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SAN JOSE, Calif. — The Perk Wars are raging across our nation.

With cutthroat competition for talent and a sizzling job market in Silicon Valley and beyond,
tech companies are seeking to attract and retain employees by pretty much spoiling them rotten.

The valley has always been a fertile breeding ground for workplace goodies, championed famously
by Google with its gourmet cafeterias and on-site massage rooms. But in these talent-hungry times,
Google seems almost stodgy compared with startups like the crowdfunding platform Tilt in San
Francisco, where employees after a year on the job get a free plane ticket to anywhere in the
world. Or real-estate giant Zillow, which offers free overnight shipping of breast milk from
nursing moms on business trips to their homes. Or even software behemoth Salesforce, which recently
held a “Miracle of Mindfulness Day” in which experts equipped “employees with mindful tips to help
them through their work day.”

Millennials are getting a ton of “bennies,” thanks in part to all the startups whose mission is
to deliver cool perks for other startups. Executives at Blueboard, which helps GoPro and others
reward their employees with mind-blowing experiences, are seeing explosive growth.

“Companies are realizing that millennials really care about perks,” said co-founder Kevin Yip. “
And they’re looking for more and more ways to keep employees excited and to keep them from leaving
the company for another.”

With its belief that employees prefer experiential benefits over financial ones, Blueboard
provides perks for clients like lessons in stand-up comedy or the chance to be James Bond for a
day, complete with rented tux, a sky-dive and lessons in making the perfect martini.

Companies are trying to outdo each with perks, said Meg Virick, a business professor at San Jose
State University, because wages, at least nationally, haven’t risen dramatically. “So these perks
are taking up a bigger and bigger chunk of the total compensation offered to employees.”

Part of the attraction to employers, she said, is that “they’re revocable if the company gets
into a financially tight spot; you can offer yoga classes one day and stop them tomorrow. You can’t
do that with wage and salary structures.”

More companies are offering financial perks specially tailored to young millennials coming to
work in a part of the country grappling with soaring rents and home prices. With some new hires
carrying huge student debt, the financial picture can seem overwhelming.

As Richard Cordray, director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, put it: “Some of
the initial research on financial education in the workplace already suggests that a financially
capable workforce is more satisfied, more engaged, and more productive for their employers.”

San Francisco-based Sindeo Mortgage helps its 75 employees with — you guessed it — low-cost home
loans. Staples is using vampire-themed games to get employees excited about money-management and
investing in a 401(k). And a firm outside Seattle called Pacific Market Research provides its
employees with financial skills training.

Article source: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2015/12/28/waging-perk-wars.html

A LITTLE MORE TO THE LEFT: The cities of Berkeley, El Cerrito and Albany have all made the list of Top 10 Liberal Cities in the United States in a new ranking from a Palo Alto-based political startup.

The ranking is based on which federal and state candidates their city residents have donated to since 1980. For example, donations to more left-of-center candidates such as Bernie Sanders garnered more points than donations to Hillary Clinton, widely viewed as the mainstream Democratic candidate.

As a result, the three East Bay cities edged out San Francisco, long considered a haven for liberal politics. The top spot for the country’s most liberal city went to Vashon Island, Washington, which has a population of roughly 10,000 people, 94 percent of whom are white.

The most conservative city in the country according to the ranking is Hereford, Texas, also known as the “Beef Capital of the World” for its abundant cattle farms. An estimated 15,000 people live in Hereford, although the demographics are more mixed, with about 70 percent white residents and 25 percent reporting as “other.”

The goal of the ranking was to highlight the growing polarization of the country, with liberals much more likely to live on the East or West coasts and conservatives in the Midwest.

The list was compiled by Crowdpac, a nonpartisan tech startup based in Palo Alto that says its mission is to inform citizens about politicians. To read more about the survey, including which other cities made the list, visit http://wapo.st/1m2l3AU.

CLEARING THE AIR FOR THE KIDS: When Catherine Borquez first saw the smoke blowing onto the Willow Cove Elementary School campus, she thought it was from a house fire. So Borquez, the Pittsburg school’s principal, and Vice Principal Kenny Winkler walked across campus to an adjacent residential back yard, where they found a man burning old leaves and dead branches.

“It looked like a bonfire, and it was right under a eucalyptus tree. Smoke just started permeating the campus of the school,” she said.

The fact that eucalyptus trees themselves are known to be highly combustible fire hazards did not escape the principal’s discerning eye. She called the Contra Costa County Fire District, which sent people to talk to the man with the fire.

Less than an hour later, the smoke returned, as had the bonfire. This time Borquez called Pittsburg police, who also came to talk to the burning man. The air cleared soon after.

Borquez said it was a matter of protecting her students.

“I’ve got asthmatic kids here, and all that smoke is just not healthy,” she said.

