Promotoras for Transportation Justice
Organization: San Francisco Study Center
Funding Request: $500.000.00
Project Summary
Promotoras for Transportation Justice is a community engagement and planning project led by the San Francisco Study Center with the Center for Latino Advocacy, Resources & Organizing (CLARO) as the implementing partner. CLARO’s vision is to build an engagement infrastructure that makes Latino mobility patterns visible, enables fruitful planning, improves pedestrian and transit safety, and advances climate and transportation equity. The centerpiece is a paid Promotora cohort, a culturally adept, community-based workforce of trained laypeople (often Latinas) who lead outreach, data collection, and community-based planning that agencies can act on.
The project recruits and trains Promotoras using a peer-to-peer curriculum developed with community partners and grounded in proven models such as UCSF’s Community-Based Participatory Research. Training spans transit access and reliability, pedestrian and personal safety, ADA access, affordability, and the climate and air-quality dimensions of travel, alongside survey ethics, informed consent, stakeholder interviewing, and data quality. Promotoras then co-design bilingual survey and interview tools, conduct stakeholder interviews and intercept surveys at major crossings and transfer points, and help synthesize findings into priority corridors and service barriers. The work culminates in a workshop series that converts the data into a needs assessment, producing two final deliverables: an Outreach Plan documenting the trained Promotora cohort, and a community-validated Needs Assessment with travel-pattern data and corridor priorities, both designed to inform a future Latino Community-Based Transportation Plan.
Project Descriptions and Transportation Equity
Latino transit riders in San Francisco face mobility challenges that are often overlooked in a complex city. Many travel off-peak and make chained trips linking childcare, work, school, and clinics, requiring multiple transfers and long walks, so that unreliable service translates into missed shifts, lost wages, late pickups, and costly ride-hails. Safety and environmental barriers, including dangerous crossings, speeding, unclean conditions, and harassment, fall hardest on women, youth, seniors, immigrants, and people with disabilities, and residents often cope by driving, taking longer routes, avoiding nights, or paying more, which only deepens inequity. These are public-health inequities as much as transportation ones: walking farther, waiting longer, and traveling through unsafe corridors compounds harms, including localized air-pollution exposure in communities already carrying cumulative environmental burdens. A core barrier to fixing any of this is the difficulty of meaningfully engaging the Latino community, given identification, language, fear, and trust barriers, which is precisely the gap this project’s Promotora “linkage” workforce is built to close.
The project advances equity through a Promotora-led model designed for everyday residents who depend on transit and walking. Promotoras, compensated through stipends, conduct bilingual transit and pedestrian intercept surveys during peak and off-hours; engage guardians at school, BEACON, and childcare sites to document trip-chaining; reach workers near job corridors; and connect with residents through cultural celebrations and trusted neighborhood organizations. Participation is supported with bilingual interpretation and translation, plain-language materials, flexible meeting times, stipends, and multiple formats including intercept surveys, small-group pláticas, workshops, and phone/WhatsApp options. Crucially, decision-making power rests with the Promotoras and community workshops, which design the survey questions, select engagement locations, validate findings, and rank priorities, with summaries published after each phase to show how community input directly drives the planning.
Community Benefit
The project benefits San Francisco’s low-income Latino residents who rely on transit and walking, especially immigrant families, caregivers, youth, seniors, people with disabilities, and shift workers with non-traditional schedules. While Mission-centered, the work extends to trips reaching the Excelsior, Tenderloin, and Bayview Hunters Point neighborhoods with dense clusters of affordable housing, nonprofits, schools, childcare sites, and medical services that residents reach through trip-chained journeys. By documenting travel patterns and safety barriers and converting them into community-led priorities, the project moves toward safer crossings, improved access and reliability, and more affordable, dignified mobility, delivered through a “Latino Mobility Existing Conditions” assessment that centers the very residents typically excluded from planning.
The benefits are also about capacity and climate awareness. Promotoras educate the community on clean transportation options and the environmental stakes of travel choices, especially relevant in San Francisco, where private vehicles account for 72% of transportation emissions, and transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases. The trained cohorts gain skills in outreach, data collection, and planning, creating paid pathways into transportation and climate work and a pipeline of future transit-justice leaders. Early actions, including walk-safety audits, mapping of priority routes, and community workshops, produce a baseline of existing conditions that can directly inform future Community-Based Transportation Plans.
Partnerships and Structure
The partnership reflects a growing, historically tense relationship between SFMTA and the city’s Latino communities, particularly in the Mission, where many residents felt “planned over rather than planned for.” The project is explicitly framed as a moment to nurture that working relationship into lasting infrastructure, with decision-making resting in community coalitions and workshops. The roles are organized as follows:
San Francisco Study Center (Lead Applicant): Manages the project, handles compliance, reporting, contracting, and fiscal controls, and supervises CLARO’s deliverables and milestones, bringing experience as lead agency on the city’s 2017 intermodal Safe Routes to Schools effort under Vision Zero.
CLARO (Implementing Partner): Recruits, trains, and compensates the Promotoras, leads community outreach, designs surveys, collects data, facilitates workshops, and completes the Outreach Plan and Needs Assessment deliverables.
SFMTA (Government Partner): Provides staff to ensure accuracy and feasibility, shares service, safety, and capital-planning data, supports field engagement, participates in community workshops, and helps translate community priorities into actionable deliverables while honoring community leadership, committing to transparent feedback on feasibility and near-term actions.
Community Partners: Advocates for safety, transit, environmental justice, caregiving, and senior and disability organizations who support recruitment, contribute training modules, host events, and reach those most affected by inequities.
Equity is built into the structure through paid community roles, multilingual access, and a model in which Promotoras and community workshops set engagement locations, validate findings, and rank priorities. Grant funds will support final MOUs, protocols, and a governance framework that codifies decision-making and accountability, addressing the historic power imbalance directly rather than leaving it implicit.