap our College Connect program works to close, which is why this partnership makes sense on both ends. We spend six years helping students figure out what to ask for. USF is a campus where the answers are within reach once they arrive.

“Mission Graduates aligns with a lot of the things we stand for,” Victoria says. “Getting students prepared to succeed in higher education. That really aligns with what we value here at USF.”

Asked what she’d want a Mission Graduates high schooler to know, she didn’t hesitate.

“It can be really scary and overwhelming to be the first to navigate higher education. You’re not alone. Find your people. You can do it, and you don’t have to do it alone.”

🧡 Our corporate sponsors are the community that makes this work possible. Thank you, USF, for backing Food for Thought 2026.

University of San Francisco

🎯 A school built by community organizing just out-organized everyone.June Jordan School for Equity opened in 2003 in the...
09/23/2026

🎯 A school built by community organizing just out-organized everyone.

June Jordan School for Equity opened in 2003 in the Excelsior. It exists because a group of teachers, parents, and students spent two years campaigning for it, studying schools around the country and organizing until the district agreed to let them build one. They were chosen from thirty applicants.  

It’s named for the poet and activist June Jordan, whom Alice Walker called the universal poet. About 166 students go there. The mission isn’t only to get them to college, but to send them out as people who can change things.

Twenty-three years later, that’s still how the place works.

Erin Cavanaugh and Jacqueline Rin run our Extended Day Program at June Jordan. They set a Food for Thought team goal of $1,000. They’re now past $6,500, and every dollar goes straight back into their own program.

They did it the way the school was built. They went to the people already there: teachers, staff, families, the people who know these students by name. Principal Amanda Chui gave first, and then someone gave in her honor. They wrote to people one at a time rather than blasting a list. Erin asked her lash lady.

What the money funds is a program shaped entirely by what students actually want. Motorcycle Mechanics. Astronomy. GSA. Homework help and exam prep. Warm suppers. Connections to internships. A room to be in after the last bell.

They also showed up at Foreign Cinema together during Dine Out, Do Good, because that’s the other thing about June Jordan. They do things together.

Food for Thought closes September 30.
👉 Join in supporting June Jordan:

June Jordan School for Equity

🎳 Tonight we’re bowling! Mission Bowling Club closes out Dine Out, Do Good, and it’s the most fun we’ll have all week.Ou...
09/21/2026

🎳 Tonight we’re bowling!

Mission Bowling Club closes out Dine Out, Do Good, and it’s the most fun we’ll have all week.

Our College Connect and high school students will be there with the volunteer writing partners who’ve spent the year helping them through college essays and applications. Different setting, same people, nobody has to write anything.

We asked Jarrod Ashby, who manages the club, what he hopes the students get out of it. “As someone who remembers the stress of senior year and applying for colleges, I honestly hope they just have fun and get to blow off a little steam with some bowling.”

Tonight is also MBC’s monthly Q***r Community Bowling Night, which is exactly why we picked it. They’ve built a room where a lot of different people feel at home. On any given week that’s ODC dancers from across the street, bowling leagues, families at weekend brunch, and whoever’s out on a Friday night.

$10 from every $12 ticket goes to Mission Graduates, and a drink is included.

On why they keep doing this, Jarrod put it plainly: supporting local nonprofits is part of the necessary work of running a business in San Francisco.

Tonight, 6 to 8 PM. Come bowl. Gutter balls welcome.

📍 3176 17th Street 🔗

Mission Bowling Club, thank you for closing us out. 🧡

***rBowlingNight Mission Bowling Club

🇲🇽 🏡 “The moment I stepped off that plane, I had this overwhelming sensation of coming home. And it hasn’t left.” Cathi ...
09/18/2026

🇲🇽 🏡 “The moment I stepped off that plane, I had this overwhelming sensation of coming home. And it hasn’t left.”

Cathi House’s first trip to Mexico was a supply run. She’s an architect, and she needed a particular stone for a project she was designing in the Caribbean, so she flew down to find the quarry it came from.

