Granddaughter Seeks Signatures, $1.5M Grant to Transform Visitacion Valley Park

Six years after 88-year-old Yik Oi Huang was beaten and left unconscious at the Visitacion Valley park where she took her daily walks, the space that now carries her name still sits largely empty. Her granddaughter, Sasanna Yee, moved to change that last week by filing a $1.5 million grant application and gathering community signatures to back it, pushing to transform the park at 251 Leland Ave into the kind of gathering place Huang herself spent decades trying to build.

Yee's application targets the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department's Community Opportunity Fund, which accepted submissions through March 2026 and is scheduled to announce awards when the Rec and Park Commission convenes this summer. The proposal calls for a remembrance and reflection garden honoring Huang and Ronald Colthirst, the late Visitacion Valley activist who helped lead the campaign to rename the park in 2024. Yee also requested new seating, improved lighting, landscaping, and infrastructure to support community events, along with accessibility upgrades and more welcoming entranceways intended to draw foot traffic to a park she says remains dangerously underused.

"Just increasing accessibility and making entrance ways more inviting and such that people feel welcomed into the space and really transforming it into a place of loss into a place of joy," Yee said.

She said the park lacks the resources needed to foster safety and connection. The logic embedded in the grant pitch is direct: more seating and regular programming would bring Visitacion Valley families, seniors, and children to 251 Leland Ave throughout the day, generating the natural oversight that comes from a park people actually choose to visit.

Huang was a familiar presence at the park long before it bore her name. For more than 17 years she served as an ambassador for the Visitacion Valley Friendship Club, an advocacy and senior services group for the Chinese immigrant community that she recruited neighbors into during her morning walks. She was beaten and left unconscious at the park in 2019 at age 88, and died the following year. Keonte Gathron was convicted of her murder last November, though his sentencing has since been delayed.

To bolster her grant application, Yee needed roughly 2,000 Change.org signatures by midnight Thursday. Whether that community backing was enough to carry the project forward will be decided when the Recreation and Park Commission selects its summer 2026 awards, determining whether the park gets the investment needed to become something more than a name on a sign.