BUILT FROM THE GROUND UP. LITERALLY.
North Fair Oaks didn’t wait to be saved. It showed up.
For over three years, youth and families packed into North Fair Oaks Council meetings, month after month, alongside then-Executive Director Sister Christina Heltsley. They came because their neighborhood was struggling, densely underserved, marked by gang activity and violence, and starving for something better. They came because they believed that if they kept showing up, something would change.
It did.
The community’s persistence secured land on Marlborough Avenue. Donors took notice. A building went up, not handed down from on high, but shaped by the very people who needed it most. Youth had a voice in every step, from the design of the programs to the hiring of the center’s first director, who wouldn’t just run the place but live there, in the small caretaker apartment on-site.
That director was Rafael Avendaño. Twenty-five years old. Fresh from leading youth development work in Ashland/Cherryland in the East Bay. And exactly the right person for the moment.
Avendaño arrived in San Francisco from El Salvador at age three. He grew up inside the same complicated, often indifferent, sometimes hostile environment that the kids of North Fair Oaks were navigating every day. He didn’t need a briefing on the community’s challenges. He’d lived a version of them. And he understood, with rare clarity, what sports, open space, and genuine mentorship can do for a young person when the rest of the world isn’t paying attention.
Then, in January 2012, just one month before the center’s doors were set to open, a young person in the neighborhood was stabbed.
It wasn’t statistics. It was an alarm. A reminder of exactly what was at stake, and exactly why the community had fought so hard for so long to build something different. The urgency that had fueled three years of council meetings snapped into sharp, painful focus. North Fair Oaks needed this. And it needed it now.
So, in February 2012, Avendaño opened the doors.
Fifty kids. One paid staff member. Ten volunteers built on grit and goodwill. It wasn’t much, but it was real, and the neighborhood could feel the difference. By summer, word had spread, and funding followed. A hundred kids. Twenty volunteers. The program wasn’t scaling on strategy. It was scaling on need, and on the stubborn refusal to quit.
Today, Siena Youth Center serves over 200 youth annually, with a full team of coordinators, an assistant director, an education programs manager, a family resource manager and a solid base of volunteers. Growth that was never forced just earned, one relationship at a time.
And it was never just an after-school program. It’s a whole ecosystem.
Four departments, health, leadership, education, and artwork, work together to build kids who are whole, healthy, and happy. That means daily workouts and sports leagues. Study hall anchored by high school tutors. Science experiments and a reading club. A Netflix film class where youth learn to critique social issues through their own cultural lens. Running classes that prepare parents and kids for a 5K side by side. Late-night workouts for parents on long shifts, because SYC sees the whole family, not just the child who walks through the door.
For adults, there’s more: financial literacy, parenting classes, and community action meetings that meet people where their real lives are. As Avendaño describes it, “We offer different ways to navigate and understand the systems that both support and oppress us.”
The leadership track is in a category of its own. High schoolers in the North Fair Oaks Youth Initiative don’t just participate, they lead. They run departments. They build a curriculum. They facilitate workshops. They get advocacy training and learn to use their voices for real, lasting influence. They sit in community meetings and take on the hard conversations about rent, displacement, and what a neighborhood owes the people who built it. These aren’t kids being supervised. They’re being trusted.
That trust is the whole model. SYC’s mentorship approach is deliberate about what it’s pushing back against: stigma, broken trust, and the school-to-prison pipeline. It meets young people exactly where they are culturally, linguistically, and personally, and builds something the system rarely offers: a genuine sense of belonging and power.
Then there’s the outdoors SYC’s quiet, stubborn revolution.
In a neighborhood with little access to parks or open space, SYC forged partnerships with MidPen Open Space, Latino Outdoors, the Sierra Club, Trips For Kids, and Stand Up 8 to bring hiking, camping, biking, and trail running to kids who’ve never had those experiences within reach. Monthly outings. Trail maintenance days. Student-led presentations to the MidPen board. Because access to nature shouldn’t be a privilege reserved for those with the right zip code. It’s a right, and SYC is making that case with every trip into the hills.
The staff is 90% Latinx. The mentors look like the kids they serve. That’s not a detail. That’s the foundation.
From three years of community meetings and a dream stubborn enough to become a building to 200 youth served annually, thousands of hours of programming, and a movement taking root across the trails and open spaces of San Mateo County, Siena Youth Center is proof of what happens when a community refuses to be overlooked.
It’s not just changing what’s possible for North Fair Oaks kids. It’s changing what they believe is possible for themselves.