POT OF GOLD: There’s always an angle for enterprising entrepreneurs. Take — or don’t — “420 Tours” in Colorado, which in 2012 legalized recreational marijuana. 420 claims in an email that it is the nation’s largest “cannabis tourism company.” Some of its attractions might seem obvious, such as “all-inclusive cannabis vacations perfect for honeymoons (or) bachelor/bachelorette parties.”

And, of course it would offer “cannabis friendly” transportation from the Denver airport and tours of industrial pot farms and hash makers.

The puffs and suds tours of growers and breweries is a thoughtful touch.

But 420 has its own eye on the flush generation of foodies. For them it offers “cannabis pairing dinners” and the Eye’s favorite, a sushi and joint-rolling class.

“No! No! The fish and rice go on the seaweed!”

Staff writers Karina Ioffee, Sam Richards and Andrew McGall contributed to this report.

Article source: http://www.contracostatimes.com/breaking-news/ci_29302435/eye-east-bay-whats-most-liberal-bay-area

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Saylean Barham had planned on losing her apartment.

With the end of her lease approaching, Barham paid off her bills, sold all her things and bought plane tickets for her and her disabled son to her home state of Hawaii.

Barham, a 43-year-old single mom, was ready to start over.

Then the notice came: a court order from her estranged husband that prevented her from leaving California.

As she stared at the legal note, Barham said, she began to panic.

She couldn’t return her plane tickets. She didn’t have a job. She didn’t have a home. Her son, a sweet-faced 16-year-old boy with autism, cerebral palsy and pica disorder, needs round-the-clock care.

And so began a routine she would repeat every day with no end in sight: a careful mining of resources and listings, looking for shelters, cheap motels and willing friends or relatives to find a place to sleep.

It became her full-time job.

“I was on this mission every day of finding a place to stay every night,” she said. “I would call places or show up and they would turn us away. I was just trying to find shelter.”

Kimo Jeremiah Barham, 16, has trouble walking. He communicates through noises and short, three-word sentences or single-word exclamations. He tears paper and shreds clothing compulsively. He has trouble sleeping through the night.

And though he was the reason Barham needed to find shelter so desperately, he also complicated matters.

Some facilities built to house women and children enforce age limits for boys — and at 16, Kimo was too old for many of the programs.

Others had strict house rules about eating, curfew, noise.

“It’s scary when you’re out there with your child, not sure where you’re going to go,” she said.

Food and shelter

Some days, the mother and son would spend hours in her orange Kia driving around the Bay Area, searching for food and shelter.

At night, they relied mostly on motels and friends’ floors and couches that they would share for a night at a time.

On a few occasions, Barham said, she thought they would have to sleep in her car.

Meanwhile, her divorce was proceeding, and she was shuttling Kimo to supervised visits with his father in Modesto.

“It’s frustrating, because that’s time and money I’m spending on gas and driving that I could be using to take care of things for us,” she said.

Barham, a deeply religious woman, believed all along that God would see her and her son through their time of struggle — just as she had found salvation at her lowest points in the past.

Though Barham was raised in Hawaii as a Jehovah’s Witness, by the 1990s, she was spending her days in a drug-fueled blur.

High on crack and methamphetamine, the young mother stayed awake for days at a time. To escape the violence of her marriage and the chaos of her life, Barham said, she would smoke until the lines between reality and delusion were incomprehensible.

One day, holed up in a drug den, with crack rocks littered across the stove, Barham found herself in front of a mirror, seeing her reflection for the first time in days.

She had never seen herself that way before, she said.

“In that moment, I hated who I was,” she said. “I hated who I had let myself become.”

She quit the drugs, but found alcohol. It took another 10 years before she found God and overcame her addictions for good.

Arm injury

In 2007, Barham’s left arm was ripped open in a car accident that sent her and her then-husband to the emergency room.

The couple had been arguing when she grabbed the steering wheel from her husband’s hands, jerked it to the right and sent the car careening off the road.

“I didn’t want to die,” she recalled. “But after years of abuse and of hearing you’re worthless, at some point, something inside you just snaps.”

Barham suffered nerve and tendon damage that still causes pain.

The day after she was released from the hospital, she packed her bags, took Kimo and his older sister, now 18, and left.

She didn’t know where she was going to go then either, she said. But she was better prepared: She had a job, she had help with Kimo, she never had to wonder where their next meal, or their next bed, would be.

An energetic woman with bright eyes and a warm smile, Berham prefers to give than receive. She has worked as a missionary with the Christian group Youth With a Mission, and had planned to join them in Hawaii when she returned to the islands.

She doesn’t like asking for help.

But as Kimo’s sole caretaker, she said, she’s had to swallow her pride and do whatever it takes to provide for her son.

After weeks of uncertainty, Barham found a small cottage for $900 a month in the hills of Clayton, where she felt peace for the first time in weeks.

