SA2020, a community goal-setting and data-tracking nonprofit, will cease operations on March 28, it announced Tuesday.
Started in 2010, the three-person nonprofit organization in recent years positioned itself as a watchdog over how institutions — particularly the City of San Antonio — present data and address inequities SA2020’s “community vision” sought to eliminate. It has also supported controversial police reform measures and more recently called for a cease-fire in Gaza.
Last year, SA2020 released its first public assessment of the city’s budget in a scathing report and as part of its swan song and data release on Tuesday, it released its first “policy agenda” that includes recommendations for the city’s annual mid-year budget adjustment process.
“People in San Antonio are visionary, that’s not going to change,” SA2020 Executive Director Kiran Bains told the San Antonio Report. “But I feel very, very concerned about the inability of our local institutions to be held accountable and the way in which power is yielded to silence people.”
“… This isn’t just about one proposition or a single statement on Palestine, this is about something much bigger,” Bains said. “It is an indictment of our local institutions — and it’s an indictment of our city government as well as funders of nonprofits — that a nonprofit that has been responsible for guiding progress toward a shared community vision …. are not [given] conditions of work that are conducive to being visionary.”
Bains said the lack of institutional collaboration and progress towards the numerous community goals outlined by SA2020, including racial equity, public health, education, environment and poverty is “just another example of the gap between rhetoric and practice.”
SA2020 began as a community engagement initiative under Mayor Julián Castro. It became a nonprofit entity outside of the city organization in 2012.
As SA2020 prepared for the new decade, it engaged nearly 12,300 residents through public meetings and a survey to take part in reaffirming the vision for San Antonio in 2030. In 2020, it launched its new brand and community vision for 2030. That same year, just weeks before the coronavirus pandemic took hold, several City Council members and Mayor Ron Nirenberg called for increased collaboration with SA2020.
The city’s fiscal year 2024 budget was the first since 2015 that did not include funding for SA2020 as the city opted to shift that investment to internal data and equity initiatives.
Then the nonprofit supported two different police reform measures that challenged the city’s status quo, but ultimately failed: Proposition B, which would have stripped the union of its power to collectively bargain for its contract, and Proposition A, which — among other reforms — aimed to expand the police department’s cite-and-release policy.
One month after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which City Council condemned, SA2020 called on the council to demand a cease-fire of Israel’s retaliatory attacks in Gaza.
“Every level of government in the U.S., including the City of San Antonio, is enabling Israel’s occupation of Palestine through policies, billions of dollars in military assistance, delegation trips, and rhetoric,” its Facebook post stated. “We demand that our representatives take immediate action to end the genocide.”
The nonprofit’s statement “infuriated local institutions,” SA2020 posted in its blog announcing its dissolution. “… [L]ocal funders withheld payment on existing grant contracts, threatened our 501c3 status, sought to control our public communications, and pressured us to remain silent.”
Under IRS rules, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations are prohibited from directly or indirectly participating or intervening in political campaigns on behalf of candidates for elective public office.
According to SA2020, 20% of the nonprofit’s partners “withdrew their partnership with SA2020, many citing a desire to remain ‘politically neutral.'”
The board voted to dissolve the nonprofit during a Dec. 7 meeting, Bains said. “For more than a year prior to that we were working on, how do we change this model that we [knew was] not sustainable.”
SA2020 had “closed the gap” in its budget from losing city funding and had six months of funding secured as of December, she said.
After paying out employees and other obligations, any remaining funds will be given to another nonprofit, to be determined by the SA2020 board. The website will remain online through September, though it’s seeking a partner to keep the website archived.
