Serving the Music - Pacific Sun

Boz Scaggs will headline a Nov. 24 benefit concert at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco celebrating the work of Cassandra Flipper, the retiring executive director of Bread & Roses.

Flipper, a longtime Marin resident, is stepping down after 14 years at the head of the local non-profit agency, which presents 600 free concerts each year to people confined to prisons, hospitals, juvenile detention facilities, special needs centers and other institutions throughout the Bay Area. The agency has a staff of nine that works with 1,500 volunteers to bring music and other entertainment annually to an estimated 28,000 seniors, adults, teens and children confined or isolated from society.

Bread & Roses was founded by the late singer, songwriter and activist Mimi Farina, the sister of Joan Baez and an accomplished folk artist in her own right. Flipper is credited with helping to keep the agency afloat after Farina's death at her Mill Valley home in 2001 after a long bout with neuroendocrine cancer.

Farina started the agency in 1974. She remained politically active, teaming up with Pete Sears and other fellow musicians to protest the shipment of weapons to El Salvador by the Reagan administration. Her music to the song "Bread and Roses," with lyrics by James Oppenheim, can be heard in the new film Pride, based on the true story of a group of gay activists in London who rallied to support Welsh coal miners.

Flipper, a St. Louis native, is an attorney who has worked for several prestigious law firms as well as high-profile non-profits. She was deputy general counsel for Levi Strauss & Co. for 11 years, a managing partner for The Nature Company and Smith & Hawken, executive director of the California CASA (Court-Appointed Special Advocates) Association, and she served on the board of the Marin Foundation.

"The dedicated work Cassandra Flipper has done with Bread & Roses over these past 14 years has kept Mimi's vision—her legacy—alive and well," Baez wrote in a press statement.