Well mention again later, they also gave quite a big gift to the campaign. Thank you. Its now my pleasure to really move us into thanking the other people who really put down significant mark er s and donatn s and pledges to this campaign and invite other people who have really lifted for me so long to come up and thank people who have participated, thats russ flin and hjose allen. [ applause ]. Thank you, ashley. Good morning, everyone. I am hjose allen. Im a member of the board of meals on wheels frisk San Francisco, and along with russ flin, i co chachaired the 50th s anniversary capital campaign. Us russ and i are proud to be part of this vital project and to be able to thank each of you for your support of meals on wheels. Clearly to be successful in r e raising almost 41, dlr 42 needed for this project require s extensive jen rgenerosity for, many support er s. Luckily we have been successful in raising the funds necessary to move forward and have secured 80 of our goal. We have 20 left to go. Now, it gives me great pleasure to thank the individuals. I call them our First Responder s p who helped jumpstart this campaign. First, there are two familyies who have been part of the meals on wheels family for over 30 years and have led the way with their lead gifts. The first is my he esteemed co f cochair russ flin and his wife leigh. Actually they didnt stop with just making their personal gift to the campaign, but they added to their gift by challenging their family and friends to join the efforts. So for that, were very, very thankful. [ applause ] sjts. The second family i would like to thank is the sanjakamo family through the yvonne and n angelo sanjakamo foundation. Here today is the daughter to recognize her mom who could not be abowith us. Thank you again and thanks to the sanjakamo family for their support. [ applause ]. Next, while they could not be here today, i would like to thank our meals on wheels hon honorary board chair andy and a carrie good mman, who have led e way in this campaign not only through their financial contributions to the campaign, but through their in sigsight s un titiring deadication to meal wheels. [ applause ]. Now, there are 42 additional individual donor s thus far, bu our Program Schedule today doesnt allow me to call each of them out individually, but there are a few that i would like to thank. Here they are. Emily and sam glick, diane pe c pelaconi and susan sanjakamo, debbie and andy rat cliff, craig and maureen sullivan. Rosemary and harry wong and lisa and todd zabel. We are truly grateful for these and other individuals who have helped bring us to the threshold of a successful capital campa n campaign. I look forward to being with all of you at our dedication in the last quarter of 2020 when we will have an opportunity to memorialise all the gueift s toe campaign through naming and donor recognition. Thank you sooch for your supp t support. [ applause ]. Thank you, hjose. Im russ flin. I would like to start off by acknowledging ashley and all of his hue mmility for having the leadership ability to drag this board, some of who left the board because they didnt feel this was a possibility that we could realize. Ashley thank you sincerely for our efforts. Now ill get back on script. Hjose, thank you for all youve done. Without hjose i wouldnt begin o know how to raise money. Hes done this socio mamany tis. While ive raised money for political campaigns, ive rarely raised money for floirp p l philantropic. I would like to thank all the organizations and foundations that have contributed to this. The urps foundation, city of San Francisco office of economic and workforce development, First Republic bank, kooeizer perman e permanententy, crescent port ee hail foundation, walter and a s alise habb foundation, the bob ross fowks foundation, and our only one technology contributor, usual uber, and that un fortunately has been a little bit of a shortcoming in our campaign. While we have the mayor here [ laughter ]. Id like to challenge her to maybe open the door to a few more of these folks and give e jose and i a chance to see if we can convince them to make contributions. While weve raised 80 of our funds, we still need 20 fmore. So id challenge everyone here who has already given to re consider and think about just stretching just a little bit more and that can help put us over the 41. 2 41. 5, 42 million that we need. Thank you all for coming today and, ashley, its yours. [ applause ]. Sincerely, i think you can see it pretty easily how blessed we are to have russ and hjose ad frankly every board member and b donor associated with this. We wouldnt be here without you. Were coming to the end of the speaking program. I give you the chance to re lla but also to secelebrate a littl bit. We now were going to do somethi something i dont know how were going to do this, but i do want to offer a few closing thanks and instructions. Flawl first of all , can we jut give our staff that work every day delivering food [ applause ]. Answering the phones, i just dont think none of us who dont do this work think about what it means to walk up buil buildings and six flights of stairs with food in our your hand and buildings with he wieor s that dont work and getting in and out of a car. We have pretsocial worker s goi trying to help people who literally have nothing and people who have challenges and so forth and we have a staff that back them up thats unparalleled. Again, my deep eest and most sincere appreciation to them. I specifically want to thank our Development Team led by Jessica Sweedler and weve been working together now for 12 years and we almost feel like were kind of a dentist function ental di dysfunction al family, but a god one working together. Frankly i think why both she and i deserve credit is we didnt staff up to run this campaign, were just running