**VIRTUAL** Community Pride Seder

Elected in November 2016, Senator Scott Wiener represents District 11 in the California State Senate. District 11 includes all of San Francisco, Broadmoor, Colma, and Daly City, as well as portions of South San Francisco.
In the Senate, Senator Wiener works to make housing more affordable, invest in our transportation systems, increase access to healthcare, support working families, meaningfully address climate change and the impacts of drought, reform our criminal justice system, reduce gun violence, reduce California’s high poverty rate, and safeguard and expand the rights of all communities, including immigrants and the LGBT community.
Senator Wiener has authored 36 bills that were signed into law. Among them are SB 35, a landmark bill to streamline housing approvals in cities not meeting their housing goals; SB 822, which enacts the strongest net neutrality protections in the nation; SB 1045 and SB 40, which expand and strengthen California’s conservatorship laws to help individuals who are living on our streets with severe mental health and substance use disorders; SB 700, which significantly expands access to renewable energy storage; SB 923, which modernizes California’s eyewitness identification standards to ensure innocent people are not sent to prison; SB 136, which reduces mass incarceration by repealing California’s most common used sentence enhancement; SB 219, which protects LGBT seniors in long-term care facilities; and SB 159, which allows pharmacists to provide PrEP and PEP (powerful HIV prevention medications) without a physician’s prescription.
Senator Wiener is also the author of landmark legislation, SB 50, which, if passed, will override local restrictive zoning to legalize apartment buildings and affordable housing near public transportation and job centers. (Currently, many communities ban apartment buildings, even right next to major transit hubs.)
Senator Wiener was named Legislator of the Year by the California Sexual Assault Investigators Association and California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, for his work reforming California’s criminal justice system, and by the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition and California Building Industry Association for his work addressing California’s housing shortage. He was also named Legislator of the Year by the California Solar & Storage Association for his work to expand on site solar storage throughout the state. Larkin Street Youth Services honored Senator Wiener with the Anne B. Stanton Award for his work to combat youth homelessness throughout California. For a full list of awards, please see awards tab.
Senator Wiener serves as Chair of the Senate Housing Committee and is a member of the Energy, Utilities, and Communications Committee; the Human Services Committee; the Public Safety Committee; the Governmental Organization Committee; the Governance and Finance Committee; and the Joint Legislative Audit Committee. He is also the Assistant Majority Whip, and serves as the Chair of the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus.
Before his election to the Senate, Senator Wiener served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, representing the district previously represented by Supervisor Harvey Milk. During his time on the Board of Supervisors, Senator Wiener authored a number of first-in-the-nation laws, including mandating fully paid parental leave for all working parents, requiring water recycling and solar power in new developments, and banning public spending in states with LGBT hate laws. He focused extensively on housing and public transportation, authoring laws to streamline approvals of affordable housing, to legalize new in-law units, and to tie public transportation funding to population growth.

Before his election to the Board of Supervisors, Senator Wiener spent 15 years practicing law: as a Deputy City Attorney in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, in private practice at Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe, and as a law clerk for Justice Alan Handler on the New Jersey Supreme Court. Senator Wiener co-chaired the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club, BALIF (the Bay Area’s LGBT bar association), and the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, as well as serving on the national board of directors of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT civil rights organization.
Senator Wiener grew up in New Jersey, the son of small business owners, and attended public school. He received a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and a law degree from Harvard Law School. He spent a year in Chile on a Fulbright Scholarship doing historical research. He has lived in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood for over 22 years.

Mayor Libby Schaaf was born and raised in Oakland, which she proudly describes as, “The most unapologetic Sanctuary City in America.” During her tenure, Oakland has undergone an economic revitalization and building boom, as well as cut gun violence in half.

Her “17K/17K Housing Plan” has helped increase Oakland’s affordable housing production, stabilize rents, and decrease evictions. Her innovative public-private partnerships Keep Oakland Housed and Cabin Communities are credited with preventing 1,800 families a year from losing their housing, while resolving some of Oakland’s most unsafe street encampments. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed Mayor Schaaf to California’s first Council of Regional Homeless Advisors.

She created Oakland’s first Department of Transportation, whose equity-based paving plan is the first of its kind in the nation and will make previously underserved neighborhoods safer, while addressing the city’s decades-old infrastructure backlog.

Mayor Schaaf is most proud of launching the Oakland Promise, a bold cradle-to-career initiative to send more low-income Oakland kids to preschool and college. The Oakland Promise has sent more than 1,400 Oakland students (and counting) to college with scholarships and mentors, and will give every baby born into poverty a $500 college savings account at birth.

