the green line institute leadership program here in the day. any of this year? [applause] we are sort of like -- almost like a little cold, i would say, in terms of green lighting people. with sprinkles around the country. you know, just all doing incredible work. jane is just one of the superstars. i watched her career in politics from afar, but from the first "see jane run" campaign when she was running for the board of education here. you one by one of the largest margins or highest vote-getter. it was it the highest vote- getter here, which is absolutely incredible. it was a relief fractious

campaign. people mobilize and i think people came out to vote for her because of what they saw in her in terms of her leadership qualities, her real commitment to communities, to san francisco, to change. as soon as we landed on san francisco, i knew i wanted to involve jane. she is someone i respect tremendously, though has a great store -- sorry, who is really committed to just people. people in general, and making sure that the government is doing right by communities, making sure that the people that are here to serve them are actually serving them. with no further ado, i would like to introduce you to supervisor jane kim.

[applause] them a first of all, it is such an honor for me to be here tonight. i saw the release team list of grantees that are here today. i feel honored to be here to talk a little bit about some lessons in leadership that i have learned i guess over the last 10 years because i am sure many of you can share much more than i can in terms of the work of improving our community. thank you so much for having me here. i was asked to talk a little bit about how i got to where i am today and also talk a little bit about things i have learned about leadership over the course of my career, so i thought i would touch on that and really just open up for questions and answers. first, what i do -- i serve on the board of supervisors here in san francisco, and i represent one of our more diverse districts here in san francisco, the south of market, the tenderloin, mission bay, treasure island, and north part

of mission. it actually starts a block and a half away from this hotel, a little south of us, and it goes down to the ballpark and to 20th and potrero. i started in january, and prior to that, i served on our board of education. also, over the last 10 years, i have spent my whole life working in non-profits. one was 14, i started volunteering for the coalition on the homeless. then they hired me, and throughout my high school career, i've always worked at non-profits, eventually working at summer youth employment program. after college, i worked a year for their green lighting institute where i met a number of the folks in this room and spent six years as a community organizer at chinatown community development center. really how i got involved in local politics. from there, running for the school board. i should tell you i actually ran

twice. i lost my first race. then, went to law school and work at lawyers committee for civil rights. my entire year had -- my entire world has been the non-profit sector. i've spent very little time outside of that, and that is how i learned everything that i have. i thought maybe i would talk a little bit about leadership lessons, the things i have learned over my time. there are four i usually share with young people, but i find that to be relevant everyday in the work i do on the board of supervisors. the first lesson i learned was in college and it was the importance of community building. when i went to college, because of my years in high school working with the coalition for homeless and other youth programs, i came in my freshman year as one of those rah rah after this. many of you were probably those individuals yourself and know of folks like that. i wanted to change the world. i really wanted to challenge people, kind of that kind of energy. i remember my sophomore year i

was on staff at one of our ethnic theme houses at stanford, and we had four -- we had african-american, chicano, native american theme houses, and the rules were to invite people to talk about issues of race and class. i just wanted to do all these heavy hitting hard discussions on the killing of vincent chen. a chinese-american man who was murdered at his bachelor party because two laid-off autoworkers thought that he was japanese and this was in the early 1980's. they were taking out their anger on him and they actually beat him to death before his wedding. or talking about the l.a. riots. and number of different issues. i remember my mentor at the time who was the fellow at the

house -- she really help us back the first quarter. she said we would not do any of that. and she was a hard-core activists. she was a guerrilla activists from the philippines. was on an execution list, had done crazy things in her life. she said we're just going to do community building, which was the first time i had ever heard the concept here is to set will just going to be fun stuff. i thought that was not what i signed up for. i signed up to mobilize the next generation of activists and leaders for our country. so the first semester, she was like, "we are not going to do any of that began we were going to the scavenger hunts and water fights and, you know, games and that kind of -- you know, stuff that i really was not ready to do, but we went along and all of it, and we got to the second quarter and she said, "i think we are ready to do all the stuff that you guys had signed up to

do." you know, something that i did not expect happen. the first week, we had -- i do not know, showed some documentary and had a discussion afterwards. the thing that shocked me was 50% of the dorm could not be asian-american. we had a number of people there that just did not want to be in the dorm. they were a low draw and were not going to for this update. i have to just let them go. like those were folks that i would never reach. what happened was the first week was that everyone in the door and came out. the sorority sisters, softball players, wonderful folks, the folks that were so unhappy that they got this dorm were coming to our weekly discussion. i realized they came because they knew their neighbors and cared about this community that they were in and wanted to talk about some of the hard issues and wanted to hear from, you know, there -- their c-residents

