I have a feeling at some point the FBI will knock on the doors of Harlan Kelly, Juliet Ellis, Dwayne Jones, Chris Gruwell, and others … but Kelly may also be sweating the guilty pleas of Wong, which includes an agreement to cooperate with the FBI. …
— “Friends with Community Benefits,” Susan Dyer Reynolds, Marina Times, July 2020
When Mission Local reporter Lana Tleimat snapped a photo for her Sept. 1, 2023, article of Dwayne Jones exiting a courtroom after pleading not guilty to bribery charges, she likely didn’t realize that the woman to his left was Kyra Worthy. This week Worthy was charged with 34 felonies related to the misuse of more than $700,000 in public funds, including the submission of fraudulent invoices, theft, wage theft, and check fraud during her time as head of SF SAFE, a nonprofit that partnered with the San Francisco Police Department. So why was Worthy in court supporting Jones? Like many others in the ongoing City Hall scandal, she worked with him on another troubled project, this one created in 2004 by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Starting in 2020, I wrote a number of articles about Jones and his dubious connections to Harlan Kelly Jr., former general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC), Juliet Ellis (Kelly’s chief strategy officer and assistant general manager of external affairs and illicit romantic affair), and District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton. Walton followed in Jones’s footsteps as executive director of Young Community Developers, a nonprofit that got a lion’s share of the behested “donations” from contractors doing business with the SFPUC via a “social impact” pay-for-play scheme known as the community benefits program.
An October 2021 column I wrote about Jones is mentioned in the federal indictment which, in August 2023, charged him with 59 counts of fraud including bribery, misappropriation of public funds, and aiding and abetting a financial conflict of interests in a government contract. Nearly a year after Jones was arrested, he has had multiple court hearings and, facing potentially decades in prison, sources say he’s talking.
The San Francisco district attorney’s office is accusing Worthy of failing to pay more than $500,000 to subgrantees of a city contract, embezzling more than $100,000 from SF SAFE for personal use, and committing wage theft against employees, alleging that Worthy’s mismanagement led to the nearly 50-year-old charity ceasing operations this past January despite receiving millions in public and private funds over five years. The investigation involves 25 search warrants and more than two dozen witnesses.
Jones, who ran RDJ Enterprises alongside his wife and friends, has a reputation at City Hall going back decades. Former San Francisco supervisor Chris Daly once said, “If you are going to have an operation where you’re buying political support in the southeast part of the town, Dwayne Jones is the guy.” A regular on San Francisco’s southeast circuit, Jones worked alongside former Department of Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru (currently serving seven years in prison for fraud), District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton (who calls Jones “his mentor”), as well as Kelly (currently serving six years in prison for fraud) and Ellis, who stepped down from the SFPUC after Kelly’s arrest. In a Facebook post, Ellis called Jones “her boy,” and, in fact, most of Jones’s talents were deployed as Ellis’s favorite middleman in the community benefits program. But Jones got his start with the city of San Francisco in 2004 as director of the Mayor’s Office of Community Development under now-Governor Newsom, where, in 2006, he rose to the rank of deputy chief of staff.
In 2004 during his State of the City address, Newsom announced the Communities of Opportunity program, patterned after a similar endeavor in New York’s Harlem, to help families living in public housing projects with after-school tutoring, job placement, health care, and addiction treatment. Newsom also ponied up $370,000 in city funds to cover the cost of providing a top mayoral deputy to oversee the program. His name? Dwayne Jones.
In October 2007, Jones hired Kyra Worthy as his community education manager, tasked with “ensuring the implementation of effective, mission driven, culturally relevant programming that serves the youth in the community.” It wasn’t Worthy’s first gig in San Francisco. From May 2002 through September 2003, she served as director of program services for the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco, and she took over as director of the Bayview Hunters Point Center in September 2003, leaving in September 2007, just one month before Jones hired her. During the course of Jones’s and Worthy’s tenures, the Communities of Opportunity program spent lavishly:
• $570,882 for conferences (mostly for hosting a gathering in San Francisco in 2007 for community development professionals);
• $162,000 for events, including a Comedy Shop performance with six comedians and a hip-hop event featuring Def Jam artists;
• $464,823 for consultants, including $300,000 in public relations;
• $399,000 for a program office and community staff; and
• $298,637 for assorted community outreach.
The program also spent $1.6 million on funding for “community-based organizations and other services” — in other words, money that went right back into the pockets of Communities of Opportunity leaders like Jones and Worthy, and the providers they hired for the jobs.
In 2008, then (and current) president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Aaron Peskin ordered an audit of Communities of Opportunity, and as you might imagine, it wasn’t pretty. According to budget analyst Harvey Rose, the eight programs operated by a dozen nonprofits had spent nearly $4 million in private foundation and grant money with little to show for it (except, perhaps, memories of that private performance by Def Jam artists).
Newsom’s spokesperson Nathan Ballard said at the time the mayor made “no apologies” for his pet project, perhaps the biggest boondoggle of his San Francisco political career. Ballard also accused Peskin of being “on a vendetta” against the program, only ordering the audit because he knew it was “near and dear to the mayor.” As we now know, Peskin was on the right side of history.
For his part, Jones insisted both donors and program participants were happy with it, telling reporters Phil Matier and Andy Ross, “They knew coming in there would be no overnight miracles, and there would be lessons to be learned.” That, however, was just another one of Jones’s many lies. Newsom and sponsors soon pulled the plug on Communities of Opportunity, steering over 1,200 families at the housing projects into services already offered.
You would think Newsom would have fired Jones and blacklisted him from working with the city in the future, but Jones continued to serve in Newsom’s office until 2010. In 2011, the late Mayor Ed Lee appointed Jones to serve on a subcommittee that monitored contracts (you can’t make this stuff up) under the Human Rights Commission.
As for Worthy, she landed on her feet, too, as manager of programs and services at Parent University at the Edgewood Center for Children and Families, where she worked from April 2009 through July 2010. Her job duties included “providing guidance and oversight in the development and implementation of multidisciplinary, high-impact programming for Bayview Hunter’s Point residents” and “building the future constituency and leadership of the program by engaging Bayview Residents, young people and other marginalized communities in San Francisco.” From there she spent a year as student support services supervisor in the community engagement department at the West Contra Costa Unified School District (August 2010 through June 2012), and then went on to the executive director position at the nonprofit For Richmond (August 2013 through August 2018) before taking the job as executive director at SF SAFE.
In a 2019 article in the San Francisco Examiner, newly elected District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton is pictured walking with Worthy in the Bayview after bringing SF SAFE onboard to help gather input from the community, inform policy, and create written protocols for issues including truancy, traffic safety, and violence. Worthy and Walton said they also planned to conduct an audit of the services provided by local nonprofits — a sort of “accountability report card,” as Worthy described the endeavor.
“It’s auditing the services, because all of these nonprofits are being funded and there still are these persistent gaps in service,” Worthy explained. Yes, Walton agreed, “audits should be done.”
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