Recall SF School Board campaign founders go on to launch SF Guardians academy to train more future political leaders

(SAN FRANCISCO) Autumn Looijen and Siva Raj, authors of the recall school board petitions and measures, successfully led the campaign to recall three former members of the San Francisco School Board at a special election in February 2022. They have not left the political arena. Instead they founded the SF Guardians to continue their work to have further impacts on elections. They just announced an academy that would begin a 6-week program on March 4 to train more future political leaders.

Looijen and Raj encouraged more Chinese and Asian Americans to join the academy if they are interested in serving the community to run for public offices. The deadline to apply to the academy is February 23. The first day of the training program is March 4.

More information can be found on its website, sfguardians.org. The program is free for participants. Donations are welcome to support the work of the SF Guardians.

Looijen and Raj are considered relatively new residents of San Francisco. They launched the recall school board campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic and made a miracle happen to recall three former school board members. The movement rewrote San Francisco history and caught the media attention worldwide.

Both Looijen and Taj never got involved in any political campaigns prior to the recall school board movement. Looijen is from Seattle, where she grew up picking wild blackberries and cooking Indonesian food with her grandmother. She worked in Silicon Valley for years, where she ran dmoz.org, the online volunteer project that inspired Wikipedia. She moved to San Francisco during the beginning of the COVID and has lived in the lower Haight neighborhood with Raj, her partner since then.

Raj is from Chennai, India, where his parents skipped meals to make sure he got a good education. He helped develop contact lenses, and ran his own startup selling exercise bikes to corporate gyms until the pandemic hit in 2020. Raj also moved to San Francisco in 2020 and has stayed in lower Haight with Looijen.

In the entire recall school board movement, Looijen and Raj first organized the volunteers to gather signatures for three petitions. Once all three petitions were qualified for the ballot measures, both took the lead to plan the campaign for three measures. Finally they won the recall elections with a landslide victory and made history as the first successful recall election in a century for the city.

Lainie Motamedi, Lisa Weissman-Ward and Ann Hsu were appointed by Mayor London Breed to fill in the seats left by three recalled school board members. All three needed to run for re-election in November 2022 to keep their seats.

Looijen and Raj founded SF Guardians in 2022 and had its first independent expenditures campaign to support three appointed school board candidates. Only Ann Hsu lost in the race.

"We were deeply sad when Ann lost ... we also learnt a lot from looking at all the things that went wrong. City Guardians Academy was born out of that learning," Looije and Raj said. "Ann was a brand new candidate. And when she made mistakes (as new candidates do), we weren't allowed to talk to her (because we were running independent expenditure ads)."

If SF Guardians Academy had offered a similar program before Hsu ran for election, Looijen and Raj believed a very different outcome could be seen.

By looking back at the leadership and skill they learned to win the recall school board elections, they thanked for the support from the community. "We didn't hire any political consultants for the recall nor did we have any relevant experience before starting it," they said. "But we knew how to run startups so we took a startup approach to it ... openness to learn, willingness to try new things, and iteration -- learning from what we did to improve on it."

"We were also lucky to get help and support from so many people in the community -- many people advised us for free, we had the best election lawyer in town work for us pro bono ... and that allowed us to avoid the many land mines," Looijen and Raj continued.

"The City Guardians Academy is designed to support new candidates, so they can be effective and confident from day one," Looijen and Raj added, "We want brand new candidates to make mistakes, and learn from them, at the Academy -- before they hit the campaign trail. When they run for the first time, we want it to feel like the second time."

They believed they had some different views about politics and the most effective way to run campaigns. "And we think that many of these skills we learnt the hard way we can teach other newbies like us ... that's why we created the Academy."

They said they had no interest in running for public office themselves. "One person getting elected can make a difference, but to fix big problems, you need a team of good candidates who will work together in office. So we'll be supporting and coaching the team of candidates our community endorses."

Looijen and Raj encouraged Chinese and Asian Americans to participate in the academy. "We would love to see more Asian Americans in office. Asians are seriously underrepresented in San Francisco politics, and we would really love to see Chinese Americans in office who are authentically fighting for their community's needs," they said.