of the issues of race and class. i learned a lot and i was probably one of the most incredible years i have been dissipated in any type of dorm community, and it has carried through in all the work i do. as a youth organizer, when we reach out to you, i really did not play up the community service and activism and organizing work we would be doing. i approach young people as a way of it is a social gathering. we have food. it is something to do after school. you usually kind of work your way up here eventually, it was just the young people that were doing all the out reach, and they understood that community building was an essential aspect of everything that they did, that if we were not able to bring in every youth and make them feel comfortable in the space we were in having that they would eventually lead or drop out, and i think we were able to retain a really high retention rate of young people because of that lesson that i have learned. it has also carried through in all the campaign work that i have been involved in. the second lesson is probably a

very familiar lesson for everyone in his room as well, and that is the importance of coalition building. my first year, i ran for school board, and it was my first time running. we did not win, but we did run one of the largest grass-roots campaigns in the city. we drop in over 300 precincts, and we had a very strong showing. two years later, a friend of mine who was an active parent organizer, an african-american, wanted to run for the school board as well, and i remember when she also decided to declare the year that i did that a lot of people came up to us and said, "there is no way that both of you will win. there's no way that two women of color are progressive and from the community will win two of the three seats on the school board." as the summer when on and we started going after endorsements, we actually found that that was kind of true. every time she would get an

endorsement, i would not get an endorsement from that group, and every time i got an endorsement, she would not get one. all the advice that people have been telling us we're starting to play out, and it was interesting because i could feel the tension between us during that campaign. we knew that in some ways we were competing for the one spot for the woman of color to get on the school board. you know, you could tell that through september, when the campaign started, that was cited kind of not doing as much collaborative work together. at some point in october, for whatever reason, it dawned on us that it would not matter if only one of us one appeared with only have an impact on the board of education if we gain two more seats that year. so despite everything that people were saying to us, we decided to continue the campaign together and divide up our volunteers throughout the city. that night, something happened that does not always happen that is not always the outcome of coalition building, but we both won. it was considered one of the biggest surprises --

[applause] thank you. it was considered one of the big surprises of the election. my predecessor, chris daly, said that we were the biggest surprise next to ed jew who also won that year. probably only funny to 10 people here. [laughter] we really thought that only one of us was going to come -- was going to win and one of us would come in third place here that year, three women of color one, but we were able to make an impact in terms of the votes we were able to take for the next two years and it allowed us to do a lot of policies about restorative justice that we were trying to bring in instead of suspensions and expulsions and other policies that we had cared about. coalition building has become very interesting for me now on the board of supervisors because i ran really to serve and improve the lives of low- income communities. i represent a very diverse

district. i represent some of the wealthiest homeowners in the city. i also represent the forest residents of san francisco. we have the highest level of low-income constituents. median income for households is far less than the rest of the city in district 6. we have a lot of the new condo developments that you will see a around at&t ballpark, and we still have a lot of the single room occupancy hotels that many of our immigrant families and formerly homeless and other folks eventually move into in the tenderloin and north mission and western south of market. so for me, i think a lot about what coalition building means in terms of pushing policies that make sense for people with very different interests. something that surprised me when i was running for board of supervisors was that everyone told me i would need five different platforms for all the different neighborhoods in district 6, an additional --

initially was that a developing different platforms. what i learned through door- knocking is that people actually wanted the same things. they wanted safe and clean streets. they wanted good schools. they wanted good jobs. and actually, everyone wanted affordable housing. it was not a concept people were against, as long as it did not ignore them. despite the fact that one of my campaign managers called it whiplashed -- one hour we would be at a food kitchen line handing out literature, and the next hour, we would be, you know, at a coffee line trying to get votes, so it was always talking to very different types of folks come of the people that really actually wanted the same things. i found that there were several issues that threaded people together. one was constituent services. although we have up and coming neighborhoods that are more well-to-do and highly educated, they felt fairly ignored by the

city government because they were a new neighborhood. in the tenderloin and other areas, people felt ignored even though they had been historically part of the city for a very long time for a different set of reasons -- because they were immigrants, because they were formerly homeless, because there were not as educated, because they did not have as much money, they did not have a voice in the process. we found a level of uniformity of people feeling ignored by the government. two, we saw issues that impact everyone. at least that is an initial platform for our office to work on. one was pedestrian safety. we have the highest rate of pedestrian vehicle collisions in the entire city and it costs us a tremendous amount of money. whether you live in south beach or you live in the tenderloin, your likelihood of getting hit by a car is much higher than anywhere in the state of california and also anywhere in the city. we have higher rates of collision and shanghai, tokyo, new york city, and hong kong as well. working on issues like that had