Barham, who receives state and federal assistance in addition to selling her
hand
-made jewelry, couldn’t afford the deposit. So she asked The Chronicle’s Season of Sharing fund if it could help.

Season of Sharing provided the deposit plus two months rent to get her and Kimo set up in their new home.

“It’s a start for her,” said Michael Hopfe, Barham’s case manager with the nonprofit Independent Living Resources in Concord. “It’s not the easiest out there, but it’s something for her to get a start.”

The first night, she said, they slept on an air mattress laid atop the tile floor of the cold cottage. It was the easiest sleep she’d had in weeks.

Still, she worries about what’s to come.

“I think of not having what he needs and what’s going to happen to him when I die,” she said. “I need to get home (to Hawaii). I need to make sure that he has a future, that no matter what happens to me, he’s going to be taken care of.”

Marissa Lang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: mlang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Marissa_Jae

Chronicle Season of Sharing Fund daily donor list

Fund total as of Dec. 22: $6,328,491

The Advisory Group of SF; Larry Agius, $25, in memory of Victoria Garret Agius; Ruth Auerbach, $50; Roger Sally Bland, in honor of BB Walker; Arlyn Bull, $100, in honor of Peter Elaine Bull; Pamela Catlett, $100; Gloria Cevallos; Linda Connelly, in honor of Patty, Mony, Maxine and Donna; James Davidson, $250; Mike de la Rocha, in honor of my mom Mercedes de la Rocha; Jeff Demain Lauren Brener, $50; Lisa Gantman Dungan; Kendra Ellis James Paterson, $100; Rebecca Erwin Dan Spencer; Dianne Ben Fong-Torres, $150, in honor of our family; Hallie Friedman; Sue John Garcia, in honor of Tom Berg; Christopher Gray, $100; Matthew Gray, $200; Rafael Herrera, $300; Jeff Hopkins, $100, in memory of Margaret Ragsdale; Kenneth Houk; Carl Jacobsen, $100; Nick Sandy Javaras, $50; Al Lynn Kugler; Judith Hanson Lasater, $100, in memory of Charles Miles Hanson; Andrea Lopez, in memory of Carlos Lopez; Edward Louie, $100; V. Loustalot, in memory of Manuel Lucy Ruiz; Barrett Lucero, in memory of my parents Janice Charles Pivnick; Mike Machado, $500, in memory of Gordon Machado; Hamid Malekmadani, $100, in honor of my mother; Helen Mark; Sheila McClear, $50; Lydia Mendoza, $50; Deborah Miller Stephen Fraser, in memory of Walter Miller; Loey Peter Montagne, in memory of Leah Blum; Nagle Family; Bradley Owens, $375, in memory of Cecile Richard Owens; Toby Pollock; Brian Powell, $250, in memory of Kimberly Powell; Gary Reeder, $100; Sharon Russ Rettig, $500; Priscilla Rich; Dan Richards, $250; Michael Rom, $100, in memory of John Patricia Rom; Daryl Schilling; Carolyn Schwartzbord, in memory of Barbara Mort Barron; Carole Douglas Sheft, $500; Donald Priscilla Smith, $500; Soto Family, in honor of Bob, Colleen Elise Haas; Stauffer Family, $100; Laura Steinman Willem Villet; Edward Tanovitz, $100; Stephane, Farida, Jade Julien Teral, $500; Rhona Harvey Weinstein, $500, in memory of Rabbi Michael Hannah Barenbaum; Randall Sharon Young, $500, in memory of Chester Miyoko Imai and Robert Dorothea Young; Marc Julia Zafferano, in honor of Eric C. Johnson.

Anonymous donations in honor of: Stephen A. Carter; The Dorward Family; Dick Kolbert Nancy Erb, $25; Nick Eleanor Fesunoff; Kath Keith MacLaury; Susan Rosenberg.

Anonymous donations in memory of: Si Kahn Aluy, $100; Armando Bardini; Wayman Q. Fong; Patrick Haugh, $500; Elizabeth Jacobson.

Some new ideas

Writing a check or donating online are easy ways to contribute to Season of Sharing, but creative approaches can help, too. Here are some ideas:

Matchmaker: Use social media to get your friends to donate. One longtime donor posted a notice about his 25th work anniversary and offered to match donations — he suggested $25. The result: $475 in contributions, and the donor rounded up for an even $1,000.

Party time: Millennials can host a baking, pizza or wine potluck and ask each guest to donate $10. A party of 20 becomes a powerful $200 to help our community.

Holidays: Many holiday gatherings will bring together family and friends. Encourage those attending to make a donation.

Get out: Organize a hike, run, swim or row with your friends and get everyone to contribute.

Say a prayer: Encourage members of your religious community to donate.

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Single-mom-son-get-rental-help-after-detour-in-6721735.php