​Mobile Teams and Local Stewards
Streets Team
Buddy Bennett
Jason Berube
Ferose Bassier
Gerardo De Guzman
Clinton Nelson
Shower Power 
Cyntha Simpson
Angelina Pena
Leyla Williams
Eleana Dull
Patty Bennett
Angela Snowden
Outreach
O'Neill Fernandez
Randy Scott
Deborah Young 
Leyla Williams 
Raul Rodriguez
Local Stewards
Candace Rincon
Donna Archuleta
Jewel Morse
Mernard Washington
Anthony Contreras
Arthur McCoy
Michael Whisenhunt
Chistopher Williams 
Paul Baker
Juliana Sandoval
Gamal Palmer

Team Leaders

​Cyntha Simpson 
Shower Power 
Cyntha has 18 months experience with Shower Power and is an expert with handling the intricacies of deploying mobile amenities. She will expand this role to deploy aligned Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) amenities. She is a strong-willed and positive leader, who is able to connect and ally with our unhoused community. Her motivations are strengthened by her determination to create a strong family for her newborn child and partner, O’Neill Fernandez. They have recently secured permanent housing for their family. She was born in San Pablo and raised in Richmond. 
Candace Rincon 
Castro Encampment Team​
Candace Rincon is SOS Team leader for the Castro​ St. encampment where about 50 people are housed in a variety of RV’s, trailers and their own cars. She has been an SOS staff member for two years. Her responsibilities include directing a team of four Streets Team workers and volunteer residents in keeping the community clean and orderly. Candace and the team work closely with residents to head off problems and assess current needs.  

Integrated Partners

O'Neill Fernandez
Director of Programs/ Lifelong Health Ambassador

​​Talented and full of people skills, O’Neill moves the flow of SOS operations with exceptional ability to organize. He’s now also a full-time LifeLong Health Ambassador, the certified facilitator for SOS’s 8-week Personal Compass curriculum, and a Mental Health First Aid responder. Originally from Honolulu, HI, O’Neill was homeless for four years after losing his wife, and now is a proud papa for daughter Kailynn. ​

Randy Scott
​Health Ambassador, LifeLong Medical Care

Helping lead SOS since June 2020, Randy is now full-time employed by LifeLong. Randy delivers problem-solving skills and keen attention to his unhoused peers with a focus on “making friends, connections, and influencing people.” His personal transformation includes being incarcerated and unsheltered for 26 years who lived in a culvert of San Pablo Creek. SOS was his first job since 1998. Randy now feels like he’s living a dream with LifeLong, while he also continues leading SOS.

Managers

Tshombe Perkin
Logistics Manager

​Tshombe arrived as a Streets Team member and advanced as its most capable leader where he managed 10 people working on encampment clean-up, outreach, relationship building, and neighborhood problem solving. Now Tshombe works way beyond expectations with his acumen for quick decisionmaking as Logistics Manager to conquer the challenges of staffing and workforce. Hard working, serious and extremely dedicated, he is deepl
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Daniel Barth
​Executive Director

​In 1987 Daniel started building and running emergency shelters and transitional housing from Hayward to Berkeley for 180 households, raising $21M in hard-earned new dollars. While a stay-at-home papa for Damir and Dara, he attended USC in 2014 to learn his public administration degree. Volunteer efforts with the kids and other caring community members helped to found Safe Organized Spaces Richmond in 2021 for improving unsafe, insecure, and unstable encampments in our neighborhoods -- Housed and Unhoused Neighbors working together! SOS currently employs 32 passionate people, 28 of them hired straight out of encampments, 13 now living in housing. A first gen American from Queens NY, the family’s now proud first-time homeowners and newcomers to Richmond for 12 years on Chanslor Ave.

Mayra Gonzalez-Rico
Administrative Manager

Mai came to SOS as a dedicated volunteer with years in the construction management field. Her accessible nature and practical sensibility is proving to be the perfect remedy for building SOS's organization and infrastructure from scratch. When Mai isn't running back to the SOS Yard from her nearby Iron Triangle home, she's mama to Emilio and her dogs. ​

Tomi Nagai-Rothe
Director of Operations

Tomi Nagai-Rothe is an AAPI person and  lives in Upper Huchiun (colonized as El Sobrante). She is active in decolonizing/ anti-colonizing work. Tomi worked for the Grove Consultants International of San Francisco for 25 years in the roles of senior consultant (graphic facilitator), workshop director, instructional designer and workshop leader. She worked in the Fellows Program in Public Affairs (2013-14) for Coro Northern California. Tomi piloted the Personal Vision curriculum for unhoused participants to engage in personal development and take assertive, self-reflective steps along life's potential pathways. She currently serves as SOS director of operations, creating systems that support all of SOS’s work.

Organizational Volunteers

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​Tom Herriman is Chair of the SOS Board of Directors. He has been an SOS volunteer since April 2019, and helps out with media production, construction projects and community relations. In 2022 he headed Richmond Rotary’s Housing First program which paid for housing for a full year for 11 homeless families. Tom has decades of experience in print and radio media as a reporter and editor. He heads the non-profit Kisa Foundation USA which supports arts and education in Uganda and he is a member of the Richmond Arts and Culture Commission. He  lives in East Richmond Heights.


Tom Herriman
Board Chair and Media Correspondent

Maurice Tierney
​Photo Journalist

Hailing from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, Maurice now finds home in what he calls 'The Pittsburgh of the East', Richmond, CA. He has had a varied career, pursuing interests in photography, magazine publishing, bicycle advocacy, and gardening. And his main form of transportation is a heavy duty electric bicycle. Maurice volunteers his photography skills to SOS, so he can have a better understanding of homelessness in America and to share this with everyone else. He hopes that through his work, he can contribute to reducing the anger and hostility that divides us, and our community can grow stronger, because we’re all in this together.

Lynn Vidal
Board Treasurer 

Lynn is a California native and is dedicated to evolving sustainable systems of design. She is a Director of Operations and consultant for food justice, shelterless, anti-incarceral organizations. It is her belief that to make impactful change the paradigms must shift. She works to change these paradigms of Western Culture. ​