been interesting for us because when we hold our monthly pedestrian safety meeting, we have leaders from sro hotels and condo owners come and set the table to talk about how we could make our streets safer appeared going back to community building, working on issues that i think some people would call like issues, but actually have a serious impact, which is fatalities and serious injuries. as we talk about moving forward on policies that support giving more money to schools, or towards local hire or creating a municipal bank, how do you broaden the base of people interested in those issues? that is a question i think we think about all the time in our office. as much as we are up to fight for issues, we also want broad- based support for the issues we are moving forward with pirie whether those allies are in small businesses or also moderate, middle-class families that may not feel the same pitch that some of our lower income

residents do but feel the pinch of our economic hard times, how do we build those bridges is a question we engage on in every single issue. the third lesson that i have learned over time is the importance of knowing your true north. i say this because i once heard one of our asian-american leaders talk to a group of very young students about the importance of knowing your true north, and i agree that it is really important, but what i think what has been most important for me, especially being in politics when everything goes from black and white to very great, is having friends that share my principles. i think that has been probably one of the most important things during my time in office, having friends that i know share the same principles that i do that are willing to hold me accountable to them. it is something i tell young people all the time that go into this type of work. it is very difficult, and we have to support one another

enduring a period i think we often view activists and nonprofit workers as martyrs and we often view ourselves as martyrs in this community. there's no way we will be able to sustain that in the long term if we do not have people that would love to work with and have fun working on to do this work of improving our community. i know i want to still be doing this when i am 60 or 70. part of that has been also creating a community around me that i love and that loves me back and supports me to be able to do this for the long term. i think i will leave it at and perhaps open up to questions. i know i did not talk as much about district 6 and the communities that i represent, but i really would love to address, you know, what folks would like to hear about. [applause] thank you.

>> we have a couple of microphones that are floating around. if you could just raise your hands, i could direct our microphones to your table. all right, we have tosh a first. >> will survey with the cleveland foundation. i am interested in your conversation about coalition building. we are trying to join low-income residents with some of the anchors that our institutions have here we are trying to build a coalition between low- income folks and people who are some of the wealthiest people in terms of the cleveland foundation. that is kind of our challenge. can you speak to that a little bit about building coalitions across income inequality. supervisor kim: i wish i had the

answers to that because i was that was -- i think that is a question we think about every day. we try to find issues that affect a broad base of constituents regardless of income, so pedestrian safety was one of the issues that i have brought up earlier and really try to build relationships among school spirit the one thing i think we all know is that once people know each other there is a very different response that people have, so if you do not know your neighbors, then you are angry when they make noise or if they are sleeping on, you know, the curve in front of your doorstep, but once the relationship gets built, it is a very different response i usually feel that people have. i do think it is challenging, and i think that's low income residents do need to think a lot about who they can build relationships and partnerships with. i brought up small businesses earlier because i think they often face a lot of the same struggles that we experience in

low-income or middle-class communities, but they experience the same struggles in terms of a lot of the obstacles, whether it is planning or department of building inspection, department of public works -- many public hurdles that they have to cross, and they are not making as much money as they could be. we are not doing a whole lot to help them, so what can we do to kind of support that. we are currently looking at policies on how to build more affordable housing in district 6. and actually even putting in, i guess, led use controls of affordable housing in the south of market. and how do you do that? that will create that initial gut reaction response of why are you stopping private development? why are you constricting public development? what we have been finding, though, is that everyone is really struggling right now.

i think you see that with the popularity of the occupy movements happening across the country. a lot of people are frustrated with the economy, so i think we have an opening there in terms of appealing to folks. i do think that when we talk about affordable housing, we have to expand the definition of affordable housing. in san francisco, for example, we actually meet 80% of very low income housing needs in the city. still not perfect, but 80%. for market rate, we actually address 120% of their needs. i am sorry, 100 percent -- 160%. then you have middle-class housing, and will be addressing anywhere from 12% to 40% of that need, so i think there is a real opportunity there. people feel the crunch with rent and the cost of housing to build coalitions. the other thing that i think is

