Remembering Mimi Fariña as Bread & Roses celebrates its 50th anniversary

One unforgettable day in 1974, a lovely young folk singer named Mimi Fariña came to my office in Mill Valley to tell me about a nonprofit she had just started. She was calling it Bread & Roses, a name inspired by a poem she’d read about how hearts can starve as well as bodies, how people may need bread to live, but they must also have roses — art, beauty, music — to feel truly alive.

Inspired by a B.B. King concert at Sing Sing Prison in New York, she said she aimed to bring free live music and entertainment to people shut away in institutions — jails, hospitals, senior homes, juvenile detention centers — anyplace where she and her fellow musicians could go in, sing and play a little and maybe brighten the lives of those who need it most.

She told me she was launching her fledgling organization with a special event to climax its first year — a New Year’s Day show at San Quentin with folk icon Joan Baez, Mimi’s older sister, and rock star Boz Scaggs. Would I be interested in writing about it?

She didn’t really have to ask. I was more than interested. What a great story. And I’ve never met a man who could say no to Mimi Fariña. But what is truly incredible is that Bread & Roses is still carrying out her vision 50 years later, producing 600 shows a year at 125 Bay Area institutions. And get this: Since 1974, Bread & Roses has served more than a million institutionalized people at over 20,000 shows with the help of nearly 3,000 volunteers. What a legacy.

In celebration of its 50th anniversary, Bread & Roses is presenting “The Golden Jam,” a fundraising evening hosted by her sister Joan and rock journalist Ben Fong-Torres on May 23 at the Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley. Marin folk legend Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and a host of Bread & Roses volunteers are set to perform. More information at givebutter.com/goldenjam.

“It always feels different when you know you’re doing something for somebody else,” Joan says of performing for Bread & Roses. “For Mimi, that was the whole incentive, having real empathy for people who live without the roses.”

Not long after we met, Mimi and I became friends when she enlisted me to help her write the programs for the now-historic Bread & Roses Festivals of Music she produced annually from 1977 through 1982 at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. The lineups were mind-blowing, a who’s who of folk and pop music of the day: Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Hoyt Axton, Melanie, Pete Seeger, Don McLean, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Richie Havens, Jackson Browne, Arlo Guthrie, Dan Hicks, Odetta, Judy Collins and Kris Kristofferson. It’s a long and impressive list.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, reviewer Joel Selvin wrote: “A richer, more satisfying collection of talent and music would be difficult to imagine.”

In 1997, as she was putting together what would be the last of her extraordinary series of Bread & Roses concerts on Alcatraz Island, Mimi and I began dating and became a couple. At the time, she was planning to retire from Bread & Roses after a 25th anniversary gala concert at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco in 1999.

But just as she was looking forward to the next chapter in her life, she was diagnosed with cancer. She was just 56 when she died of the disease in 2001.

Through her work with Bread & Roses, she touched so many lives and hearts that more than 2,000 people filled San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral for her memorial.

“Mimi filled empty souls with hope and song,” Joan said in her eulogy. “She held the aged and forgotten in her light. She reminded prisoners that they were human beings with names and not just numbers.”

Losing Mimi was devastating, but the work of Bread & Roses continued for the next 14 years under her successor, Cassandra Flipper, a soft-spoken former lawyer for Levi Strauss & Co. who had also headed a statewide association devoted to helping abused and neglected children.

“The transition was easier for me because not only did the audience members remember Mimi, but the performers, donors and everybody else did, too,” she says. “It was easier to connect with the past and build on it.”

Under her tenure, the name was updated to Bread & Roses Presents, which the nonprofit maintains to this day.

Marian Hubler, who has been on the Bread & Roses staff for 28 years, longer than anyone else, was inspired by Mimi to begin working for the organization, leaving her job as a state park ranger. And, after Mimi’s death, she felt a calling to stay on, to keep doing the work that her mentor started.

”After Mimi passed away, I just said that this is something I can do with my life,” she says. “I can help keep Bread & Roses going. Mimi’s dedication to the mission inspired me to stay.”