That was 39 years ago. She’s since designed more than 45 homes in Mexico, and she and her husband Steven House of House + House Architects have spent the decades since with one foot in San Francisco and one in San Miguel de Allende.

A life built across two countries is what led them to Mission Graduates about 20 years ago, and it’s why they’ve kept supporting us. They’ve watched the organization grow from a small after-school program into what it is now, and Cathi says she admires the persistence behind it most.

🧡 Every year since, they’ve donated a week at their home in San Miguel as our Food for Thought grand prize.

And it’s some prize. Seven nights for two at Casa de las Estrellas, with airfare. A house Cathi designed and built for the two of them, in one of Mexico’s most beautiful colonial towns.

They hope whoever wins comes home understanding Mexico differently than when they left.

“It’s such a joy to open someone’s eyes to something they had a preconception about but really had no idea.”

Every gift to Food for Thought is an entry. Donate by September 30.

🔗

Thank you, Cathi and Steven. 💛

🫓 Today we’re at Panchita’s Pupusería & Restaurant, across the street from our office.It’s the kind of place people come...
09/17/2026

🫓 Today we’re at Panchita’s Pupusería & Restaurant, across the street from our office.

It’s the kind of place people come back to for twenty years, then start bringing their kids.

It’s been on 16th Street since 1989, run by the same family the whole time. Doris and Jackie Vargas are behind it now, working with a team that makes thousands of pupusas by hand on a good weekend. It takes about three years to learn to shape one properly.

When the recession hit in 2008, they put a grill out on the sidewalk and started doing pupusa deals so people could still afford to eat. Those deals never went away. Keeping it within reach has always been the point.

They’ve been part of Food for Thought for years, and they open their doors to our families every time we ask.

There are dozens of kinds of pupusa now. Loroco, spinach, zucchini, mushroom and garlic, and the revuelta with pork, beans and cheese, which outsells everything. Get the plantains with crema. Get the horchata.

Today, 4 to 6 PM, our Promotoras and the Parent Partner Program are hosting here. Many of the families coming are regulars. We wanted a room we already feel at home in.

A portion of every order goes to Mission Graduates all day, dine-in or takeout. Lunch counts. Dinner counts.

📍 3091 16th Street, open 9am to 11pm
🔗 Full week at the link in bio

Panchitas Pupuseria : thank you!

💥 Every food truck at SPARK Social is somebody’s small business.That’s easy to miss when you’re looking at a food park i...
09/16/2026

💥 Every food truck at SPARK Social is somebody’s small business.

That’s easy to miss when you’re looking at a food park in Mission Bay with a b**r garden, mini golf, and a rotating lineup of vendors. But the model is deliberate, and so is the way they use the space.

“SPARK Social is a launchpad for local food entrepreneurs,” their team told us. “Each vendor brings a story, a dream, and something unique that enriches our city.”

They describe their role as both a platform and a partner: giving small food businesses a place to grow while giving families somewhere accessible and safe to gather. They work with nonprofits, schools, and community groups regularly, and they’ve been doing it with us for years.

Tonight they’re hosting us again. From 6 to 8 PM we’ll be around reserved fire pits with the Educational Champions, volunteers, writing partners, and alumni who have been carrying Food for Thought on their own time. It’s the kind of evening that only works because somebody hands you the space and tells you to make yourselves at home.

Through September 22, a portion of every fire pit rental at SPARK goes to Mission Graduates. Guests just mention Food for Thought when booking.

SPARK is one of five San Francisco restaurants taking part in Dine Out, Do Good this week, alongside Foreign Cinema, Asiento, Panchita’s Pupusería, and Mission Bowling Club.

👉 Full schedule:

Address

3040 16th Street
San Francisco, CA
94103

Opening Hours

Monday 10am - 6pm
Tuesday 10am - 6pm
Wednesday 10am - 6pm
Thursday 10am - 6pm
Friday 10am - 6pm

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