really important -- again, i am speaking very much from a government perspective -- is how you get people to appreciate paying taxes? [applause] i love what coleman did two years ago. on tax day last year -- this is one of the organizations -- they actually went out to one of the post offices on april 15 and had thank you signs for people coming in to mail their taxes, saying thank you for paying for our parks and schools and streets and all of that. i think that is a really important message. part of my role in city government is to get people to believe in local government and what we can do and get them to understand where our tax dollars go. [applause] i think that is important education and awareness that needs to happen. people do not realize that their money goes to the very things that they care about. i often find that i have to articulate what that is and getting people to understand the

importance of our budget as well and how that is actually what i think is the most important policy document that probably any government entity passes. the budget document -- it is all numbers and line items, but it is essentially a list of priorities and it shows who we care about. is it seniors? seniors getting meals on the weekends? recreation centers being open later on mondays and wednesdays? more after-school programs, extending our school day by did we go hours? those sorts of things. i think getting people to articulate that is really important in coalition building. >> hello. i thought all three of your lessons corresponded with trends in buffalo. i guess the question is -- how does that translate into the electoral world for you?

the you do anything when it came to building social relationships and then just any sort of especially effective community events that you use when you were doing community organizing? >> when i was deciding whether to run for the board of supervisors, actually, i got my inspiration in terms of the campaign from a cookbook. for those of you from new york city, you know dave change, t -- chang, the star chef out of new york city. you wrote something that i thought was really interesting. before he opened his third restaurant, he went to paris or he went to france and eight at one of those three-star restaurants, and what he said about his experience there i found very interesting. he said what they cooked anyone could cut, but it is so hard to

do. what he said was that they could very simple dishes, but everything was done inaccurately. the service, the way they pratt, how they could it, but you know, it still just roast beef and potatoes, something that anyone can make. i found that really inspiring for a campaign. when people talk about electoral politics, especially now with the internet and all of that, people are looking for the new way of reaching voters. what i actually found is that not much has changed in terms of campaign. it is still old-fashioned meeting people. meeting people does so much more than sending out e-mail and doing trendy different last month, which i still think our effective. i do not think you should not do them, but if you want people to come out and vote, you have to go out and meet them. when i ran last year, i was not endorsed by anyone. i was not endorsed by the democratic party. i was not endorsed by labor.

i was not endorsed by any news paper publication except for our chinese-language newspaper, and everyone told me i was going to lose. this was pretty early on. because i did not have the formula. either i did not have the chamber support and all of that and i did not have labor and democratic party, so i was definitely going to lose. my opponents definitely got all of those endorsements, so we actually had no choice. we had to do campaigning the hard way. we had to go hit the streets. we door knocked almost every day. i was door knocking most days, film banking personally. we were always out on the street. i was trying to meet more voters than any of my opponents. and i think that was the formula that worked for us on election day. what we did anyone can do. anyone can go door knocking, but it is really hard to do it well. it is incredibly physical. there's a lot of people involved in it. i was really lucky.

my background as an organizer certainly helped because all of my friends were organizers. we were very lucky to have most of the organizers in the south of market tenderloin working on our campaign, so we have that level of expertise in terms of outreach in the community. >> i think most people see san francisco, obviously every city has its issues and challenges, but as a relatively successful and prosperous city existing i am probably the most dysfunctional state in the country, california. as a local official, i am curious -- do you feel san francisco is somewhat insulated from state problems, or are these issues that really impact the city every day? how do you think about that as a

local official? >> the state definitely has an impact on the city of san francisco, but we are very fortunate, i think, in terms of different revenue bases that we have the other counties do not have. also, several different policies that my predecessors have fought for prior to me. when i was on the school district, schools were getting close all around the state of california. we had two things in san francisco that help prevent a lot of that closures and layoffs. one was a public in richmond fund that several groups work done in 2004 where we dedicated a set aside a city funding to go to our public schools. we set aside money and we have to give it out every year to the school district. for me, it has been great. i am glad we have a set aside for our schools, and it has been able to help cover some of the impact that have happened on the

state level. the sec and was something back -- actually, both measures were put out by at the time supervisor tom ammiano, which is a rainy day fund. we had a time where san francisco was doing incredibly well. we had set aside a rainy day fund that has been used both by the city and county of san francisco and our school district. we have been able to weather the storm i think better than other counties and cities have. i do not know how much longer we will be able to continue doing that. at some point, that money is going to run out. >> any more questions? i want to again thank -- oh, sorry. >> hello. just curious, sort of, what is happening in san francisco with regards to policies to cope with the homeless and keep them