Rebecca Kaplan represents the entire City of Oakland as its Councilmember At-Large and current Council President. She was elected to the Oakland City Council in November 2008, when she became the youngest – and first openly-lesbian – Oakland City Councilmember. Rebecca has provided energetic and effective leadership towards establishing coherent and holistic approaches to economic development, land-use policy, public safety and other issues to create a vibrant city.

Council President Kaplan grew up attending orthodox Hebrew school and has taught Torah (bible) classes in area synagogues and churches. She earned a Bachelor of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor. She also holds a Master of Arts in Urban & Environmental Policy from Tufts University and a Juris Doctorate from Stanford Law School.


On the Council, Rebecca has fixed long-standing legislative log-jams to launch new blight-fighting tools, has cut red tape and fees for small businesses, and has generated new revenue without raising taxes on residents. Rebecca is strongly committed to creating new economic opportunity for Oakland – from job creation to retail attraction to homebuyer assistance. She is also committed to improving public safety, strengthening transportation and reforming government.

Prior to her service on the Oakland City Council, Rebecca served as At-Large Director on the AC Transit Board of Directors from 2002 to 2008. During this time, she helped bring AC Transit its first hydrogen fuel cell buses and continued her commitment to improving active transportation for Oaklanders by working to improve biking, walking and public transit opportunities. As Director, Rebecca led the creation of the new all-night transit service, new service to San Francisco and to BART stations, and pushed for technological upgrades to make bus service faster and more reliable.

Council-member Kaplan has made Oakland her home for more than the past two decades. Kaplan’s work experience includes serving as an aide for the California State Legislature in the 16th Assembly District and as an attorney.

Council-member Kaplan earned a Bachelor of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor. She also holds a Master of Arts in Urban & Environmental Policy from Tufts University and a Juris Doctorate from Stanford Law School.

Manny Yekutiel is the owner of Manny’s - a physical civic gathering space in San Francisco which combines a non-profit restaurant, bar, coffee shop, political bookstore, and civic events space. The purpose of the Manny’s is to create a place to go to become a better informed and more involved citizen. In its first year Manny’s was awarded Small Business of the Year by the California State Senate, hosted 17 of the Democratic presidential candidates, and was featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Before building Manny’s, Manny was Deputy Northern California Finance Director for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Chief of Staff of FWD.us, a field organizer on President Obama’s 2012 campaign in New Hampshire, and a White House intern.

Michael G. Pappas was selected by the San Francisco Interfaith Council (SFIC) to the newly created administrative post of Executive Director in 2007. In his tenure he has substantially helped increase the Council’s budget and programs; strengthened existing and cultivated new relationships with civic leaders, NGO’s, judicatories and congregations; and significantly projected the SFIC through expanded use of technology. His current board memberships include Mayoral appointments to the San Francisco Disaster Council and 2020 Census Complete Count Committee. He previously served on the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and Department of Aging and Adult Services Commission.

The Rev. Canon Dr. Ellen Clark-King is currently Vice Dean and Canon for Social Justice at Grace Cathedral. Ordained in 1992 she has worked in England, Canada and the United States and is the author of two books on feminist theology and Christian spirituality. Ellen greatly values interfaith partnerships and has been honored to be on the board of the SFIC. In October Ellen is returning to England where she will take up a new role as Dean of King’s College London.

Vincent Reybet-Degat is a 28-year-old French-American gay man who immigrated to the Bay Area in 2016. As a psychiatric social worker in San Francisco, he serves individuals who are chronically incarcerated, experiencing homelessness and living with severe mental illnesses. Outside of work, one of the things he cares about is growing spiritually through Judaism. When his family and friends back in Paris ask him about living here, Sha’ar Zahav is one of the first things he talks about. It illustrates how amazing the U.S. can be. He is grateful and proud to participate in today's Pride Seder.

Emily Dorian grew up in San Jose, in a Lebanese-Jewish household. She’s proud of her ethnic roots and lesbian identity. She graduated from SFSU in Business Administration and Data Science, and currently is working at Tesla in their Autopilot division. She is passionate about welcoming young people in Jewish spaces and working to build a Jewish home with Carolina. During quarantine, she has taken up campaigning to turn swing states blue. Celebrating a PRIDE seder with Sha'ar Zahav means commemorating and honoring our LGBTQ ancestors.