loader from loading.io

D9 Supervisor Candidate Jackie Fielder, Part 2 (S7E2)

Storied: San Francisco

Release Date: 10/29/2024

Woody LaBounty, Part 1 (S7E11) show art Woody LaBounty, Part 1 (S7E11)

Storied: San Francisco

On his mom’s side, Woody LaBounty’s San Francisco roots go back to 1850. In Part 1, get to know Woody, who, today, is the president and CEO of . But he’s so, so much more than that. He begins by tracing his lineage back to the early days of the Gold Rush. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather arrived here mid-Nineteenth Century. Woody even knows what ship he was on and the exact day that it arrived in the recently christened city of San Francisco. On Woody’s dad’s side, the roots are about 100 years younger than that. His father grew up in Fort Worth, Texas (like I did). His...

info_outline
Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 2 (S7E10) show art Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 2 (S7E10)

Storied: San Francisco

In Part 2, we start off talking about the significance of opening a Latinx-owned bookstore in the heart of the Mission, on 24th Street.   The folks who run Medicine for Nightmares call the entire space at 3036 24th Street—the bookstore in front and gallery in back—"The Portal." Josiah talks about the intention to utilize that gallery space to highlight art and artists in the Mission. The gallery is also often home to community group meetings, further solidifying its importance. That's my kind of mixed-use. In the three years that MfN has been open, they've hosted more than 800 events...

info_outline
Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares, Part 1 (S7E10) show art Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares, Part 1 (S7E10)

Storied: San Francisco

This episode is a sequel podcast nearly five years in the making. We last talked with poet back in 2020, over Zoom, in the early COVID days. In this podcast, we pick up, more or less, with where we left off that summer. Back in those days, Josiah Luis still worked at in North Beach. He walks us through that store’s process of rearranging around social-distancing protocols that were new at the time. He says that the early days of the pandemic meant hunkering down at home and reading-reading-reading. But once it was deemed safe to reopen City Lights, Josiah was really happy to be back. One...

info_outline
Ask Me SF's Ellen Lo, Part 2 (S7E9) show art Ask Me SF's Ellen Lo, Part 2 (S7E9)

Storied: San Francisco

In Part 2, we pick up with Ellen's life after she graduated from Washington University. Next up was a move to New York City.   In the Big City, she consulted for a financial services company. It was 2007, just before the financial crisis of those years. She found the job market tight, so she got a job in Washington, DC, where she lived for four years. Ellen says that during her time in the nation's capital, she behaved like a New York snob, never really giving DC a chance. She'd go back to NYC just about every weekend. Some of her New York friends didn't realize that she'd moved, in fact....

info_outline
Ask Me SF’s Ellen Lo, Part 1 (S7E9) show art Ask Me SF’s Ellen Lo, Part 1 (S7E9)

Storied: San Francisco

One of Ellen Lo’s main motivations is to beautify the spaces she’s in. In this podcast, we meet and get to know Ellen. Today, she runs , a site and handle she populates with reviews of spots around The City she wants to share with the world. Sounds familiar, but we’ll get to that later in the episode. We start with Ellen’s childhood, which began in small-town North Carolina. It was a town so small, in fact, that the few times she’s gone back to visit, it hasn’t changed. Ellen’s time in North Carolina wasn’t easy. Hers was the only Asian-American family in her school and town,...

info_outline
Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 2 (S7E8) show art Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 2 (S7E8)

Storied: San Francisco

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Nato details the three times he's left his hometown of San Francisco.   The first was when he went to college, which was at Reed in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-Nineties. To get us there, Nato rattles off all of the ways that he was a "comedy head" before that was even a thing. At Reed, he met a guy who's dad was the manager of the Comedy Underground in Seattle. Nato's first time doing stand-up on stage was at the Comedy Underground, in fact.   As he describes it, to say that he bombed that first time would be an...

info_outline
Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 1 (S7E8) show art Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 1 (S7E8)

Storied: San Francisco

Nato Green started hanging out at San Francisco comedy clubs when he was in eighth grade. Nato’s parents met when they both still lived in the suburbs of Chicago. They got married in 1968 and moved to San Francisco soon after that. Nato says that they “were in the counter-culture, but bad at it.” What he means by that is they didn’t take their subversive lifestyles all the way like many of their peers did. But they were definitely left-leaning folks. They settled in Noe Valley, which was quite a different neighborhood back then. It was much more working-class than it is today. Think:...

info_outline
Barbara Gratta/Gratta Wines, Part 2 (S7E7) show art Barbara Gratta/Gratta Wines, Part 2 (S7E7)

Storied: San Francisco

Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Barbara had just really become settled in San Francisco and was in what would become a decades-long process of learning the place (I can totally relate, btw). She hung out in the Castro more than the Mission, which in those days was a lesbian mecca. Café Flore (nowadays known as ) was a favorite.   Eventually, though, Barbara moved to the Mission. The company she had been contracting with hired her and that provided the security she needed. She called an apartment at 19th Street and Dolores, across from Dolores Park, home. She's quick to point...

info_outline
Barbara Gratta/Gratta Wines, Part 1 (S7E7) show art Barbara Gratta/Gratta Wines, Part 1 (S7E7)

