In 2017, Stanley Roberts, a video journalist known for the groundbreaking series “People Behaving Badly,” was invited to participate in a San Francisco State University journalism mentorship program. As to be expected, most of the students were in their late teens and early twenties, but one person, a woman in her early fifties named Alicia Mayo, looked familiar, perhaps because she’d been in the broadcasting business for years. However, unlike Roberts, an award-winning videographer and reporter whose decades in television garnered awards, accolades, and fame, Mayo had been on the periphery or behind the scenes.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Mayo has held over 30 jobs and internships, including producing a Saturday night show at San Francisco’s KPOO FM Radio (1987–89); interning for Belva Davis at Roberts’s old workplace, KRON (1995); and reporting traffic for 511 (1998–2002). When Roberts met her in 2017, Mayo was enrolled in San Francisco State University’s Broadcast Electronics Communication Arts program, where she also served as president for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists student chapter. After graduation, Mayo worked as a traffic producer, editor, and anchor for CBS Radio (2017–18), a digital content producer at KRON (2018–19), and came full circle at KPOO as executive producer of “The Bay Area Mental Health Hour” talk show and “Clari-T Conversations.” Between 2015 and 2020, Mayo also ran her own company called Alicia Mayo Media Productions. It’s not clear from her background, but somewhere along the way Mayo switched her focus from broadcasting to mental health. For nearly 20 years, she worked for the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District as a “Special Education Itinerant Paraeducator/Behavior Intervention Specialist.”
On Aug. 31, 2021, Mayo — who lived in Fairfield, Calif., with her husband and two sons — was arrested for spousal battery. Bail was set at $7,500 and she later pleaded no contest to the charges. In 2022, Mayo moved into the nonprofit world as project administrator for San Francisco Mental Health Education Funds, Inc., an organization “attempting to address inequities in behavioral and mental healthcare for marginalized and underserved communities in San Francisco.” She left that job in February 2023. And that’s where things get murky.
In 2020, Mayo founded Clari-T Media as “Northern California’s Black woman owned multimedia, broadcast productions, marketing & communications nonprofit agency.” She writes that her previous employer San Francisco Mental Health Education Funds “meta presence” includes The Bay Area Mental Health Hour, Clari-T Conversations, and The Dream Keeper Diary are “exclusive human-interest news/public affairs and grassroots broadcast solutions driven content produced by Clari T Media.” She filed articles of incorporation as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) with the California Secretary of State on Jan. 27, 2020, listing her home address in Fairfield as the business location. She names herself as chief executive officer and one of her sons, Leonard Isaiah Mayo, as secretary. Under “Specific Purpose of this Organization,” Mayo scribbled, “Provide education and information to the public.” The IRS lists Clari-T Media as tax exempt since 2023, but the company has yet to file a Form 990 (required by nonprofits to file yearly). There is no website listed, and Mayo’s posts appear exclusively on social media platforms.
Mayo posted to Instagram on Jan. 19, 2022, “The Dream Keeper Diary will premiere later this month,” followed by numerous hashtags, including #dreamkeepersf, #dreamkeeperinitiative, and #dkisf. The Dream Keeper Initiative is the now-infamous program cosponsored by Mayor London Breed and District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton. “In June 2020, following the killing of George Floyd, Mayor Breed and Supervisor Walton announced a plan to prioritize the redirection of resources from law enforcement to support the African American community. … As part of the budget process, Mayor Breed redirected $120 million from law enforcement for investments in the African American community for Fiscal Years 2020–21 and 2021–22,” Breed and Walton said in a February 2021 press release. Critics point out that Dream Keeper has ballooned to $300 million focused on only 4 percent of the city’s population, and writer Sanjana Friedman recently made the case that the race-based program, never approved by taxpayers, could even be illegal. Over the past few months, information has come to light about egregious cases of cronyism and grift, with money going primarily to unqualified people and nonprofits that are connected to Breed, Walton, or both. That appears to be the situation with Mayo and her company Clari-T Media, which received over $200,000 in grant money from Dream Keeper.
A search of Mayo’s Instagram account, where she goes by radiotvqueen.alicia, pulls up Dream Keeper-related events. On Nov. 4, 2023, Mayo produced a video at a City Hall rally for Dream Keeper funding where she tagged another grant recipient, MegaBlackSF, which paid to sponsor events around the country (including in Washington D.C., Atlanta, and Martha’s Vineyard) along with Dream Keeper Initiative, San Francisco Human Rights Commission (which oversees Dream Keeper), and Young Community Developers (where Walton was once executive director). “The subjects on the agenda were and still are #Reparations & #dreamkeepersf. … Do we need to start from the beginning? Really?” she says in the comments of her March 16, 2023, broadcast from City Hall. “The San Francisco Dream Keeper Initiative is providing a very small percentage of needs to this community effectively proving it’s value. But, DKI is under scrutiny and on the chopping block as leaders of San Francisco politics decide how to take back what little funding that’s been made available. It seems we’ve been here before. DKI is and has been the only ray of light and hope in recent years for this community historically starved of resources.”
Three days later, Mayo posted “Dream Keeper Diary,” a narcissistic discussion with none other than Dream Keeper cosponsor Walton about his autobiography, From Juvenile Hall to City Hall: Your Resume Can Change, self-published on Amazon Hub and released a month prior to the interview. That video received 108 views and Walton’s book is currently ranked number 2,163,161in the Kindle Store.
