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tv   [untitled]    June 25, 2011 5:30pm-6:00pm PDT

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room 263, is open. >> good morning, board of supervisors. i am a client of the veterans equity center. i am here to ask the board of supervisors not to cut the budget of the veterans equity center. here, we have our free legal clinic. we have legislative updates. we have workshops for housing. we have so many things that the veterans equity center did for us, especially the paperwork. we have access to computers. it is afraid. -- free. arts and crafts. the food distribution.
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this is for our health. we are widows of world war ii veterans. our health is now run down. and the veterans equity center staff and volunteers make us healthy. please, board of supervisors, please do not cut the budget of the veterans equity center. thank you and have a nice day. supervisor chu: thank you. next speaker please. >> i am a member of the soma
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senior center. i am in a position of the senior budget cuts. i go to the senior center almost every day to entertain my fellow seniors, dancing, singing, volunteering, and doing exercise to keep fit and healthy. the oncoming budget cuts to the senior centers break the hearts of my fellow seniors and gives us stress. as we all know, stress affects the body and will surely make us sick. the expenses will be coming from this instead of savings. every day, seniors are motivated to get up and have lunch at the center. if the centers are closed saturday and sunday, where will we go, stay home and be depressed? many of us rely on them. it is only at the center where our stress is relieved by talking to our friends, dancing,
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exercise, singing, learning how to cope in nutritious food, forgetting our pain for a while. learn to manipulate computers and feel it important on our birthdays, supporting each other, learning arts and crafts, and most important of all, have a sense of belonging. these budget cuts will shorten our lives, make us depressed, and tell us we have no more reason to live longer and feel that our lives are disposable, because we are old and useless in society. what you are cutting are the basic needs of seniors in order to survive. we did our responsibility to raise our children, and now they are paying taxes to support this. seniors want to enjoy and live comfortably in our remaining years. are we entitled to reap the fruits of our labor?
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what kind of society would we be if we do not know how to take care of the old seniors, especially the poor seniors? supervisor chu: thank you. next speaker please. >> good afternoon, supervisors. i cannot be that public. i think she touched on a lot of the things i was going to say. i am a community service workers at the veterans equity center. i am also a granddaughter of a filipino world war ii veteran. as we mentioned, we provide direct services to filipino world war veterans and their families. i want to give you a quick snapshot of our population that we serve. most of them arrived here in the united states in the 1990's, as older adults, so they were already in their six to pause and 70's. most of them concentrated themselves in san francisco in district 6. most of them currently now live
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on supplemental social security, which is $875 at maximum a month. as far as rent and their housing, they pay between $300 and $500 in rent, so that leaves just a little bit to cover their basic needs. given this picture of who our population is, i am here to ask you to reject the proposed budget cuts. the mayor is proposing to cut 16,006 and $40 from the veterans equity center budget, which is equivalent to about 40 seniors. if that is cut, that means we will serve 40 last seniors. these seniors will foreseeable ago to other senior services which were also impacted and may not be adequately equipped in the language and cultural sensitivity. so i would like you to keep that in mind, hoping that you would
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think favorably towards us and restore the money. in the 2009, 2012 area plan for the department of aging services, they prioritize the need for services to marginalized seniors, very low income, limited english speakers. i hope that you remember that as a priority in the area planned for 2009-2012. we need to keep that commitment to our seniors. lastly, there were many seniors who could not make it because they are immobile, but we have letters from them for all of the supervisors. supervisor chu: thank you. next speaker please. >> good afternoon to everyone. i am one of the community
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service workers of the veterans equity center. i am here to ask all of you to support the community services of the veterans equity center. the community services component funded by the department of aging and adult services, the majority of our consumers need assistance in following up claims with the department of veterans affairs. sadly, up until now, veterans are not recognized for their service in the u.s. military. making them ineligible to receive pensions. this can be very hard and complicated, leaving seniors extremely discouraged with the system. veterans equities centers offers a system of care that addresses these issues. health care is something provided by the veterans
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epicenter appeared clients need assistance in assessing health care services. our goal is to provide the support services necessary for seniors to remain in their homes, while getting the necessary treatment for their illness. these services include linkages to meal delivery, transportation to and from doctors appointments, and scheduling doctor's appointments and advocacy for other medical services that might not be covered by their insurance. there will be a tremendous impact to the community, if our agency no longer has the capacity to provide full community services. although there are agencies that are currently providing services to the filipino seniors, there exists a need in the filipino veterans community and their families.
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vec would like to continue offering its service to seniors and would like to request that you allow us to continue our work. help us to provide this about a bus service to our community. >> madam chair, members of the budget committee, there are two principal questions i would like to put before you. eventually request an answer.