it. Were running it on top of the 7 or 8 million that we have already. We had the heart to do it and weve been successful. Thank you all. I also want to thank the team who worked hard on this event specifically, david miranda, our events manager, jim on hzwald O Communications and marketing director. [ applause ]. And the person who has the hard eest job on earth, being m assistant, michelle fur longi longing fur long. And if i didnt call your name, please know how appreciative i am to you for what you do to support us in this work every single day. Its not possible to do. What were going to try to do okay. Everybody lets count down from five. Five, four, three, two, one. Yay. [ cheering and applause ] usf donates 100120 pounds of food a night. For the four semesters we have been running here, usf has donated about 18,000 pounds of food to the Food Recovery Network. Im maggie. Im nick. Were coechairs of the national led organization. What food recovery does is recover and redistribute food that would go wasted and redistributing to people in the community. The moment that i became really engaged in the cause of fighting food waste was when i had just taken the food from the usf cafeteria and i saw four pans full size full of food perfectly fine to be eaten and made the day before and that would have gone into the trash that night if we didnt recover it the next day. I want to fight food waste because it hurts the economy, its one of the largest emitters of Greenhouse Gases in the world. If it was a nation, it would be the Third Largest nation behind china and the United States. America wastes about 40 of the food we create every year, 160 billion worth and thats made up in the higher cost of food for consumers. No matter where you view the line, you should be engaged with the issue of food waste. Access edible food that we have throughout our Lunch Program in our center, i go ahead and collect it and ill cool it down and every night i prep it up and the next day ill heat it and ready for delivery. Its really natural for me, i love it, im passionate about it and its just been great. I believe its such a blessing to have the opportunity to actually feed people every day. No food should go wasted. Theres someone who wants to eat, we have food, its definitely hand in hand and it shouldnt be looked at as work or a task, were feeding people and it really means so much to me. I come to work and theyre like nora do you want this, do you want that . And its so great and everyone is truly involved. Every day, every night after every period of food, breakfast, lunch, dinner, i mean, people just throw it away. They dont even think twice about it and i think as a whole, as a community, as any community, if people just put a little effort, we could really help each other out. Thats how it should be. Thats what food is about basically. An organization that meets is the San Francisco knight ministry we work with tuesday and thursdays. By the power of your name i have faith to move mountains because i believe in jesus. I believe its helpful to offer food to people because as you know, theres so much homelessness in San Francisco and california and the United States. I really believe that food is important as well as our faith. The San Francisco knight ministry has been around for 54 years. The core of the ministry, a group of ordain ministers, we go out in the middle of the night every single night of the year, so for 54 years we have never missed a night. I know its difficult to believe maybe in the United States but a lot of our people will say this is the first meal theyve had in two days. I really believe it is a time between life or death because i mean, we could be here and have church, but, you know, i dont know how much we could feed or how many we could feed and this way over 100 people get fed every single thursday out here. Its not solely the food, i tell you, believe me. Theyre extremely grateful. Its super awesome how welcoming they are. After one or two times theyre like i recognize you. How are you doing, how is school . I have never been in the city, its overwhelming. You get to know people and through the music and the food, you get to know people. We never know what impact were going to have on folks. If you just practice love and kindness, its a labor of love and thats what the Food Recovery Network is and this is a huge i believe they salvage our mission. To me the most important part is its about food waste and feeding people. The Food Recovery NetworkNational Slogan is finding ways to feed people. Its property to bring the scientific and Human Element into the situation. Shop and dine the 49 promotes loophole businesses and changes residents to do thirds shopping and diane within the 49 square miles of San Francisco by supporting local services we help San Francisco remain unique and successful where will you shop and dine shop and dine the 49. My name is neil the general manager for the book shop here on west portal avenue if San Francisco this is a neighborhood bookstore and it is a wonderful neighborhood but it is an interesting community because the residents the neighborhood muni loves the neighborhood it is community and we as a book sincerely we see the same people here the shop all the time and you know to a certain degree this is part of their this is created the neighborhood a place where people come and subcontract it is in recent years we see a drop off of a lot of bookstores both National Chains and neighborhoods by the Neighborhood Stores where coming you dont want to one of the great things of San Francisco it is neighborhood neighborhood have dentist corrosive are coffeehouses but 2, 3, 4 coffeehouses in month neighborhoods that are on their own thats working with kids, they keep you young. They keep you on your tones on your toes. Teaching them, at the same time, us learning from