Days after moving to San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, Daniel Kim remembers his 8-year-old and 5-year-old shuddering at the sound of gunshots. “It was a ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ incident,” says Kim, ’95. More than a fifth of the neighborhood’s residents live below the poverty line, and most of the schools rank in California’s bottom 10 percent. It’s not typically a destination for college-educated parents and their families.
Yet in 2016, Kim and his wife Ann (Cho), ’95, followed their Class of ’95 friends Juliette (Lee) and Chi-Ming Chien, MS ’96, to the neighborhood, where, this fall, the foursome helped launch Rise University Preparatory, a Christian college prep school for low-income families. To make the school affordable, its staff members raise funds to bring the annual tuition down to $2,000 — less than one-tenth of what the average San Francisco private high school charges. Rise Prep meets in an old San Francisco Examiner newsroom, sharing space with the digital consulting firm Dayspring Technologies and Redeemer Community Church. The school, business and church all grew out of the alums’ decision, just before leaving the Farm, to plant themselves in the City and work together for the good of their neighbors.
Esther Landhuis, ’96, is a freelance writer in the Bay Area.
