Pride: Supes Not Convinced Current Management Can Run Parade

I volunteered for several days for SF Pride three years ago, and I was fortunate to work briefly with Brendan Behan. Of everyone I met in that organization, Brendan was, by far, the most organized and most intelligent. In that one weekend I quickly saw that if Brendan was in charge of something, like Media, it got done, and it got done well. ALL of the other areas I worked that week were nightmares.

Just one example I personally experienced was that Pride Parade Chair Marsha Levine showed up almost an hour late the morning of the parade, meaning that NO ONE from SF Pride was there to tell the parade volunteers what to do. While I and the other volunteers stood there waiting for someone from SF Pride to show up, I had suppliers constantly asking me to sign for deliveries and people asking where to find their contingents. It got so bad that I finally put my jacket on to hide my STAFF t-shirt (Most volunteers, besides Safety, receive essentially no training, and you literally just show up, put on a shirt, and have other people, in most cases outside contractors, tell you what to do.)  When Marsha Levine finally did arrive, she found that she had left almost all of her supplies at home, including office supplies and alphabetically sorted lists of contingents (so when people needed to know where to find their contingent, we couldn't look them up by name, we had to go through the list sorted by contingent number to find them, essentially random). She was so bad at organizing the volunteers that after standing around for another thirty minutes waiting for her to get with it, I got so frustrated that I left, because it was clear that she had no idea what to do with all of the volunteers she had.I saw many, many other signs of organizational problems, but you get the idea.The smartest thing that SF Pride could do would be to beg Brendan Behan to become the permanent director, but I'm afraid that Brendan is too smart to take them up on that offer.