them, everything is fulfilling. Ready . Go. [ ] we really wanted to find a way to support Women Entrepreneurs in particular in San Francisco. It was very important for the mayor, as well as the Safety Support the dreams that people want to realize, and provide them with an opportunity to receive funding to support improvements for their business so they could grow and thrive in their neighborhoods and in their industry. Three, two, one because i am one of the consultants for two nonprofits here for entrepreneurship, i knew about the grand through the renaissance entrepreneur center, and through the Small Business development center. I thought they were going to be perfect candidate because of their strong values in the community. They really give back to the neighborhood. They are from this neighborhood, and they care about the kids in the community here. When molly molly first told us about the grant because she works with Small Businesses. She has been a tremendous help for us here. She brought us to the attention of the grand just because a lot of things here were outdated, and need to be uptodate and redone totally. Hands in front. Recite the creed. My oldest is jt, he is seven, and my youngest is ryan, he is almost six. It instills discipline and the boys, but they show a lot of care. We think it is great. The moves are fantastic. The women both are great teachers. What is the next one . My son goes to fd k. He has been attending for about two years now. They also have a summer program, and last summer was our first year participating in it. They took the kids everywhere around San Francisco. This year, owner talking about placing them in summer camps, all he wanted to do was spend the entire summer with them. He has strong women in his life, so he really appreciates it. I think that carries through and i appreciate the fact that there are more strong women in the world like that. I met dandrea 25 years ago, and we met through our interest in karate. Our professor started on cortland years ago, so we grew up here at this location, we out he outgrew the space and he moved ten years later. He decided to reopen this location after he moved. Initially, i came back to say, hey, because it might have been 15 years since i even put on a uniform. My Business Partner was here basically by herself, and the person she was supposed to run the studio with said great, you are here, i started new Nursing School so you can take over. And she said wait, that is not what i am here for i was by myself before for a month before she came through. She was technically here as a secretary, but we insisted, just put on the uniform, and help her teach. I was struggling a little bit. And she has been here. One thing led to another and now we are coowners. You think a lot more about safety after having children and i wanted to not live in fear so much, and so i just took advantage of the opportunity, and i found it very powerful to hit something, to get some relief, but also having the knowledge one you might be in a situation of how to take care of yourself. The selfdefence class is a new thing that we are doing. We started with a group of women last year as a trial run to see how it felt. Theres a difference between selfdefence and doing a karate class. We didnt want them to do an actual karate class. We wanted to learn the fundamentals of how to defend yourself versus, you know, going through all the forms and techniques that we teaching a karate class and how to break that down. Then i was approached by my old high school. One once a semester, the kids get to pick an extra curricular activity to take outside of the school walls. My old biology teacher is now the principle. She approached us into doing a selfdefence class. The girls have been really proactive and really sweet. They step out of of the comfort zone, but they have been willing to step out and that hasnt been any pushback. It is really great. It is respect. You have to learn it. When we first came in, they knew us as those girls. They didnt know who we were. Finally, we came enough for them to realize, okay, they are in the business now. It took a while for us to gain that respect from our peers, our male peers. Since receiving the grant, it has ignited us even more, and put a fire underneath our butts even more. We were doing our summer camp and we are in a movie theatre, and we just finished watching a film and she stepped out to receive a phone call. She came in and she screamed, hey, we got the grant. And i said what . Martial arts is a passion for us. It is passion driven. There are days where we are dead tired and the kids come and they have the biggest smiles on their faces and it is contagious. We have been operating this program for a little over a year all Women Entrepreneurs. It is an extraordinary benefit for us. We have had the Mayors Office investing in our program so we can continue doing this work. It has been so impactful across a diversity of communities throughout the city. We hope that we are making some type of impact in these kids lives outside of just learning karate. Having selfconfidence, having discipline, learning to know when its okay to stand up for yourself versus you just being a bully in school. These are the values we want the kids to take away from this. Not just, i learned how to kick and i learned how to punch. We want the kids to have more values when they walk outside of these doors. [ ] [ ] i just wanted to say a few words. One is to the parents and to all of the kids. Thank you for supporting this program and for trusting us to create a Soccer Program in the bayview. Soccer is the worlds game, and everybody plays, but in the United States, this is a sport that struggles with access for certain communities. I coached basketball in a coached football for years, it is the same thing. It is about motivating kids and kee