Campaigns are marketing and sales. Governing is the product.
Our goal is to help civic leaders of San Francisco be more informed in what we say and effective at what we do. We source knowledge, inspiration, and insights chiefly from leaders in and around the San Francisco government with an eye toward what newcomers at the base of the learning curve would need to know.
Recurring themes:
The difference between marketing (winning campaigns) vs. product (governing that gets outcomes)
The sheer complexity of governing San Francisco
Questioning the norms, culture, and incentives that have been hobbling the effectiveness of San Francisco government
Other things veterans of governing San Francisco think are most important in the days ahead
Governing San Francisco is a project of the Abundant San Francisco, a municipal chapter of Abundance Network.
Why this newsletter exists
Mostly, this is not about giving advice to city leaders, although there will be some of that; it’s really about building shared context and a lens to the work of governing that makes things clearer and simpler. We hope that by sharing the insights, we can help, in a small but meaningful way, the community of civic leaders who love our city and toil away for years to improve our civic institutions—enabling them to be a bit more effective.
Publishing gate-kept knowledge publicly is a bit nerve-wracking, given how charged our politics in San Francisco have been. But we believe there is value in more public knowledge about how systems of governance work or why they fail.
To reform government, actors inside and outside the system—advocates, press, donors—must have a shared understanding of our challenges. Today, they don’t. Building this shared understanding of our city’s fundamental challenges is a prerequisite for successfully solving them together. Our city’s challenges are substantial.
There is an assumption that the election of moderates in and of itself will “fix” the city. Elections are consequential, but we simply will fail to govern effectively without sustained alignment between electeds, government staff, and outside civic leaders. With a new majority on the Board of Supervisors and a new Mayor, that work starts now.
It is also assumed that moderate control of the Board of Supervisors can be counted on in the subsequent election cycles. That is a faulty assumption, as the history of Board of Supervisors control shows a thermostatic regression to the mean; defending Joel Engardio in D4 and Rafael Mandelman’s D8 seat will be challenging in 2026.
This is a historic moment and opportunity for governing San Francisco. The early days of Mayor Lurie’s administration and the new Board of Supervisors will help shape whether the mandate for change voters gave our leaders translates to tangible outcomes or if we fall back into our old habit of letting the 30% we disagree on as a city tank the other 70%.