On April 19, 2023, Mayo posted a glamour shot of herself superimposed in front of the Dream Keeper logo. “NEED TO KNOW HOW TO TAP INTO THE SAN FRANCISCO DREAM KEEPER INITIATIVE DOLLARS? REGISTER AND TUNE IN NOW!!!” she commented (yes, in all caps).
Several of of the more questionable posts involve direct political campaigning for Dream Keeper cosponsor London Breed’s mayoral reelection campaign. In one post, Mayo interviews people who sing Breed’s praises and tags the video with “Team @londonbreed for Mayor of San Francisco #dreamkeepersf #clari_t_media.”
Jamaica me happy
On May 3, 2023, Mayo drops a video from Jamaica. “I am so happy I could make this birthday joy happen for my nephew Kelly on his 33rd birthday. …” In the comments, she writes, “He snorkeled, swam and floated more than 6 miles from land to an island and back. …” Other videos show Mayo with an entourage of family and friends making their way through town. “Yes, I’ll take a menu,” she giggles as they head into a beachside restaurant.
Upon returning to San Francisco, Mayo promotes Dream Keeper events like the Juneteenth events helmed by Breed and put on by fellow Dream Keeper grant recipient SF Black Wall Street, which spent $700,000 on two parties, eclipsing the $660,000 they spent on grants for Black small businesses (Tinisch Hollins, director of the entrepreneurship program, also redirected tens of thousands of dollars in administrative fees to a shell company she created).
From there, Mayo’s posts are a bevy of selfies, often set to music: booty shots of her in bikinis; showing off her braids; artsy pictures taken through filtered blinds in a variety of too-cool-for-school shades. This past January, Mayo teased new Dream Keeper Diary content in several Instagram posts, but her last Dream Keeper-related content appears in February.
On Oct. 11, 2024, Mayo posted a series of selfies, smiling in the first one as a gentleman beside her glances into the camera. Next, the couple are wearing ethereal, gauzy outfits as they take a sunset walk along the shore with a saddled horse. The location tag is “7 Mile Beach – Negril, Jamaica.” In the comments, Mayo says from her radiotvqueen.alicia handle, “@da_real_spanish_fly Hello!” That same evening, Mayo posted a slick video of her with presumably the same gentleman dancing, hugging, and kissing on the beach in silhouette set to the song “Lessons” by Eric Roberson. She comments, “Life Lessons: I guess I had to get ready for the best time in of my life,” followed by the hashtags #retireinjamaica #jamaica #ilovejamaica #cirij #ustojamaica #explorejamaica #negriljamaica.
Clearly, Jamaica was agreeing with Mayo. On Sept. 20, 2024, she posted a video titled “Retiring In Jamaica — Leaving The Drama Behind,” which received 48 views. She introduces herself from her veranda, displays the groceries she just purchased, explains how to make green juice to get your body beach ready, brags about her equally camera-loving boyfriend, and describes how she toured with “new friends and realtors” to find the perfect property. “Hey everybody Alicia Mayo of Clari-T Media … Go to my YouTube channel, um … hashtag ‘CIRIJ’ and you can find my content there. ‘CIRIJ’ is the acronym for ‘Can I retire in Jamaica.’ I want you to ask yourself that question; if you’ve ever thought about retiring in Jamaica, ask yourself, ‘Can I really retire in Jamaica?’ I can provide some of the answers. …”
Mayo’s demeanor is carefree yet condescending as she drones on with details about how she is living her best life. “I did my due diligence, and I shopped around I spent time and energy and resources to come here. … I shopped around with a real estate agent [who] showed me around took me to properties showed me what I could get for my money and so I settled on a piece of land and this land is about 10,000 square feet … just enough for me to build what I want to build on it which is my retirement home right and a couple of Villas that I can rent. …” Mayo pulls her tripod back to wow her audience. “I have 180° view up here, okay, all the way around like all the way around and that’s the ocean in the background, okay. Now let me zoom in a little bit, nothing but ocean. I have 10,000 feet of land right there and God put me right here in this apartment complex … right here next to my land right over there in this beautiful place, because God knew that I needed to be here, right?”
When I asked Stanley Roberts, who is also Black, how it made him feel to know that someone with far less talent and experience in broadcast journalism was selected for a $200,000 grant because she had connections to Dream Keeper co-sponsors Breed and Walton, and then moved to Jamaica on the taxpayers’ dime, he took a deep sigh. “It’s truly disheartening,” he said. “It adds yet another setback for those of us striving to make a positive difference.
Back on the veranda, Mayo thanks her 48 YouTube channel visitors for dropping by, and winds up her chat by saying how brave everyone thinks she is for uprooting her life and moving to Jamaica. “I was nervous scared and doing it alone; didn’t have any relatives here, no friends here, nothing — but I did it based on a trip that I took in November of 2022 … I was trying to get away from the states and all the drama that I was going through with my divorce … I needed to just take a break for myself to finally do something for myself.” In the comments, Mayo says, “My retirement journey is subjective. But I truly hope you can learn something from my process. God Bless you wherever you are. …” with the tags Clari-T Media /#CIRIJ Vlog/Dream Keeper Diary.
