Three organizations, zero clean records.

Lori Brooke’s campaign website presents her as a civic leader who has spent two decades building community organizations in San Francisco. She lists three nonprofits as evidence of that leadership: the Cow Hollow Association, where she has served as president since 2005; RescueSF, a public benefit corporation she helped found in 2021; and Neighborhoods United SF, a group she co-founded in 2023 to fight the city’s rezoning plan.

Public records tell a different story. Every one of these organizations has serious compliance problems. One was incorporated using a fictitious persona. One has no legal registration at all. And the one Brooke has run the longest went more than a decade without filing required state reports, with its business registration suspended for five years. These are not minor paperwork oversights. They are the records of someone who wants to run a city department with a $14 billion budget.

RescueSF was incorporated in February 2021 as a California public benefit nonprofit corporation. From the start, the paperwork raises flags. The organization uses Northwest Registered Agent as its registered agent of service — a company whose parent entity was described by WIRED as enabling businesses to “operate in near-total secrecy.” The articles of incorporation and RescueSF’s 2022 statement of information were both signed by “Morgan Noble” — a name WIRED identified as a fake persona used by the registered agent company across thousands of filings.

RescueSF does not operate independently as a 501(c)(3). It is fiscally sponsored by Legacy Global Programs, an Arizona-based organization that is not registered to operate in California. The arrangement costs $20 per month plus 4% of all donations. More troubling: Legacy Global Foundation, the affiliated entity that holds RescueSF’s books and records, has been on the California Attorney General’s “not allowed to operate” list since September 2015. Donors sending money to RescueSF are routing their contributions through an entity the state of California has barred from operating for over a decade.

RescueSF’s board includes Joseph Alioto Jr., grandson of former San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto. On its website, the organization claims credit for helping advance the 33 Gough Street supportive housing project, but there is no public evidence of any substantive involvement. The bulk of RescueSF’s documented work consists of vague advocacy statements — “encouraged City Hall,” “advocated for” — with no tangible outcomes attached.

Neighborhoods United SF was founded in 2023 to oppose San Francisco’s upzoning plan. It presents itself as a coalition of neighborhood groups fighting overdevelopment. But there is a basic problem: the organization does not legally exist. It has no registration with the California Secretary of State, no filings with the California Department of Justice, and no record in the IRS Tax Exempt Organization database. It is a completely unregistered entity operating under the guise of a community organization.

Despite lacking any legal standing, Neighborhoods United SF has been active in public debates over housing policy. The SF Standard reported that the group deployed “scare tactics, misinformation and red herrings” in its campaign against the city’s rezoning plan. At public meetings, the group circulated architectural renderings that SF Planning officials called “completely out of scale” and dismissed as “fear-mongering tactics.” Brooke co-founded this organization and remains one of its public leaders.

The Cow Hollow Association is Brooke’s longest-running organization. She has served as its president since 2005. The association was incorporated in 1979, giving it decades of history as a neighborhood institution. Under Brooke’s leadership, it has accumulated a record of sustained noncompliance.

The association’s business registration with the Secretary of State was suspended for more than five years, from April 2018 to September 2023. During that entire period, the Cow Hollow Association was not in good standing with the state of California. Separately, the organization went 12 years without filing required reports with the California Department of Justice — from November 2010 to December 2022.

When six years of overdue reports were finally filed retroactively in December 2022, the filings contained errors. The balance sheets listed the same numbers for both assets and revenue — fields that measure fundamentally different things. Individual line items had mathematical mistakes: for fiscal year 2017–18, expenses were listed as $5,478.94 instead of the correct $6,073.94, a $595 discrepancy. For fiscal year 2019–20, net revenue was off by approximately $2. The DOJ issued a delinquency notice in August 2024. The association has never reported more than $50,000 in annual revenue, so it files only the IRS “postcard” return (Form 990-N), which requires almost no financial disclosure.

RescueSF’s advisory board includes Lena Miller, CEO of Urban Alchemy. The SF City Controller placed Urban Alchemy on a nonprofit watchlist after identifying “serious” financial concerns at the organization, which holds more than $125 million in city contracts.

The advisory board also includes Alex Tourk, a registered lobbyist with the SF Ethics Commission whose client roster includes Airbnb, Lyft, and OpenAI. These are the people Brooke has chosen to surround herself with at an organization whose founding documents were signed by a fake name.