Gabrielle Guinea is the East Bay Associate Director of one of SCORES’ longest-serving lead agency partners, Bay Area Community Resources (BACR). As an umbrella organization, BACR delivers a wide range of services to schools and community settings – including providing SCORES programming – to the greater Bay Area, focused on expanded learning, and behavioral and mental health.

We talked to Gabrielle about her long involvement with SCORES, growing up in Noe Valley in the late 70s and early 1980s, and her love for ER Taylor Elementary School.

You’ve worked with SCORES for quite some time. Take us back to the beginning.

I’ve been working with SCORES for nearly 15 years, and SCORES has been a big part of both my personal and professional development. It all started at ER Taylor Elementary School in San Francisco, where I was doing an internship. I had stepped out of another part of my life – my background had been in business management and hospitality – and thought I was going to be a school social worker. I kind of fell into leading the expanded learning program (after school) at ER Taylor, which was run by the lead agency, Bay Area Community Resources(BACR). I discovered that our Spanish bilingual teacher had been a coach for a soccer and literary program called SCORES, but was too busy that year to keep it going. I was interested in the program, so got in touch with Yuri Morales, SCORES Chief Program Officer, and we started cultivating a conversation about an expanded SCORES program at ER Taylor. I had a billion questions, and the idea of doing more with SCORES excited me.

When did SCORES really take off at ER Taylor?

After the second year at ER Taylor, I met Manny Anaya, and he became a huge part of the program and my life at that time. He taught both poetry and soccer, and he was incredible. We just kind of landed on the same page on providing structure, a safe place to be, and mentorship. I had shifted my entire career, and this work – working with Manny and with youth in the city I grew up in – changed my life. They were kids like he and I had been, kids who sometimes didn’t have a lot of opportunities or places to go.

Flash forward seven years and I’d earned a graduate degree and was offered a new role with BACR in Oakland supporting multiple programs. It was a heartbreaking decision to leave the kids at ER Taylor, but I was ready for a new challenge. Now we’ve got SCORES running at multiple school sites in the East Bay in our expanded learning programs.

You describe relating your own experiences growing up in San Francisco to the kids you worked with a ER Taylor Elementary School. What was San Francisco like for you growing up?

I grew up in Noe Valley. It was a very different neighborhood in the late 1970s, filled with working-class families and lots of artists and hippies. Ruth Asawa lived right around the corner from us. She used to come over and do art with us, or we’d go over to her house. In that way, it was a magical time.

My mom and I lived in a flat and my best friend Lucy (who I met in kindergarten at Alvarado Elementary School, and who’s still my best friend) moved in with her mom in the flat below us. We were right across the street from St. Phillips Church, so I had a lot of Catholic friends in the neighborhood too.

Noe Valley was very culturally and racially diverse at the time. There were single parents, gay parents, straight parents, nuclear families, and blended ones – a melting pot, with kids from all kinds of backgrounds. Most of my mom’s friends were artists and most of us kids were latchkey kids. It was a great neighborhood to grow up in. We played outside and skateboarded and roller skated and hiked and took the bus everywhere. I remember when they opened up new MUNI stations and what a big deal that was.

Things started to change in the mid-1990s when so many of those houses were cleaned up repainted, and sold. My Mom was eventually evicted through the Ellis Act in 2000. It’s always super bittersweet when I’m back in Noe Valley.

Have you sought out mentors in your work?

Yes, and mine brings us right back to SCORES. Our Field of Dreams at ER Taylor was dedicated to Virginia Dold, who was my mentor. She was the principal at ER Taylor and she took me under her wing. She’s a huge supporter of SCORES. She retired in my fifth year at the school, but I wouldn’t be where I am today without her. She taught me so much and she encouraged me to go back to graduate school. We still get together once a year.

She was such a believer. She would come to Saturday games, and what principal does that? Her own kids all played soccer growing up too. She was a huge supporter of SCORES over the years.

How has your work with BACR changed since you relocated to Oakland?

My role has expanded. At BACR, we partner with a wide array of organizations. We're all over the Bay Area. We have five industries: mental health, workforce, AmeriCorps, Home Away, a DUI program, and expanded learning, which is our largest.

Some of the generational struggles of the people I work with in the Easy Bay are staggering. I work with the most amazing people, and I have so much to learn. I’m like a sponge, constantly learning more about how to show up in this world — it’s pretty upside down these days. I keep coming back to the idea that you stick to your truth, your values, and the mission of what you would like to put out in the world. And the organization I work with really stands by that.

To read more Five Questions With interviews, go here.

And one more thing! ER Taylor’s SCORES program produced both Bridgette Marin - a member of the Under-20 Mexico World Cup team and the championship-winning UCLA Women’s Soccer team - and April Barrios-Escobar, who won the SCORES National Poetry Slam in 2020.

Watch a video on Bridgette at age 14 when she made the US U-14 National Team.
Read a story about April winning the National Poetry Slam.