Angela Palmer, a deafblind client of LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Northern California’s main provider to the vision-impaired, stands for a portrait at the Ohlone College pool in Fremont. Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle

LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired has served people in San Francisco for over 122 years. Now, community members fear for the nonprofit institution’s future.

The organization received a $125 million bequest a decade ago, but today, its story is of financial distress. It lost over $17 million when the bank foreclosed its Market Street property last year. The organization has laid off 40 employees, or 23% of its staff, since January, interim CEO Brandon Cox told the Chronicle in an interview, and more layoffs may be necessary.

The LightHouse is one of the largest and most influential blindness organizations in the country and the only one along the coast from San Francisco to the Oregon border. It runs early childhood education programs; a beloved summer camp in Napa; a factory employing blind workers in Alameda; and mobility and orientation training for adults losing their sight, along with many other classes. It served over 3,000 clients in the fiscal year ending in June.

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The organization recently closed its Humboldt County office and will close its Berkeley campus next year, Cox said. It does not plan to hire a permanent CEO until next year. The average wait to receive services from the LightHouse is two to three months long, as it has been for a few years, said Summer Sanzo Dittmer, vice president of external affairs. Community members said even a few months’ delay could be devastating to people facing a blindness prognosis, who often experience depression. However, one blind client told the Chronicle that she is currently on a wait list for up to one-and-a-half years to receive training to use a white cane.

Angela Palmer, right, a deafblind client of LightHouse for the Blind, the Bay Area’s main provider to the vision-impaired, works through lessons from coach Josanne Van Der Wilk, center, at the Ohlone College pool translated through Deaf interpreter Christine Ganancial, left, at Ohlone College in Fremont. Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle

The LightHouse receives federal funds to provide deafblind clients — people with some level of both hearing and vision loss — technical support for communication devices like keyboards with braille displays, but a client and a former employee told the Chronicle the organization’s services are often unreliable after staffing cuts.

That program has retained funding for the coming year, and it receives additional federal dollars along with income and grants from the state, city, corporations and private donors. Not all of those funds are guaranteed going forward. The Trump administration’s estimated $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid in its tax and spending bill are expected to put more pressure on private organizations like the LightHouse to provide services — at the same time that many nonprofits are struggling. And while blindness can happen to anyone, whether through disease, accident or birth, visual impairment is expected to exponentially increase among baby boomers in the next decades, making the LightHouse’s services even more essential in the aging Bay Area.

The LightHouse’s management insists that services have not changed since the layoffs, which it said are part of needed adjustments to put the organization on a path for success. Nonetheless, blind community members continue to report difficulty getting access to training and support, even though the organization has $80 million in assets that could go toward boosting its operations.

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“My major concern is that we’re on a slippery slope of loss of blindness services in Northern California,” said Joshua Miele, a former board chair of the LightHouse who is blind and recipient of a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, known as a “genius grant,” for his work designing blind adaptive technology. “I’m worried that we’re only seeing the beginning of the repercussions of the financial irresponsibility that has happened in the last few years” at the LightHouse, he said.

Jennison Asuncion, the chair of the LightHouse’s board, said that the board is “laser-focused” on ensuring long-term stability of the organization, and that it will determine if more layoffs are necessary this fall when it finalizes its budget.

“No one on the board is thinking or talking about the demise of the LightHouse,” he said. “It’s had such a storied history since 1902.”

Diana McCown, the LightHouse’s chief of rehabilitation, said that the layoffs included a small percentage of service providers. The wait time depends on a person’s individual needs and source of funding, whether it’s the California Department of Rehabilitation, Veterans Affairs or other sources, she said, and that no one is turned away or charged for services.

“We are still maintaining our level of service that people know and love,” she said.

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Not all who are involved with, or rely on, the LightHouse are so confident. Margie Donovan, 63, a former board member who began attending the organization’s Enchanted Hills Camp at age 9, helped organize a rally in front of the LightHouse offices last month to call for new leadership.

“The situation is grim and we need the LightHouse to stay open,” said Donovan, who lives in Folsom (Sacramento County).

Miele and Donovan questioned how the organization allowed the default to happen when it still had assets from its windfall bequest. They and five other members of the Bay Area blind community told the Chronicle they are concerned about the future of the LightHouse and angry that the organization has said it does not plan to have a permanent CEO in place until next April.

Asuncion said finding a new CEO is one of the board’s top priorities, but that “we won’t rush for rush’s sake,” adding they needed time to find the right fit.

Bryan Bashin, center, former executive director and CEO of LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, gathers with others for a photo at the San Francisco headquarters in 2019. Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle

It is unclear if the LightHouse’s financial struggles are a result of wasteful spending, of growing too fast after its bequest, as a recent San Francisco Standard article reported, or of the economic challenges hitting all types of nonprofits and for-profit businesses. For example, the pandemic played a role in its default, because the main tenant in its office building, the city of San Francisco, left in part because of the glut of commercial real estate. And after the 2017 Wine Country fires burned Enchanted Hills Camp, the LightHouse committed to $55 million to rebuild it.

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“This may be symptomatic of what is affecting the nonprofits, not just in disability rights and access, but really widely across the sector,” said Kara Wentworth, executive director of the Nonprofit Center at La Salle University in Philadelphia.

Nonprofits reported anticipating a surge in demand for their services in a 2020 survey, and now many other financial factors are impacting them, Wentworth said. But after big events like a loan default and layoffs, it’s essential that an organization communicates its strategy, she said. “I hope that the organization is able to speak to that in a way that allows people to understand and trust that there is a strong plan in place.”

Cox said that the changes the organization is making are intended to secure long-term stability. One example, he said, is the LightHouse will save $250,000 per year by relinquishing its Berkeley location.

