Think as we close. First, nicole, the Senior Adviser to the mayor for helping us put together today. Give us a wave. Secondly, and finally i want to thank elise of the the department of the status of women. Please waive. She held she helped put all of todays logistics together. I want to thank all of my staff at the department. Please join us for a very Large Group Photo which we want to do really quickly. Everybody come on up. Francisco. My name is fwlend hope i would say on at largescale what all passionate about is peace in the world. It never outdoor 0 me that note everyone will think that is a good i know to be a paefrt. One man said ill upsetting the order of universe i want to do since a good idea not the order of universe but his offered of the universe but the ministry sgan in the room chairing sha harry and grew to be 5 we wanted to preach and teach and act gods love 40 years later i retired having been in the tenderloin most of that 7, 8, 9 some have god drew us into the someplace we became the Network Ministries for homeless women escaping prostitution if the months period before i performed Memorial Services store produced women that were murdered on the streets of San Francisco so i went back to the board and said we say to do something the number one be a safe place for them to live while he worked on changing 4 months later we were given the building in january of 1998 we opened it as a safe house for women escaping prostitution ive seen those counselors women find their strength and their beauty and their wisdom and come to be able to affirmative as the daughters of god and they accepted me and made me, be a part of the their lives. Special things to the women that offered me a chance safe house will forever be a part of the who ive become and you made that possible life didnt get any better than that. Whove would know this look of this girl grown up in atlanta will be working with produced women in San Francisco part of the system that has abused and expedited and obtain identified and degraded women for century around the world and still do at the embody the spirits of women that just know they deserve respect and intend to get it. I dont want to just so women younger women become a part of the the Current System we need to change the system we dont need to go up the ladder we need to change the corporations we need more women like that and theyre out there. We get have to get to help them. Mayor breed my name is london breed. Im mayor of San Francisco. I am so excited to be here. I have been talking about this legislation since even before becoming mayor. Im so grateful were at this point. I want to start by thanking state senator scott wiener for his incredible leadership on this important bill that finally got signed by the governor and one that were going to be putting into action right here in San Francisco. I also really want to thank supervisor Rafael Mandleman for his leadership and getting it through the board of supervisors so we can move forward on an act that we know is a critical step to help us address Mental Health reform like never before in San Francisco. Thank you to the Episcopal Community services for hosting us today. The bishop here provides permanent Supportive Housing for over 100 people in this building, an outcome that we want for all people who go through conservatorship. Thank you to the department of adult and aging services, the public conservatorship, the department of homelessness and Supportive Housing. It does take a village and it takes all of these departments in order to accomplish what we know is an important goal to help people who we know are suffering on our streets. Were here today because we know that compassion and kindness play a role in addressing what we know has been a real challenge. We know that some of the people that we see on our streets who are dealing with homelessness, Mental Health challenges, and Substance Use disorder on our streets are people that we need to come up with new solutions to help. For people who are experiencing just one of those things, its hard enough, but just imagine all three. The reality is sad. Its a repeating cycle where people are in and out of our jails and hospitals. In the same areas that they once were with no help and no plan in sight. The biggest challenge we have is that in some instances, people are refusing what were offering. Its not just its not humane to just say that someone has the right to be out on the street dealing with the same challenges over and over again and allow them to do that, especially because we know what happens in San Francisco with the challenges that people are experiencing. Thats why we need in some instances to conserve them, to help them stabilize, to provide wraparound services, and to get them on the right path. For example, el laguna honda hospital, we know that is a rehabilitation center. There are some people who have been given help and support and transitioned out of laguna honda into situations where they can not only live on their own but be provided with support from healthcare workers and other social services in order to live independently. We know with a physical challenge its possible, so why not with someone suffering from mental illness. Thanks to this legislation written by senator scott wiener and signed into law by our governor, we can get started doing just that. As i said before under the board of supervisors, under the leadership of