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the first is please tell us what the gdp statistics are for the financial year of 2011 -- 2010- 2011. and what's is the estimates -- what is the estimates so that we can examine the whole thing carefully and come up with some sort of solution that we give you all the breaks through. because you have a lot of people
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today who are going to be suffering -- and i underline that word "suffering" -- as this is no more about race. it is about people. and this is america. one of the richest countries in the world. and what i have seen from time to time -- it has no right to be seen whatsoever. so if you could tell us today what the gdp is like and what the estimates are, we would truly appreciate the answer to the question because -- [bell rings]
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supervisor chu: thank you. just so folks know, it is about 12:00 right now. i know many people have waited a very long time for public comment. we were originally going to take a break at this time but because we want to be respectful of your time, i think there is agreement among the committee just to keep going so we can hear you and be respectful of your time. so what we will do is probably one of us will rotate in and out of the room in order to grab our lunch and come back, but we will continue to hear public comment through the break we had originally intended to schedule, so continue 1. >> hello, supervisors. i am infected with both hiv and hepatitis c. i was diagnosed with hiv in 1996 and in the late 1980's, my doctor told me i had non-a, non- b hepatitis. i watched many friends die of
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hiv and wondered whether i would, too. luckily, the medications can along in the mid-1990s that would save my life. i have used all types of support the san francisco offered for aids in the 1980's and 1990's. in 1999, my doctor sought changes and suggested i do a biopsy. for the second time in my life -- two weeks later, i had the terrible news that i had cirrhosis, stage four liver disease. for the second time in my life, i had to prepare myself for a gigantic health struggle and possibly death. in the last 10 years, i have been on an extremely difficult treatment, which has many side effects including depression, fatigue, weight loss, insomnia, and it goes up additional symptoms. i had to do blood work almost every week.
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eventually, i had to inject myself with other medications which had a whole new group of side effects. i tell you this because i could not have gotten this -- gotten through this difficult time with the support. we have the shared experience of having gone through the death of friends and seen our own death many times in our lives. i strongly encourage you to find the funding for the live program and groups that support the needs of sand from cisco -- san francisco -- [bell rings] thank you.
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>> i am also co-infected. best of my knowledge, i contracted hiv by sharing needles with somebody back in 1976. immediately afterwards, i got hepatitis b and a very bad case of siriasis, which look like german measles all over my body, which has caused me problems throughout my life. while i was still in college, i developed a very high fever in december, after the hepatitis b. it went up to 105, and i was put in the school infirmary for the night, and the next day, i was
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fine. i remember on june 6, 1981, when i first read about the cluster of gay men who were getting strange cancer and pneumonia, that death for me was imminent. life in the 1980's in san francisco -- we were the maelstrom of the epidemic. it was horrible, more than you would believe. but the life program kept me from isolating, which i had for so many years, and my main emphasis now is on living rather than focusing on dying. thank you for listening to me. supervisor mirkarimi: thank you.
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next speaker please. >> i am a constituent of jane came -- jane kim. i have had aids for 25 years, and i have also had hepatitis c. i am here to speak in support continued funding supportshanti -- funding for shanti. it is an intense 16-week program for hiv-positive persons that teaches the factors that relate to good health, mind, body, and spirit. having completed the course and getting in valuable information on living a long, healthy life, i returned twice as a volunteer /pierre facilitator for the session. i have personally witnessed major growth in individuals who
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before have had little knowledge about improving and maintaining their help. to have this course not available for hiv patients that need it would be a great loss and potential cost to the city in increased medical costs. there are precious few resources for persons co- infected with hiv and hepatitis c. the best and one of the only resources is the lack program goes a support group. i have been a member of this group for years, and i have received and given support to other persons. that has helped me through the grueling treatment for hepatitis c and many other health issues complicated by having hiv. groups of this sort are sorely needed. the live program and its co- infection support group are
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indispensable in my life and the lives of other participants. please do not defund this program. thank you. supervisor mirkarimi: next speaker please. >> good afternoon. i am and nursing graduate, and i will continue to become a nurse practitioner who specializes in a chevy. i am also a patient living with hiv. when i was diagnosed in 2004, i was devastated. i felt lost, along, did not know where to turn. the stigma of the disease is crashing, and it was programs like the life program that helped teach me the tools and gave me the support to help me find the agency -- the ability of back-to-school and live a life of service. it is much more than a collection of physical symptoms appear especially now that can
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be managed for people. it has a tremendous psychosocial impact and psychological component, and people desperately need the support and tools to live successfully. i know san francisco has a legacy of being a leader in hiv care, and many of the successes that have come in hiv treatment and care come from san francisco and come from patients who have been able to advocate for themselves, but without this kind of support and tools offered by programs like the life program -- that will not exist, and we still have unfortunately the epidemic live on. so i ask that you not cut funding to the live program because it actually cuts and affects people's lives. thank you. >> good afternoon. my name is matt dorsey. as some of you know, i am the communications director for the city attorney down the hall, but i am not here on an official
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capacity. i wanted to use some personal time today to make it personal case for the enormous value of shanti's live program. i learned i was hiv-positive in 2003. at that time, on the advice of a friend, to one the live program. to this day, i consider it the single most valuable source of information and support i could have received at that time. the thing that has made the biggest difference in my health and well-being is this extraordinary program. it taught me how to live a healthy life, and it did more than that. it also taught me how to be a better brother to others who have hiv and aids. it is an extraordinary program. it works. i hope you will do what you can to keep it working.
