Building Community, Resilience, and Social Change

The call came on a Tuesday morning in July. Eliana*, 22 and struggling with her homework, learned that her parents would not be coming home from work. ICE had taken her parents and, suddenly, she was the sole guardian to her siblings – Isabel*, 4; Carlos*, 8; and Sofia*, 12, whose growing anxiety kept her awake at night.

“We were living in a constant state of fear,” Eliana recalls, echoing what Laura Valdez, Mission Action’s executive director, describes as the current psychological landscape of immigrant families across San Francisco. Mission Action (formerly known as Dolores Street Community Services) has worked for four decades to create a more just society by nurturing individual wellness while cultivating, as Valdez stresses, collective power among low-income and immigrant communities.

When a frantic Eliana found Mission Action, she discovered an ecosystem of support that understood trauma not as a moment but as a condition requiring sustained, adaptive care. The organization provided transitional housing and food while Eliana navigated her new reality, legal advice for her parents’ case, and mental health crisis support when the weight of responsibility threatened to collapse her world.

Mission Action’s approach – “meeting people where they are at” – has become increasingly vital as federal enforcement intensifies. The organization manages the Rapid Response Network – a 24/7 multilingual hotline operated in collaboration with partner organizations to verify ICE activity and provide support for detainees and their families. But the real innovation lies in the compassion and expansiveness of their programs: the same organization fields a panicked call about an immigration raid at dawn, stocks a market-style food pantry by afternoon, and opens shelter beds by evening, while case managers coordinate wraparound services that recognize crises as multifaceted.

The demand for their services has “quadrupled” in recent years, Valdez notes, while associated costs have skyrocketed. Mission Action has responded with more nimble, privately funded programming – evidence of an organization adapting its trauma-informed care as rapidly as the crises evolve.

Mission Action now operates multiple shelters, worker collectives that have secured over 4,000 living-wage jobs, the second-largest food program in the city, and legal guidance for asylum seekers with an astonishing 90% win rate. 

Today, Eliana’s siblings attend school, their backpacks filled with supplies Mission Action provided. Case managers have helped Eliana find a part-time job and stable housing for the family, while legal partners fight to reunite the family. 

The goal, as Valdez explains, remains constant: helping clients achieve independence and self-sufficiency while building the collective power necessary to address root causes. For Eliana, that means finishing her degree while her siblings find stability in a city that has learned, through organizations like Mission Action, that home is not a place you return to – it’s a community you build together.

*not their real names