supervisor a mandelman, we are moving forward and taking the necessary steps to start the process of conservatorship. The citys Attorneys Office is working closely with others to bring these cases to court and get the help that they need. We all know that San Francisco has a long history of providing compassion to people, but when people dont accept help and the alternative is they may die on our streets, we have an obligation to step in. Senator wieners law requires that we form a working group charged with assessing the new conservatorship and making sure were meeting the needs of those who qualify. Ive appointed three members of the working group and two of us are with us today. Simon pang is the department of the San FranciscoFire Department and has experience with outreach on the streets every day. Thank you for joining us. Kelly dearman is the executive director of the San Francisco in Home Supportive Services public authority. Thank you, kelly, so much for your work in this effort. Rachel rodriguez is the cofounder and director of the Community Payee partnership. She wasnt able to join us today but will be part of the committee. There will be a larger working group that will meet later this month and ensure this group meets the goals it intends to do. This conservatorship is not going to solve all of the issues on our streets, but its better than what we had before, which was absolutely no way to compel people to accept help. But thats why were continuing to invest in Behavioural Health beds. The citys budget includes 50 million for Substance Use and Mental Health treatment beds. Weve launched a comprehensive Behavioural Health initiative to help the approximately 4,000 people that we have identified who are in the most need of Mental Health care and Substance Use treatment. Our city departments are working diligently to create Personalized Care plans for the 230 people of this group who have the most acute challenges. I want to thank dr. Naguseblan for the work that hes done to get us to a place so that we understand what we need to do to start to make smart efforts so that we know the programs that are working and were investing in those programs and making sure that they work for the people that were trying to serve. The fact is for the programs that arent, we need to make a change because we know that there is a need to move forward and address this issue appropriately. Were also expanding our hours at the Behavioural HealthAccess Center and were opening additional new beds at our hummingbird west beds thanks to Tipping Point community. All of these things combined are going to help us achieve what our goal is, and that is to address the crisis. People use that word and throw it around freely, but there is a crisis with Mental Health in our city. Not just what you see on the stre streets, but in general. We need to get rid of the stigma attached to it and we need to make sure we have the tools in place to address it in the most appropriate way. We are committed to making the serious changes necessary and we are so lucky to have a very thoughtful legislator who understands these challenges and who is willing to develop partnerships in order to fight to deliver them so we can make the appropriate changes and investments right here in San Francisco to make them work for the residents who need them the most. At this time i would like to introduce our state senator scott wiener and thank him so much for his incredible leadership on this issue. [ applause ]. Thank you, mayor breed. I really want to thank the mayor for her extraordinary leadership on the really severe Mental Health and addiction challenges we see on our streets every day. This is a problem that has been many, many years in the making and has to do a lot with statewide and National Failures around our Mental Health and addiction safety nets, around housing and having enough of it. Its hard at a city level to grapple with these issues, but the mayor is really taking tangible steps to do that. This legislation has been a twoyear process, as often is the case, with hard issues. Sometimes you have to go back a second year, and this is what we did this year with sb40. I want to acknowledge the mayor, when she was a candidate, was the only candidate for mayor who supported what were doing here. I think the people saw that. Regular residents of San Francisco understand that there is a real problem on our streets and that we cant have business as usual. Because business as usual has not made things better. We have to be willing to try new things. This legislation, i was told when i was sworn in as a new senator, never try to expand conservatorships in california. Its impossible politically. Youll never be able to do it. What we learned is of course its hard and it concerns Civil Liberties, which is something that we have to be very mindful of and very cautious when youre depriving someone of Civil Liberties. But ultimately if you do it in a smart and a focused way, people get it. In the legislature honestly this was overall not a controversial bill. It was controversial in the advocacy community, and we of course respect our devote advocates and worked with them. This is a bill that got almost unanimous support on the floor of the assembly. The biggest criticism i received from colleagues, including some very liberal democrats, is why isnt this program in my area because we have people dying on the streets as well. Part of what