Storied: San Francisco

One set of Barbara Gratta's grandparents came to the US from Calabria, the toe of the boot of Italy. The other grandparents came from across the Italian peninsula—Bari. In this episode, meet Barbara. Today, she owns, operates, and makes wine at  in the Bayview. But her journey began in White Plains, NY. All four grandparents came to Brooklyn in the 1920s. They all eventually moved north to raise families away from the bustle of New York City. Barbara's grandparents were a big part of her early life, the extended families getting together often for "big Italian Sunday dinners"...

info_outline
Whack Donuts' First Anniversary (S7 bonus) show art Whack Donuts' First Anniversary (S7 bonus)

Storied: San Francisco

It's been a damn year, y'all. In this bonus episode, we catch up with friend of the show , owner and creator of . His brick-and-mortar shop in EMB 4 just marked its one-year anniversary (and last year was a Leap Year!), and I dropped by to chat with Vandor about the time since he opened, where things stand now, and the road ahead. This Saturday, to celebrate Whack Donuts' birthday, Vandor is hosting a breakdancing jam event: 5x5 crew breaking battle $1,000 donuts line dancing free giveaways Follow  for more info. And if you're able to, please  to help offset some...

info_outline
 
More Episodes

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1.

 

Jackie considers it an honor to have worked for Lateefah Simon, who's running for Congress in the East Bay for the seat currently held by Barbara Lee. Jackie was tasked with writing memos, and she took that job and ran with it, digging deeply into the weeds of policy. What she found in the existing systems of that time piqued her curiosity around what it might mean if she herself were to enter the fray. Her life up to that point formed her world views, as these things tend to do. But the policies, she says, ticked her off.

 
She had been studying to take the LSAT, with the idea that she would go to law school ... all while volunteering for the campaign to get Lateefah Simon elected to the BART Board. But that November, in 2016, the 45th president was elected, and everything changed ... for a lot of us, but especially for Jackie.
 
It all threw Jackie for a loop. Standing Rock and protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAP) were also happening, which further disillusioned her. She traveled east to join the resistance. She met folks and had deep conversations with her Native American brothers and sisters. She spent time in Minnesota doing more work with indigenous folks.  It all created a sense of hope despite the doom seemingly all around. She also noticed the protests in Seattle demanding Wall Street disinvestment.
 
In February 2017, Jackie was back home, full of "let's do it" energy, ready to tackle issues in The Bay. She had moved to The City and started digging further into the weeds of policy in San Francisco. In 2018, she decided that she wanted to make a difference here at home. She helped found the San Francisco Public Bank Coalition. She was tapped to lead the campaign against the Police Officers Association's use of force measure. For that, she worked with Democratic Socialists of America San Francisco and the ACLU of Northern California. She also worked on the No on H campaign, which succeeded.
 
Alicia Garza, cofounder of Black Lives Matter, asked Jackie to teach her class at SF State, and Jackie seized that opportunity. At State, she taught Race, Women, and Class, where she talked with students about DAP and indigenous rights, among other topics. While teaching, she also worked restaurant jobs, mostly on the Peninsula.
 
When 2019 came around, Jackie wasn't sure what to do. Looking back, she was experiencing undiagnosed ADHD. She had a nagging feeling that year, though, that she should run for office. Someone pointed out to her that State Sen. Scott Wiener was running for election unopposed. She thought of the successful ballot measure campaigns she'd been part of. She had spent time living in her van. She'd bounced around between apartments. She decided to go for it.
 
The Jackie Fielder for State Senate campaign was off to a good start. Then lockdown happened in March 2020. Everything about the campaign turned virutal—Zoom speeches and meetings, phone banking on another level, social media like never before. She centered issues like affordable housing, climate change, renters' rights, homelessness, education. She got the backing of teachers, iron workers, electricians, tenants' rights groups, affordable housing groups, and various progressive cultural affinity groups in SF.
 
Jackie didn't win that race, though.
 
She took a step back and got into therapy, where she learned about self-care and self-compassion. She got to a point where she could take better care of herself so that she could then take care of others.
 
Jackie also started a PAC in the time between the 2020 election and now. The Daybreak PAC's main purpose is to support candidates and ballot measures that reject corporate money. Also, Stop the Money Pipeline hired her to be its communications manager in 2021. Through that work, she was able to reconnect with many folks she met years earlier in her Dakota stays. By early 2023, Jackie was co-director of the organization. This summer, in 2024, she took an official leave to come home and campaign for supervisor.
 
Then the conversation shifts to District 9. Of all the places Jackie has lived in San Francisco, she's spent the most time in the district. She's queer and loves the embrace of her community in D9. She also notes that the American Indian Cultural District and Latino Cultural District, two groups that are a big part of her identity, are located in D9.
 
After our mutual love fest of the Mission, we shift to issues that Jackie hopes to address as the next D9 supervisor—public safety, how best to engage law enforcement, drug use, houselessness, housing, jobs, and more.
 
Please visit Jackie's website for more info, especially if you live in D9 (if you're not sure, look up your supervisorial district here).
 
We recorded this episode at Evil Eye in the Mission in September 2024.
 
Photography by Jeff Hunt