Street Smarts Earn a ‘Genius’ Award

SAN FRANCISCO —  Lateefah Simon never got good grades. But she has been labeled a genius.

Simon barely graduated from high school. But before turning 20, she began running a lauded nonprofit for troubled young women of color. She doesn’t shy from admitting insecurities, but Simon shines in public speaking.

Now the merits of this energetic and wiry young woman have found a national stage.

It came with a call late last year from the MacArthur Foundation, best known for the “genius” fellowships it bestows each year on a couple of dozen academics, artists and assorted high achievers. After quietly looking into her background as executive director of the Center for Young Women’s Development, they chose Simon for the award. With it came a $500,000 grant, no strings attached.

Simon still hasn’t quite made peace with the initial disbelief. In early January, she got the first of five annual checks. She woke up on a recent morning still feeling there had been a mistake, that “they’re going to find out who I really am and take back the first check.”

Such humility and doubt belies the deeds of a 26-year-old woman whom admirers compare to legends of the civil rights movement.

“She is petite and young, but has these skills of oratory that rival any great leader,” said Kamala Harris, San Francisco’s newly elected district attorney. “She’s about courage. She’s selfless in the way she gives. She is visionary.”

Supervisor Tom Ammiano has considered himself a Simon fan ever since she spoke a few years ago at City Hall during a committee hearing on troubled youth.

“She’s this mix of magnetism and enthusiasm and humanity,” Ammiano said. “We’re just so thrilled for her.”

On the streets of San Francisco, Simon is an undisputed success story, even if the bookies in her old neighborhood might have bet against it early on.

She grew up in the Fillmore district. She remembers it as the Harlem of the West, one of the nation’s centers of jazz into the 1960s. But in recent years, the crack cocaine epidemic battered the old neighborhood. She saw parents of friends lose jobs and homes to addiction.

Simon always had a roof over her head and food on the table, thanks to her mother, a pacemaker technician at the local Veterans Affairs hospital. But Simon never discovered any allure in public education, getting Ds and Fs through high school. She figured she was better off working, and held a job from age 13.

Aside from a dogged work ethic, her parents passed on a political bent. When a family friend died of complications from AIDS, Simon reacted by starting a safe sex program at school, distributing condoms out of her locker. By 17, she had traded a job as shift manager at a Taco Bell for a spot at the Center for Young Women’s Development.

She has been there ever since. Though never a street kid, Simon considers herself street smart, and she grew to use that authenticity to grab the attention of impoverished young women. At 19, Simon was juggling work with the realities of a new baby, but continued to perform so impressively at the center that she was named to the top post. Over the last half-dozen years, Simon has helped the center grow into a $425,000-a-year operation with 22 full- and part-time employees, nearly all under age 25.

The young women who participate include teens struggling with drug addiction, victims of abuse, kids living on the streets and others fresh from incarceration. The center provides a variety of after-school services to help troubled young women on a path to productive adult years. Teen girls in Juvenile Hall are offered aid. Another arm of the center provides guidance to young women of color who are lesbians, bisexual or transgender.

Every nine months, the center distributes a bulletin offering part-time jobs. Culling from a pool that typically numbers nearly 100 applicants, the center selects about a dozen young women from the city’s toughest neighborhoods. They perform community service projects and outreach to troubled teens on the streets. Along with the job comes training in entry-level computer skills, job etiquette and conflict resolution. They brush up on math while also learning to overcome difficulties with self-expression and assertiveness.

Simon calls the center “a beacon for a lot of different things -- forgiveness, hope, a lot of realism. There are no pity parties. We want them to understand they’ve got a powerful place in the world.”

Staff members consider Simon the visionary force. The genius award, they said, was richly deserved and hasn’t changed her a whit.

“She’s constantly talking about how the award is about the work of the organization,” said Danielle Montgomery, the center’s development director. “She’s very humble about it.”

The MacArthur award has opened doors for Simon. She is seeing more and more invitations to speak at conferences and seminars.

“People are listening to us,” Simon said. “We’re humbled by it.”

After the award, Simon proposed that she stop taking a salary, but her staff wouldn’t hear of it. So far, she has used her newfound financial security only to clean her carpets and hit Costco. She still hasn’t bothered with a car, relying on public transit to get everywhere she wants to go.

“I’m not going to get a big screen TV like my daughter wants,” she said.

Instead, Simon plans to return to school, juggling college with work at the center. In a few years, as she approaches 30, Simon expects to make a change. Responsibility for the Center for Young Women’s Development has always been left to young women, so Simon plans to pass the baton.

The center “has to be guided by the young woman who has sat behind bars hungry, by the young woman who stood on the street corner because she needed money for a place to stay,” Simon said.

“Despite the nation’s troubles, I know that we are going to be all right,” she concluded. “The vision, the tenacity, the fearlessness of the young people around the nation who stand up to organize will make things better than all right.”