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. Hi, everybody. Good morning and thank you for being here. Thank you to the foundation for hosting us and i am pleased to be joined here with a number of our leaders including my partner in these initiatives, supervisor mandelman as well as our new district attorney. And members of the task force. I just want to thank all the members of the task force who participated in this process. I think supervisor mandelman and i had a conversation when he and i talked about this task force and what he wanted to do with it , and he said specifically to me, i dont want to do a task force that does a report that just sits on the shelf and that is really what i am excited about. And implementing the task force this force this year, we have recommendations that we are not only working to implement, but we are going to see hopefully real results as a result of the amazing work that the task force has done. We know that in San Francisco we have a serious problem with meth use. In 2018, over 126 people died of a meth overdose and the number of Overdose Deaths from meth rose over 500 in the last 10 years. Meth use is a Public Health and a Public Safety issue in our city. We know that meth is not only providing Substance Use challenges in San Francisco, but we need to make sure that we have a citywide approach to address the combined challenges of Substance Use, Mental Illness , and homelessness in particular. And that is why, along with the department of department health, we announced a comprehensive plan for those who are most in need of Mental Healthcare and Substance Use treatment entitled urgent care s. F. With this, we include building a new system of care coordination, outreach, and lower Barrier Services, and Harm Reduction designed to meet the specific needs of the 4,000 people who we know our dual diagnosed. Several of the Meth Task Force recommendations are prioritized and urgent care s. F. In february this year, we combined this task force under the leadership of supervisor mandelman with three goals in mind. To decrease health risks for people under the influence of meth, to identify best practices for treatment and service options, and to reduce the negative medical and social impacts of matthews for all san franciscans. Over the past six months, the task force has met to understand the specific challenges that meth presents for our city and to develop recommendations that would help address this issue. And the report issued today details the findings as well as 17 recommendations. Several of the recommendations go handinhand with our goals around urgent care s. F. , which include creating a meth Sobering Center, strengthening our Mental Health and Substance Use crisis response, increasing the availability of safe indoor spaces such as dropin centers, shelters, and Navigation Centers , expanding Case Management and Wraparound Services, and expanding availability of treatment beds at multiple levels. Some of these recommendations, its meth Sobering Centers, are new efforts and we are working to implement those well several build upon the work that is already underway. By creating a trauma informed sobering sight for people who are under the influence of meth, we will have a place where people can go or can be taken td where staff will be responsibly trained to help them. In addition to creating a safe place for people to sober up, the center will be a place where we can connect those individuals to services. The department of Public Health is currently exploring locations for the center and our plan is to have at least one of these centers open within the next three to six months. We have already taken action on a few of the recommendations that were mentioned are earlier. In september we announced a partnership with Tipping Point community to open up another 14 hummingbird psychiatric west respite beds. We also announced a plan to expand the hours of the Behavioral Health access center, to increase the availability of safe indoor spaces and help those who need it get connected to care. We are also making progress on adding another 1,000 beds to our Behavioral Health treatment system. We have already funded 212 beds in the last year across the continuum of Harm Reduction treatment and recovery services. The issue of meth use also connects with our efforts on expanding conservatorship in San Francisco because the new conservatorship allows us to extend the benefit of care to treatment, to people with Mental Illness and Substance Use disorder. We know that among people with at least psychiatric hold halls, nearly nine in the 10 are users of meth. And as we work to implement a successful conservatorship program, it is important we understand the overlap between matthews and eligibility for conservatorship. We are making progress and we know that progress is not moving fast enough, but we need to be responsible in how we coordinate the right systems so it actually delivers the results we need to have an impact on what we see out on the streets every single day. It is one of the reasons why i hired the first ever Mental Health reform director this year to really analyse the system, to find out what the challenges are , and to work on solutions. Theres not one solution that is going to get us to a place where we need, but we see the problem, we understand the challenges, we understand the data. The data is going to help to inform the decisions that we make so that we can get real results. We are making progress and one of the recommendations of the task force was to strengthen our Mental Health and Substance Use crisis response. Under urgent care s. F. , we will add more Behavioral Health resources to accompany police oncall through our 311 system so that our Police Department is working handinhand with one of our Street Medicine Team workers so we can again provide people with care and get them into one of our Sobering Centers if necessary. We will take action on the recommendations to expand Case Management and Wraparound Services, specifically by reducing the patient to provide a ratio so that we can really get the kinds of results that we need, adding staff to handle the additional cases is also critical, and our next steps include taking action on these recommendations. My office will carefully review the other recommendations included in the report and determine which one will move forward and which ones will be incorporated into the work we are already doing with urgent care s. F. I want to thank the members of the task force for dedicating so many hours to this work, this very critical work. The report and set of recommendations will be extremely helpful as we move forward to address meth use that is hurting so many people in this city. I now have the pleasure to introduce the person who has really been leading on this charge, supervisor mandelman is the person who came to me about this issue early on to talk about the challenges that existed. He knows that i care about opening Safe Injection Sites and that has been a focus of my administration and i am really optimistic that we are closer than ever before to getting there, but he really highlighted the fact that we are seeing the number of folks