When he took over as executive director a decade ago, Dave Perron brought the energy and celebrity of sports to an organization that had always been primarily about music. A former executive director of the Oakland A’s Community Fund and until recently vice president of baseball and sports enterprises for the Prostate Cancer Foundation, his career has been at the nexus of sports and philanthropy. After collaborating with Mimi on a project when he was with the A’s, the gregarious Marin native accepted her invitation to serve on the Bread & Roses board of directors in the ‘80s, so he was more than familiar with Mimi’s mission when he took over the top job.

“What attracted me at first was the magic of Mimi Fariña, who could move people with such grace and charisma,” he said when I interviewed him in 2014. “She had all those great attributes of being innovative and persuasive.”

Perron guided Bread & Roses Presents through the pandemic and has forged successful fundraising partnerships with the Bank of Marin and other major donors.

“I look at philanthropy a little differently: How can it be mutually beneficial? How can we help you and you help us?” he says. “To raise money, you’ve got to be creative.”

Through his connections in the sports world, he’s been able to get celebrities like Billy Beane, Ronnie Lott, Pete Carroll and Jonny Moseley to emcee events and support the organization in other ways.

While he’s staged fundraising events with legacy artists like Graham Nash and Kris Kristofferson, he’s also realized his goal of bringing a younger generation into the fold with benefits by boygenius, Lucius, Hozier and Lukas Nelson. Fantastic Negrito headlines a Bread & Roses benefit at HopMonk Tavern in Novato in September and the War and Treaty will also perform for Bread & Roses in the fall.

The youth movement has also been reflected on the board of directors with 28-year-old Matt Jaffe as its youngest member. A professional singer-songwriter and guitarist, Jaffe has been a dedicated Bread & Roses volunteer performer for more than half his life, playing his first show when he was 12 years old.

“It was an incredible way to start performing because it introduced me to live music as a communal act, in which the line between audience and performer is erased,” he says. “That kind of connection has been built into what I want to do as a performing musician. To that end, Bread & Roses continues to underscore that performing music is a symbiotic event. And I’m so grateful for that.”

Jaffe’s first show was at Cedars of Marin, a Marin nonprofit with day programming and residential programs for individuals with developmental disabilities that Bread & Roses has been serving since the 1970s.

“You’d have to see it to believe it,” says Chuck Greene, Cedars’ co-executive director. “Our clients are not your typical audience. When somebody from Bread & Roses comes, they are obviously greeted well, but as soon as they start playing music, our clients are up and dancing and singing. It’s total involvement. And they love it. They look forward to it. It’s very meaningful, especially for the artists, which I think was one of Mimi Fariña’s initial goals: to connect artists with the community.”

No one has been involved with Mimi and Bread & Roses longer than 79-year-old Lowell “Banana” Levinger, a former member of the Youngbloods who began performing with Mimi as a duo in 1973.

I asked him what it was about her, what superpower she possessed, that could keep a nonprofit going for 50 years.

“She was so positive and outgoing and sincere and humorous,” he recalls. “Everybody loved her and wanted to help out with whatever ideas she had.”

Over the past half century, Levinger has done scores of Bread & Roses shows, for kids as well as for seniors. And it never gets old.

“Playing for old folks is really satisfying every time,” he says. “You’ve got people coming in and they’re in wheelchairs or half asleep, but when the music starts it brings them back to life. Pretty soon they’re nodding their heads and their eyes are open and they’re smiling. The healing power of music is absolutely amazing.”

Details: “The Golden Jam,” a fundraising evening hosted by Joan Baez and Ben Fong-Torres, with performances by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Ron Artis II, Dirty Cello, Jason Crosby, Jeffrey Halford, Matt Jaffe, Lowell “Banana” Levinger, Tony Saunders and others

DATE/TIME”  – 6 p.m. May 23 at the Sweetwater Music Hall at 19 Corte Madera Ave. in Mill Valley. For tickets ($250) and more information, go to givebutter.com/goldenjam.

Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net