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San Francisco Friendship House Board of Directors

Ron Rowell, MPH
Friendship House Board President
Choctaw/Kaskaskia

Abby Abinanti
Yurok

Emily Chavez, Ed.D.
Apache

Phillip Duarte
Mexican

Edwardo Madril
Pascua/Yaqui

Lucia Tallchief Mele
Seneca

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Helen Devore Waukazoo is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Friendship House. Helen has been with the Friendship House since 1963 and Executive Director since 1987.

Att 13, Helen attended boarding school when the government attempted to move and integrate American Indians from their reservations into non-Indian communities. After graduating she headed to San Francisco and confronted new realities of being an American Indian in a non-native world.  There she  faced discrimination of a new sort, a lack of support services and almost no understanding of the differences in culture. Helens mission became to bridge that divide. Forty-six years later, she has succeeded in helping to do so. 

Helen volunteered at a center started by a church group, a place for American Indian people to connect in what often felt like a foreign world. As the times changed, so did the needs of many of the people who came to the center for friendship and services. Working from volunteer clerk-typist to paid bookkeeper to co-Founder of the American Indian Friendship House in the 1970s, the mission for the Friendship House changed as well. Many who come to her are often not just addicted, but homeless and unemployed. Friendship Houses relapse rate is half that of the average treatment center. Part of the reason is the programs unique blend of 12 Step, Western psychology and Native American traditions. She has also started a 10-bed facility for mothers whose children have been removed by the courts. Here they are taught not just parenting skills, but how to cook and nurture their children incorporating many Indian traditions.

Helen has played a pivotal role to a generation of American Indians raised in the Bay Area promoting and encouraging traditional practices, and re-enforcing a true intertribal community.