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>> i am the executive director at the shanti project. i have had a chance to meet with most of you about the program and what a drastic reduction would mean for san francisco's hiv-positive community. i know we have several clients today, so i will briefly reiterate a couple of major points. first, there is nothing like the life program in sanford's is to oppose a continuum of hiv care. it is the only evidence-based evidence-producing structured behavioral intervention that teaches and guides hiv-positive individuals in the self management of their disease. and it is the city's largest, one of the oldest and only city- wide prevention with positive program, and it has been serving over 900 nida 900 clients each year. we have an outstanding
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relationship. there are several groups that would disappear if the community were not to be served, including the hiv aging population. and other extremely vulnerable groups include modeling will spanish speakers, individuals co-infected with hepatitis c, and others fear we have a record of performance monitoring reports, and ironically, just last week, we received our most recent monitoring report, which not only will again was rated at the highest levels for the program, but we received every one of the 100 points possible again appeared in closing, the loss or drastic reduction of the program means fewer hiv-positive individuals engaged in treatment, an increase in san francisco's community viral load, and ultimately, an increase in preventable new infections, so please, help us
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prevent this from happening. thank you very much. supervisor mirkarimi: thank you. next speaker please. >> thank you for this opportunity to speak. i am a cancer survivor. i had aids. when my family found out, all but my mother disown me simply for the fact that i had aids. my family had known for years that i was gay, but aides was just too much for them. before shanti's l.i.f.e. program, i was desperate, overwhelmed, and suicidal. they taught me that i am never alone. i am one of many -- far too many. i have a safe environment to handle and cope with this disease. they have given me back my life. they gave me tools with which i have turned my life around. tools that i still use every day in my life. tools that are not found or
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taught anywhere else. i got informed, i got inspired, and i got active. there is far more one needs than just taking pills every day, and this is the only program that provided what i needed most to live a quality life. shanti is more than a word. it is a face. it is my face. it is the face of all who are fighting serious illness and who need vital help. when you think of shanti and the shanti l.i.f.e. program, think of me and countless others like me who with the program cannot only survive but thrive while living with aids. i thank you for listening. >> hello. i moved to san francisco in 1979.
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i live in ross mirkarimi's district. i was diagnosed with full-blown aids in 2005. having lost many friends early, i figured it was my time to go. i looked in the dar one day and saw the shanti l.i.f.e. program. i made that call. my life is completely turnaround since that time. i cannot stress enough love and support that these people gave to me. because of their inspiration, now volunteer on a regular basis. i've seen many people in power to start taking responsibility for their lives. people are affected and are not. if you get the people on the ground vote are infected and
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still with the reason to live and care and take care of our tribe, you have more people working in infection rates will go down. thank you very much. the shanti l.i.f.e. program works. [applause] supervisor mirkarimi: thank you. next speaker please. >> good afternoon be. i know you are hungry, so i will try to be as quick as possible. i know you got into public service because he wanted to help the large number of people that you could. the shanti l.i.f.e. program is helping you help those people. seven years ago, i had a needle full of math in my arm. today, i'm raising money for the community and paying taxes back into the system. this program got me back on my feet, made me a contributing member of society, and made your jobs a lot easier, so i am asking you to consider programs
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like this that help you do more with the limited resources that you have to a lot to the community. so i appreciate your time. i appreciate the decisions you have to make. they are very difficult. there are a lot of amazing organizations out here and some really heartbreaking stories. no matter how heartbreaking my story was, it is a story of victory because today, again, i am contributing back. it is because of the life program, because of the skills that i learned, and as evidenced by that, i am habit that i am doing my own fund-raiser. i will be hiking the john neary -- john muir trail in a couple of months. i could not have done that without the skills that i learned. consider it the circle of life. people are helping, paying back into the system and helping others -- many of our volunteers helping people.
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thank you. supervisor mirkarimi: thank you. >> good afternoon. i represent the self-help for an early citizenship. i myself became a united states citizen in february of this year. i acquired information from the library to prepare myself. i speak fluent english, and even though i had knowledge, i had questions. then i found this great booklet, and i found the address for the people who represent the citizenship class is. although i did not need any class is, i had a lot of questions. onewa