this legislation and this Conservatorship Program is about is that it is completely unacceptable for us to sit by while people are unravelling and dying on our streets. Its not good enough to say we have voluntary programs that people can accept. When someone is sleeping in their feces and has open sores all over their bodies that they are not having treated, when someone is running in the middle of the street screaming at cars in the middle of traffic, to say that person should simply be expected to accept voluntary services and take control of their life in that condition, thats not reality. So we as a city, we as a state, need to do more to save these peoples lives. These are our neighbors. These are members of our community. It is not progressive to just let them die because theyre incapable of accepting voluntary services. I acknowledge that there are people who have concerns about conservatorships. Like i said, im very mindful of the Civil Liberties implications. Thats why this legislation is very focused. In fact, some of the critics of the legislation have said its narrow. Yes, it is narrow. This is narrow and designed to really help a small percentage of Homeless People who are so severely addicted and so severely mentally ill that they are dying on our streets. We know that twothirds of Homeless People have no Mental Health or addiction issues. Theyre simply poor and cant afford housing. Even of our Homeless Population that have Mental Health and addiction issues, a large majority are capable of accepting voluntary services. Thats what we need to focus on. But for a small percentage of our Homeless Population, voluntary services are not enough. What we need to do is to help them, and a conservatorship can do that. This legislation, like all conservatorships in california, has strong due process protections. Youve got a public defender, a judge oversees it. You can have essentially a trial. It ramps up and starts out with 28 days. If it continues after a psychiatric evaluation and a court hearing, it can go up to six months. The judge will have continual involvement so that if the person gets better sooner than six months, that it can be terminated early. This is really about saving lives. I want to again thank the mayor and supervisor mandelman for their extraordinary leadership in San Francisco, to convince the board of supervisors to opt in. I want to thank our department of Public Health and dos and the Fire Department for working closely with us in sacramento. And captain pang in particularly repeatedly over a twoyear period drove to San Francisco to testify and and give reallife examples of the people his team was responding for who were in such deep crisis. It geled what was going on for my colleagues. Thank you and its my pleasure to bring up our champion on the board of supervisors, supervisor mandelman. [ applause ]. Good morning, everybody. When you speak after scott, you have to adjust the microphone. This day has been a long day coming, but its an important one. The mayor talked about the crisis that we face, we have a crisis, but we have a significant drug problem in San Francisco. We see it on the streets. You can walk out onto the sidewalk in my district or pretty much any district in this city and see it, but we also see it in our emergency rooms. I know simon is going to be speaking shortly. Roughly half the folks that go to these places are taken in with nothing in their system. We have a system of meth psychosis and inebriation. That spills over into other emergency rooms. It places a tremendous challenge throughout the Public Health system to have so many folks struggling with these issues. Then we see it in the morgue, honestly. One of the largest predictors of whether a homeless person will die on the streets is whether they have a meth use disorder. This is a moral imperative to address these issues and it is critical for the future of San Francisco. I want to express my tremendous gratitude for the backbones of steel in the form of senator wiener and mayor breed that have made first sb40 happen. I am absolutely confident if the mayor had not made this a top priority, this would not have passed the board of supervisors and we would not be implementing this locally. It was her threat to go to the ballot that got sb45 implemented here in San Francisco and gives us the opportunity to take advantage of sb40. I want to express my thanks for that. The fight for sb1045 was harder than it should have been. This is a Small Program and a pilot to test out the approach. The vehemence to it was unwarranted. Pointed at a larger disagreement, senator wiener talked about the folks that championed voluntary services as an alternative to these two bills and that was a man practice we heard over and over again. It is to the mayors great credit that she has been a leading proponent of expanding voluntary services and has put in the money to expand access to housing to lowincome folks and making the Mental Health beds available and the work that she addressed. It is not an either or. It is a both and. As was said, we are not going to get there if we ignore the sickest people on the streets, the folks who do not know that they need help. Those people have to be our highest priority. There are fiscal reasons for that. Financially they are a huge challenge for the city, but more importantly it is a moral imperative. I am excited to see the department of Public Health and the offic