“If we didn’t make changes now and we continued along the same trajectory, we would be concerned about the future of the organization,” he said.

Cox said he does not believe financial mismanagement took place at the organization. “Our previous CEOs have been innovators and they wanted to do big, big things in the blindness world,” he said.

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Some of that ambition was sparked when the LightHouse learned that a Seattle businessman had left it $125 million in 2014, dwarfing its usual annual income of around $1 million.

The following year, it became the majority owner of its current property on 1155 Market St, and in 2016 left behind a longtime location on Van Ness Avenue to take over the top three floors. In the renovation, Bay Area architect Chris Downey, who is blind, added acoustic elements so that blind people could navigate the space more easily, wrote Andrew Leland in his 2023 memoir, “The Country of the Blind.”

“Normally, a center serving the blind would be in an infinitely more modest space,” wrote Leland. But the bequest helped make the LightHouse “one of the most innovative blindness rehabilitation centers in the country,” he said.

The city of San Francisco had long rented out the eight bottom floors, part of a separate parcel from the top three floors. The LightHouse and a partner took out a $48 million loan for the space.

But after the city decided that the rent was too high, its departure triggered the default in June 2024, because the loan was contingent on having a tenant, Cox said.

The LightHouse still retains ownership of the top three floors of the building under a separate loan of $28.5 million, though the value of that property has dropped from $28 million to $4.7 million, according to Dittmer.

Cox said the original purchase of the building, at the time, “was a smart thing to do. No one could imagine that property values would plummet.”

But Miele, the former board chair, disagrees that the organization was simply a victim of the pandemic. He said that the organization’s leadership should have worked harder with the city and been more prepared.

“I understand that there was a pandemic and lots of people had trouble, but this was next-level negligence,” he said. “They were not proactively trying to plan for the future or avoid this fiscal crisis.”

About six months before the default, the LightHouse had close to $117 million in unrestricted liquid assets, meaning funds not designated for specific purposes by donors and that the board had set aside for “subsidizing operating deficits” among other potential uses, according to the organization’s September 2023 financial audit.

The organization considered using those assets to prevent the default but decided it would not make sense in the long term without a tenant, Cox said. The offices are still empty.

Around the time of the default, the organization also increased its staff, spending around $13 million on personnel in the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years, up from around $11 million in 2022, according to its audits, which was one of the reasons for the layoffs, said Dittmer.

Though the LightHouse said that the layoffs haven’t impacted services, some community members report long wait times.

Patti Knochenhauer of Santa Rosa said she was told by a LightHouse employee in March that she would have to wait one to one-and-a-half years for mobility training she needs to get a guide dog. Knochenhauer said her family does not want her to go out without one because they fear for her safety.

“I’m pretty much housebound and it’s really lonely,” said Knochenhauer, who is 69.

In October, Knochenhauer reached out to the Earle Baum Center, where she had received services after first losing her sight in 2018. The LightHouse took over the Santa Rosa center last year and laid off five employees, then brought one of them back part-time, said Cox.

“We’re on less than a skeleton crew,” said Knochenhauer.

Knochenhauer declined to allow the Chronicle to share her name with management, so Cox said that he could not comment directly on her case. But he said that “the staff member misspoke” and that there are no clients waiting that long for services, in an email.

Susan Kitazawa of San Francisco first went to the LightHouse to learn how to use a white cane and get around the city 20 years ago, when the former registered nurse learned she had severe optic nerve damage and was “living with terror” at the prospect of losing her sight.

Now also a volunteer and donor at the organization, Kitazawa continues to rely on its access to technology services. While it used to be reasonably easy to communicate, she said in recent years the LightHouse has not responded to calls.

Cox said that anyone experiencing problems should reach out to their service navigator, a new role created by the organization. He also said the organization has a complaint line for which there are no active complaints.

However, deafblind clients staged a protest against the LightHouse in front of its Berkeley location last month and said they’re struggling to access technology that is essential to their lives. They’re part of a LightHouse program that provides communications devices, training and technical support to deafblind clients throughout California. The Federal Communications Commission awarded the LightHouse $832,853 to run the program in the fiscal year ending in June 2025. It served 126 active participants that year, according to the LightHouse.

Angela Palmer, center, a deafblind client of LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired receives coaching from Josanne Van Der Wilk, left, during lessons translated through Deaf interpreter Christine Ganancial, right, at the Ohlone College pool in Fremont. Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle

Angela Palmer of Hayward said the LightHouse recently reassigned or laid off employees in the program who were skilled in braille technology as well as tactile American Sign Language, which deafblind people use to communicate by signing into each other’s hands. About a year ago, the LightHouse replaced those staff members with a person who knows tactile ASL but has limited ability in braille technology, she said.

Palmer uses a keyboard with a refreshable braille display connected to her iPhone and computer to read and send messages, and to check her bank account and medical records. But she said the LightHouse trainer did not set up the phone correctly, leaving her unable to send emails and more reliant on her partner.

“It makes me feel inadequate, isolated, worried about my future,” she said.

Four other members of the program provided video testimonials reporting similar problems, which they posted on a website calling for the FCC to stop working with the LightHouse.

Cox said the individuals did not contact LightHouse directly with their complaints. Palmer, however, said she did inform the LightHouse of the issue recently.

McCown said that the LightHouse has 10 staff members who can assist deafblind clients, and that all are proficient in braille.

However, the LightHouse said it had only three employees working in the program in July 2024, in its response to a complaint former employee Mussie Gebre filed with the Federal Communications Commission, alleging the LightHouse provided insufficient staffing and failed to hire qualified personnel. Only one of those employees still works in the program full-time, said Gebre, who is deafblind and lives in Oakland.

The LightHouse has asked the FCC to dismiss the complaint and denies the allegations. Gebre said he expects the FCC to respond in the coming weeks.