i fought for senior citizens. i fought for the powerless. i was part of the city's first whistleblower program. i made sure our domestic partners and minority and women-owned business ordinances were successful. i helped establish our recycling program. now the nation's most successful. i ensured equal access to government services for all our citizens, including our immigrants. documented and undocumented. [applause] in other words, i am my own person. [applause] decades ago, i was about as anti-establishment as one could be. today, like you, i am trying to

make the establishment work for all san franciscans. and yes, i am quite aware of the significance of being san francisco's first asian-american mayor. as a chinese american, i'm well aware of my community's long and troubled and proud history in this city. the san francisco of old was directly involved in racism and neglect. the san francisco that i fought as an attorney began to change. and now today, our struggle is here and it's succeeding. [applause] i am humbled to stand before you today on the shoulders of giants among many flagbearers on the day we moved that

history forward. and i'm committed to move all san francisco, all of us, forward. and that is why i've accepted this awesome responsibility. so i hope you will join me. i intend to reach out to you, my colleagues, to my fellow citizens across all political lines and all potential barriers. there are so many talented people in this building and in this city. i know we can move san francisco forward together. and in the coming days, i will reach out to every member of the board of supervisors and meet with you personally to discuss my ideas and my agenda. and yes, president chiu, i will sit down with you, shortly, to work out the details of our question-and-answer session. i will seek your advice and counsel as we immediately begin to confront the challenges that lay ahead. starting with tackling our

budget deficit and finding a new police chief. to the members of the board, i see you as my esteemed colleagues. and i look forward to a relationship based on mutual respect and trust. to our fellow citizens, i'm not going to change. i'm going to open up that room 200 for everybody, daily, and make sure that you know what that is. i present myself to you as a mayor for everyone. a mayor for the neighborhoods, for downtown, for business, for labor, for the powerless, and the powerful. for left, right and everyone in between. for everyone. i will be a mayor who tackles things head on and moves the bar forward. i will be your mayor. thank you very much. [applause]

>> mayors invite each and every one of you to join him and his family in the south light court for some libations and some enjoyment courtesy of mccall's. so please feel free to wander on over there with your cameras and get your photographs and do

whatever you like. but thank you so much for coming.

when a resident of san francisco is looking for health care, you look in your neighborhood first. what is closest to you? if you come to a neighborhood health center or a clinic, you then have access it a system of care in the community health network. we are a system of care that was probably based on the family practice model, but it was really clear that there are special populations with special needs. the cole street clinic is a youth clinic in the heart of the haight ashbury and they target youth. tom woodell takes care of many of the central city residents

and they have great expertise in providing services for many of the homeless. potrero hill and southeast health centers are health centers in those particular communities that are family health centers, so they provide health care to patients across the age span. . >> many of our clients are working poor. they pay their taxes. they may run into a rough patch now and then and what we're able to provide is a bridge towards getting them back on their feet. the center averages about 14,000 visits a year in the health clinic alone. one of the areas that we specialize in is family medicine, but the additional focus of that is is to provide care to women and children. women find out they're pregnant, we talk to them about the importance of getting good prenatal care which takes many visits. we initially will see them for their full physical to

determine their base line health, and then enroll them in prenatal care which occurs over the next 9 months. group prenatal care is designed to give women the opportunity to bond during their pregnancy with other women that have similar due dates. our doctors here are family doctors. they are able to help these women deliver their babies at the hospital, at general hospital. we also have the wic program, which is a program that provides food vouchers for our families after they have their children, up to age 5 they are able to receive food vouchers to get milk and cereal for their children. >> it's for the city, not only our clinic, but the city. we have all our children in san francisco should have insurance now because if they are low income enough, they get medical. if they actually have a little more assets, a little more income, they can get happy family.

we do have family who come outside of our neighborhood to come on our clinic. one thing i learn from our clients, no matter how old they are, no matter how little english they know, they know how to get to chinatown, meaning they know how to get to our clinic. 85 percent of our staff is bilingual because we are serving many monolingual chinese patients. they can be child care providers so our clients can go out and work. >> we found more and more women of child bearing age come down with cancer and they have kids and the kids were having a horrible time and parents were having a horrible time. how do parents tell their kids they may not be here?

what we do is provide a place and the material and support and then they figure out their own truth, what it means to them. i see the behavior change in front of my eyes. maybe they have never been able to go out of boundaries, their lives have been so rigid to sort of expressing that makes tremendous changes. because we did what we did, it is now sort of a nationwide model. >> i think you would be surprised if you come to these clinics. many of them i think would be your neighbors if you knew that. often times we just don't discuss that. we treat husband and wife and they bring in their kids or we treat the grandparents and then the next generation. there are people who come in who need treatment for their heart disease or for their diabetes or their high blood pressure or their cholesterol or their hepatitis b. we actually provide group medical visits and group

education classes and meeting people who have similar chronic illnesses as you do really helps you understand that you are not alone in dealing with this. and it validates the experiences that you have and so you learn from each other. >> i think it's very important to try to be in tune with the needs of the community and a lot of our patients have -- a lot of our patients are actually immigrants who have a lot of competing priorities, family issues, child care issues, maybe not being able to find work or finding work and not being insured and health care sometimes isn't the top priority for them. we need to understand that so that we can help them take care of themselves physically and emotionally to deal with all these other things. they also have to be working through with people living longer and living with more chronic conditions i think we're going to see more

patients coming through. >> starting next year, every day 10,000 people will hit the age of 60 until 2020. . >> the needs of the patients that we see at kerr senior center often have to do with the consequences of long standing substance abuse and mental illness, linked to their chronic diseases. heart failure, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, stroke, those kinds of chronic illnesses. when you get them in your 30's and 40's and you have them into your aging process, you are not going to have a comfortable old age. you are also seeing in terms of epidemics, an increase in alzheimer's and it is going to increase as t