CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff speaks at the press conference announcing the Heading Home campaign on Friday, December 9, 2016 in San Francisco, Calif. Amy Osborne / Special to The Chronicle 2016
San Francisco Chronicle • May 22, 2018 • By Kevin Fagan
Marc Benioff isn’t planning on waxing long about the gleaming glass sides, the pioneering height or the fancy light show at the top of his Salesforce Tower when it officially opens Tuesday. He’s got more down-to-earth things in mind for the dedication speech he’s set to give.
He’ll be talking about solving homelessness — particularly among children and families — and how the Heading Home Initiative he helped create has met its fundraising goal and what it will do in the future. Making education the best it can be. Cleaning trash off the streets.
These are causes he has personally given millions of dollars to address. And on the day he dedicates the tallest office building San Francisco has ever seen (61 stories), he wants to use this pulpit to pound home the ideas he has for making his hometown a better place.
“In my humble opinion, I have some priorities for the next mayor,” Benioff told The Chronicle on Monday. “I’m talking about public education for our kids, and health care, helping our homeless people, particularly homeless kids. Making streets clean. Trust and safety.”
His list goes on to include fixing up school playgrounds and hospitals — not just in San Francisco, but in Oakland and beyond — reducing income inequality and marshaling the economic power of tech companies like his for the public good. As he rolls it out, his words come in an ever increasing rush — this is clearly a passion of his, and one toward which he has personally steered his money since founding the software giant in 1999.
Benioff and his wife, Lynne, have donated millions of dollars to causes from schools to hospitals, with $250 million alone going to the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland. Salesforce and Salesforce.org, the foundation arm of the company, have given $220 million to community causes.
“These are the good times, when we should be focused on these things,” he said. He doesn’t want to run for San Francisco mayor — “I’m pretty busy right now,” he cracked — but he definitely wants to push whoever is elected next month toward fixing the things he thinks need fixing the most.
At the top of his list is homelessness.
On Tuesday, Benioff will announce that the Heading Home Initiative, the family homelessness effort he and his wife helped found in 2016, has met its goal of raising at least $30 million in public and private funding. The Benioffs kick-started the program with $10 million, and on Tuesday they will also announce they are tossing in an addition $1.5 million to spur more donations. They’re looking to raise $7 million more over the next year, and the goal is to end most family homelessness in San Francisco in the next few years.
Over the past two years, Heading Home — managed by Hamilton Families, the city’s biggest family homelessness nonprofit — has housed 235 families through rent subsidies. The goal is to put a total of 800 under roofs by 2020. Just as important is reducing the waiting time for homeless families in shelters to get housed from more than a year to just 90 days.
Hamilton director Tomiquia Moss said 88 percent of the city’s homeless families are now meeting that 90-day wait period goal, but to get them into housing, about 80 percent have to be placed outside of San Francisco.
“Rents went up 22 percent in the Bay Area over the past couple of years and pay is actually down 2 percent, so we have some real challenges and are charting some new territory here,” Moss said. “But we are excited. Getting people housed in 90 days has always been our goal, and I believe we can do that.”
Benioff said he is so encouraged by the Heading Home effort that he’d like to see the model expanded to individual homeless people.
“I feel very optimistic about this model,” he said. “There is no reason why, in a great city like San Francisco, any child should be homeless. If that is not a priority here, I don’t know what is.”
With that same sort of concern for children, Benioff’s company has granted more than $34 million to public schools in San Francisco and Oakland since 2013, and Salesforce workers have volunteered more than 25,000 hours of time as well. He credits that, at least in part, for a 2,000 percent increase in the enrollment of girls in computer science classes in San Francisco over the past year — and a 6,000 percent rise in the enrollment of under-represented groups overall in computer science.
He now wants the same kind of attention — “focus, focus, focus” — on making the city’s streets clean, creating affordable housing for teachers and enlisting more tech companies to get involved in social change.
“The tech community can be a key partner with the city, but it needs to not be pointed out as a scapegoat,” Benioff said. “This city has been able to make tremendous changes throughout its history — look at Bank of America, Levi Strauss, Warren Hellman — people who really set the stage to show that we can solve problems.
“But we have to be working all together.”
Why spend so much effort on these causes, when running a multibillion tech company presumably takes a lot of attention to begin with?
“I think it’s hard-wired into me,” he said. “I feel very much committed to San Francisco, I went to public schools in the Bay Area. I’ve just always felt this way.”