who are dying on our streets with methamphetamine increasing significantly, and so he has been the leader on shining the light on this issue and i am hopeful that because of his leadership in this work, we can take these recommendations to the next level so we can see a difference and we can help save lives. Ladies and gentlemen, supervisor raphael mandelman. [applause] thank you, madame mayor. Thank you for your commitment and persistence in making the changes in the city that everyone agrees need to be made, and for your fortitude and making those changes that are necessary, but not everyone agrees need to be made. San francisco has a meth problem i think we all know it. We all see it on our streets, in our hospital emergency rooms, in our jails and too often in the growing list of san franciscans dying from overdoses. Among homeless san franciscans who have died on our streets, methamphetamine was the most commonly present substance showing up in 47 of deaths. Now this is not the first time San Francisco has engaged on the issue of meth and its impacts in our communities. It was nearly 15 years ago that then then mayor newsom and supervisor dusty convened the citys first Meth Task Force focused on its impacts in the queer community. I know there are some veterans of that effort here in the room, some of them were part of the task force. The task force, that task force didnt important work and helped lead innovations and modelled the response that our task force has studied and i think its really appropriate that we are here in this aids foundation building. Thank you for your work and thank you for giving us or a thomas and make, where is make . There he is. Laura is back there. Okay. They made such important contributions to the task force but have been doing amazing work on drug policy and helping folks out for many decades, a couple decades. I will stop before i get in any more trouble. [laughter] this task force and the report we released today is not really the beginning of a conversation, and its not certainly the end of the conversation. It cant be. I believe we have made important contributions to that conversation. Today, meth addiction is still very much a queer issue in San Francisco, but as me know, and as the report documents, it is also a Public Health crisis that threatens the safety and wellbeing of vulnerable residents across the city, in every community, and threatens those communities. The report contains 17 recommendations and we cant go into each and every one of them here. I want to highlight a couple of them in particular. The first recommendation is to create a trauma informed sobering sight with integrated Harm Reduction services for people who are under the influence of methamphetamine. Drug Sobering Centers were the task forces top recommendation. Across a spectrum of participants, whether Law Enforcement, service providers, people with lived experience, everyone agreed that we need places that are not psychiatric emergency services, that are not emergency rooms, and that are not jails for people who are meth intoxicated or in a meth induced psychosis. Safe space for them to be and it leaves the communities from which they came safer. This is something we must do and i am so grateful to our mayor, her team, and dr. Colfax for their commitment to making this happen on an expedited timeline. The second recommendation of the task force, which also, i believe it was the secondhighest recommended recommendation, was to strengthen the citys interdisciplinary Behavioral Health crisis response. I hear almost every day from constituents who are seeing folks in distress, folks in psychosis pretty much every day and they have no idea what to do , who to call, how to get a response. They call 311, it doesnt work. They feel nervous about calling the police, and so what the mayor recognizes and what has worked its way into urgent care s. F. And what will be moving forward are other responses so that san franciscans who are seeing neighbors and distress have a number they can call, and app they can dial, and they can get, in realtime, an appropriate response it isnt necessarily the police. If you need a police officer, the police need to be there, but ideally, it is not the police. So that is something that i think will change lives, both for folks who are in crisis, and for the communities in which those folks are living. Theres a third recommendation that is buried way down there. It is item number 17. It is actually really important and it is strength collaboration strengthen communities communication and collaboration among city agencies and providers. I want to highlight this because it is the reason that dr. Bland exists. I want to thank mayor breed for creating this position, for recognizing the need to look across city agencies, to look to our nonprofit partners, to bring folks together to get out of the silos and to have us working together towards common destinations and towards getting care to the people who need it. We can do this. I dont want to steal dr. Colfax s thunder because i think he may say some similar things and i will i will say again. We know we can do this because we have done it before. The San Francisco model of h. I. V. Care was innovated by a city that had been abandoned by the federal government to deal with really challenging Public Health crises here at the local level and although we were angry , and many of the folks here protested the federal governments inaction in the department of Public Health, and other city agencies, and in our nonprofit partners, we innovated and we created a San Francisco model of care that has now resulted in new h. I. V. Infections dropping below 200 for the first time. That is amazing. We will get to zero, but the fact we were able to do it there gives me hope we can do it here with our Behavioral Health services. And dr. Bland will get us there. Thank you, again, mayor breed for all of your work and all of these Behavioral Health issues. It cant be done in a day, but you have not rested a day since you have started. I am grateful for that. I want to thank my cochair, i want to thank the d. P. H. Staff who work so hard on running these all of the members to do such extraordinary work in your work lives and to go above and beyond every day but who gave us the wisdom, the expertise, the experience to come up with the report that i think really does make a useful contribution to the conversation. I am excited. Thank you. [applause] i also want to take the opportunity to thank and recognize a commander who is joining us from the Police Department, as well as Brent Andrews from p. R. C. Some Amazing Community partners. We have two more speakers and at this time, i would like to ask dr. Grant colfax, the director of the department of Public Health, to say a few words. Thank you. I think before i started, you announced i was going to be cochairing the task force. [laughter] i am really pleased. It is great to be here with so many colleagues and friends and having worked on this issue for several decades, i think this is an amazing day as we move forward with recommendations. The health department, with so many did was only partners in the room, we do big things. This is one