The Stories We Tell: A Tribute to HAP’s Teresa Friend

After thirty years of dedicated service and advocacy, Teresa Friend retired on June 21. As Director and Managing Attorney of JDC’s Homeless Advocacy Project (HAP) since 1993, she led a team of staff and volunteers that helped more than 2,000 people each year by providing services ranging from federal disability benefit advocacy, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) advocacy, and eviction defense, to immigration documentation and social services assistance. Many of HAP’s clients suffer from serious mental health issues, adding a layer of complexity—and a deep need for compassion and creative problem-solving—to their cases.

“All of this time—from thirty years ago—her passion hasn’t faltered,” said Bao-Tran Dang, a Supervising Attorney at HAP since 2016. Staff, coworkers, and partners laud Friend’s excellent legal skills, her compassion and approachability, her calm and humble leadership, as well as her dedication to ending homelessness in San Francisco. “She’s such a rock star,” said Teresa Johnson, President of BASF and JDC. “She has led HAP through periods of incredible change in the city and the community HAP serves—the COVID pandemic, cost of living in the city, challenges in city services. Throughout, Teresa has steadily kept her hand on the tiller.”

Friend’s retirement plans include hiking, tackling house and yard projects, spending time with family members and friends, and playing her cello more often. Perhaps later she’ll serve as a judge pro tem. This fall, she’s embarking on a long-anticipated tour of Scotland.

As she begins the next chapter of her life, we’re taking this opportunity to share stories, honor her decades of service, and celebrate her legacy.

A Legend from the Beginning

Friend’s start at HAP is something of legend. Tanya Nieman, then-Director of BASF’s Volunteer Legal Services Program (VLSP; now known as the JDC), interviewed both Friend and Ramona Holguín for the Managing Attorney/Director position and couldn’t make up her mind—so she hired both!

“We both had such great enthusiasm,” recalled Holguín, who retired in February 2017. Both women were determined to solve homelessness in San Francisco, she said, “and we did make people in some cases whole again.”

One attribute several colleagues mention is how hands-on Friend has been, how she worked directly with clients while fulfilling her role as Director. “I always kept a caseload. That was important to me,” Friend said. “No job was too small for her,” said Yolanda Jackson, BASF and JDC’s Executive Director and General Counsel.

Jackson recalled a case in which the client needed to be notified about a court appearance, but he had no fixed address. Friend—with little more than a description of his sleeping bag—spent several days walking the neighborhood where he’d last been seen, until she found him.

A Model of Compassion and Commitment

“She’s a totally zealous advocate who works with some of our hardest clients,” said Katie Danielson, who started at HAP as a law student intern over twenty-four years ago and is now the Director of HAP. “Her compassion and empathy are tireless.”

Joe Wilson agrees. His first impression of Friend was as “a people’s lawyer, a community-driven activist,” someone thoughtful, thorough, and dedicated to leveling the legal playing field for unhoused people with the odds stacked against them. Wilson has a unique perspective. In 1982, Wilson was a shelter resident. As he got back on his feet, he worked as a volunteer, then as a shelter manager. Since 2017, he has been Executive Director of Hospitality House, a long-time partner with HAP serving San Francisco residents struggling with homelessness. “The whole idea of having the law fight for poor people was a curious concept,” Wilson said of HAP’s holistic approach to providing services and legal representation. Wilson has seen first-hand that disenfranchised people can’t always win, but Friend and HAP helped him believe a fair fight was possible. Friend’s tenacity, year in and year out, left an indelible mark on Wilson. “Teresa is one of us,” Wilson said. “She’s in this fight with us.”

Jackson remembered a case in which the client received eviction notices every two to three months, and, over the course of four years, needed representation repeatedly. When he lost his case at trial, Friend persisted—and prevailed. “She got it reversed to keep him housed,” Jackson said. “Ten to fifteen years later, [the client] is housed today.” According to Jackson, it’s rare for a case to go to appeals as his did, and it’s even rarer for a case like this to ultimately succeed. “She truly believes in what she does, in the cause,” Jackson said. “She’ll go to the end to fight for her clients, to make sure they have access to us and our services.”

An Active Listener

Friend is known as a fair-minded, patient, and gifted listener, as well as a brilliant and creative problem-solver. “She’s a genius, I think, at working with our types of clients,” Holguín said. Clients may come to HAP multiple times—sometimes with a new issue, sometimes with one more chronic—and Friend made time to listen to them all. Holguín remembered one client who would only meet with Friend. “He would come in and was never happy, and he raised his voice. I’d go over there, to her office next door to mine, and Teresa was just very calmly listening,” Holguín said. “I had to see she was okay, and she was more than okay. [Working with troubled clients] was part of our job, which required patience and compassion and listening and joining them in their pain sometimes.”

Despite an abundance of stories like this—stories about cases fought and lost but then re-fought and won, of unbelievable stories about clients themselves lost then found, of admirable stories about her honor and dedication—Friend attributed her personal and work ethic to one overall strength: “I don’t give up.”

A Leader by Example

Friend has been equally approachable and accessible to her team of attorneys, paralegals, social workers and advocates, student interns, and volunteer legal and social services professionals. “She always has an open door,” said Laura Slade Chiera, who worked at HAP for eight years and currently is Executive Director/Managing Attorney for Legal Assistance to the Elderly, another HAP partner. Considering how intense the work is, there is a lot of pressure on staff, and Friend led by example—“an amazing example,” according to Chiera—for how to stay calm, upbeat, positive, and engaged. “A slew of attorneys learned from Teresa how to do that and do it well,” Chiera said.

“She enables us to do the work that is needed,” Dang said. “When we have tough days, tough cases, she reminds us of the importance of the work we do, by reminding us these are people, they’re not just clients.”

“She gives everyone a lot of autonomy and is very supportive,” Danielson said, who recalls an especially busy time when she had a couple of cases in litigation and went to Friend for guidance. “I said, ‘I just want to be a good person, do the right thing.’ And Teresa said, ‘Katie, you are a good person. We don’t have time for that right now.’” Friend offered wisdom and perspective, and she walked her talk. “It was another way of saying ‘Don’t get in the way of your work,’” Danielson said. “She has a way of communicating she has faith in you. She sees the best in me, which makes me feel motivated to do my best.”

A Visionary Team-Builder

The staff Friend developed at HAP is impressive. “She built this place from two to five employees to twenty-plus,” Dang said, and according to Holguín, they are “the greatest group of people anyone could ever assemble.”

Holguín credits “Teresa Friend’s eye” for finding and hiring people who have the “right amount of compassion” for serving HAP’s clientele. “The team she’s built is tight-knit, like family,” Jackson said. And, against most trends in contemporary work settings, many staff members are long-tenured. Jackson said “a lot of that has to do with her leadership.”

Friend’s Legacy

The staff she assembled, her leadership, and her advocacy are all critical elements of Friend’s legacy, a legacy that reaches beyond HAP’s walls and will serve the residents of San Francisco for years to come. “We talked about changing lives,” Holguín said about the impact of HAP’s work. “Well, it was our lives that changed too—in a good way. Your spirit grows.”

“We built HAP into something that plays a much larger role in the community. We built that from a tiny little project into something that is well-respected,” Friend said. Getting to the heart of the matter, she summarized her legacy with: “We built HAP.”