The San Francisco Dharma Collective is a sangha-led dharma community.

A compassionate and awakened world where all beings are cared for, supported, and safe.

SFDC creates a welcoming and inclusive space for meditation, community, and awakening through diverse teachings and practices.

Welcome to the San Francisco Dharma Collective! We are a grassroots collective focused on compassion and the liberation of all beings. Our mission is to create a kind, welcoming, and inclusive space for meditation, community, and awakening. At SFDC, we appreciate, value, and cherish our differences and embrace our shared humanity. We welcome all people, including Indigenous, Black, Latinx, all People of Color, disabled, white, old, queer, trans, nonbinary, women, documented or undocumented, convicted, poor, or any person who may or may not feel marginalized in this society. We give thanks for the richness and beauty diversity creates. We’re on this journey together. Join us!

In the fall of 2018, the San Francisco Dharma Collective was created out of a desire to share power among the sangha to reduce the potential of causing harm that has become all too common in hierarchical spiritual organizations. We are volunteer led, with no guiding teacher, pan-buddhist, and supported by the generous donations of our sangha. We exist to serve our community. It has been a challenging and rewarding endeavor. We have been able to stay open, support our teachers, and provide our community with a safe and welcoming place to practice, connect, and heal. 

At SFDC, we acknowledge the long history of white supremacy in this country. The violence, injustice, oppression, and racism are deeply rooted in our institutions and in our minds. Therefore, we intend to create a community rooted in nonviolence, equity, acceptance, mutual respect, and personal transformative change. We acknowledge the long history of underrepresentation of certain social groups within the Dharma. We recognize that awareness around cultural appropriation and religion has evolved over the years. These issues need to be handled with extreme care and sensitivity. As Dharma practitioners, we are committed to uprooting our ignorance and biases, including those based on race, class, caste, gender and gender expression, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, religion, age, ethnicity, nationality, citizenship status, income level, or current or former incarceration, so we can support the dismantling of oppression and colonization. We understand that we will be perfectly imperfect in this endeavor and we are open to feedback when we stumble

Our goal is to show up with curiosity, humility, integrity, and compassion. We know that making change is more than a statement of intention; we commit to taking concrete steps to make progress on these intentions, steps we will continuously review, reflect on and revisit. 

The great master Padmasambhava said, “Even if my view is higher than the sky, The attention I pay to my actions and their effects is finer than flour.”

Guided by the Six Paramitas: generosity, discipline, patience, diligence, concentration, and wisdom, we commit, together, to creating the conditions for everyone to be welcomed in our sangha.

• Creating a core committee of people to come up with a comprehensive DEI plan to keep this work at the forefront of our organization as an important aspect of who we are

• Continually examining our practices and structures to question the ways in which they promote or dismantle white supremacy culture by offering classes, trainings and workshops to our Board, staff, teachers and community members

• Supporting our teachers in creating more inclusive and accessible classes for all, including closed captioning for the hearing impaired, easy access, comfortable seating, and accommodating different postures while meditating

• Recruiting and financially supporting teachers of color from diverse backgrounds 

• Financially supporting affinity groups - including an SFDC BIPOC Sangha and Spanish Language Sangha 

• Programming classes that give white people opportunities to investigate their own racial conditioning and white privilege, that often, through ignorance, rise up and cause collective harm

• Providing annual updates to our sangha about our work in this area

• Recruiting new board members who are committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion

• Engaging with, learning more from, and responding to feedback from our community members and teachers

• Increasing our outreach to the diverse communities in the Bay Area and around the world

• Collaborating with organizations focused on providing aid to marginalized communities 

We want to be held accountable. Please provide us with feedback when you feel we have acted unskillfully or feel you have been harmed in some way in this community by emailing us at the sfdharmacollective@gmail.com.

We sit on the ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone (pronounced Rah-my-toosh O-lone-ee), land and they have never ceded, lost or forgotten.

The San Francisco Dharma Collective recognizes, appreciates, and honors the Ramaytush Ohlone people alive today living in the Bay Area, their ancestors, their culture, and this land they have cared for for thousands and thousands of years, despite centuries of colonization, subjugation, ethnic cleansing, human hunting, slavery, rape, removal, and genocide. We acknowledge this gruesome history and the ongoing effects it has on the local and greater Native American communities. Our practice encourages compassion and continued mindfulness of the ways in which we are participating in this tragic reality. We commit to educating ourselves, building relationships with, and supporting Indigenous groups in the Bay Area. We offer our space as a resource to elevate the voices of Indigenous people.

We acknowledge our physical space is located in the historic Latino business and residential district known as El Corazon de la Misión, “the heart of the Mission.” This is a rich cultural district deeply rooted in San Francisco’s history. 24th Street is home to many unique specialty stores, restaurants, taquerias, bakeries, grocers, cafes, and art galleries. It has the greatest concentration of murals and Latino businesses in the city. This community is full of workers who helped build this city, artists, teachers, professionals, and community leaders who have made this neighborhood a desirable place to live. And, yet, many of those people live in fear of losing their homes and their incomes. We stand beside our neighbors in solidarity. We aspire to be a place of refuge, connection, and healing. We invite our neighbors to come join us, get involved, and we commit to help preserve the history and the beautiful culture present on 24th Street.

The SF Dharma Collective makes a continuing effort to establish programming for groups outside the dominant culture who might otherwise not assume that their needs are seen or their selves are welcome. The SFDC invites affinity groups that wish to meet for the purpose of community, meditation, and studying dharma. Study groups formed for the purpose of examining privilege or unlearning bias through dharma-based practices are also welcomed here. Groups are open to self-identified members of the population for whom they are intended as well as supportive individuals (allies).

All classes and sits are open to all and no registration is necessary. We are supported by your generosity (dana). No one is ever turned away for lack of funds.

Find us on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and/or Twitter.

Read meeting notes in our Google drive.