day's work, after a dinner, after thinking hard all day, you all just want to go to bed, but what we found is that people like to stay up late and talk about issues, said tomorrow night, we have our first experiment with what we are calling the night our experience, -- night owl experience, and one person will be talking about some of the work we are doing in a different way of looking at success. i have seen the mayor just appear here, and i am going to do this crazy thing where a person from maplewood new jersey and who works is going to welcome the mayor to a meeting in his own town, but it is really terrific to have edwin lee join us. it is good anytime you are running a big city like this. i think you know that when major league took over, -- when mayor

lee to go when gavin newsom was appointed -- sorry. he was elected to statewide office as the number two person in the government of california. i think many of us met gavin newsom and was impressed by his leadership. it is good to have the newly- elected mayor with us, it elected a few days ago as the first chinese-american mayor of the city. a great city. many of us do not get here as often as we like. we are often in awe of this place. i think what he brings to the city is an important thing in the time of this city's growth, and as sean said, as all big city in america does, we have pockets of poverty, pockets of trouble, and i think the mayor

is really looking at this with fresh eyes, and it is terrific to welcome you. [applause] >> thank you. well, thank you very much. it is my pleasure to be here. philip, thank you for that introduction, and as many of you may have heard, we just had a recent election here, the voters have asked us to step up for another four years. i do not know if you know this -- i have been a very reluctant politician. i think the real story is that i would never have been in the position i am in today of my cell phone had not worked in hong kong. [laughter] literally a year ago. but it is a government and a city i have had the pleasure of working in for the last 22 years. it has been a wonderful

experience to do this public service. i also do not know if you know a little bit of my history. i used to not really like government. [laughter] in fact, i sued san francisco three times before i worked for it. led a rent strike back in my earlier years as an attorney, right out of berkeley. [applause] i hope those years are over, but you really still have to change government, even if you work for it. you still have to pretty much needed change, and that is what i am prepared to do. i do need that change. i think we all need this changes in our city and make sure it is serving and deliberate things and making sure it is really representing our people. i still feel that way. i felt all along -- the last lawsuit we did was against the

fire department, and we ended up with a 10-year consent decree. one of the nice things i was able to talk about during the campaign but even before the campaign started was just being very prideful to be able to serve alongside the first female fire chief in the history of san francisco and knowing -- and knowing -- [applause] thank you. that is good. and knowing that she came from the very first classes we created after we sued them and knowing that you did the right thing then and, gosh, you know, 22 years later, you are literally serving with the people that you knew were qualified but did not have the chance to serve government. my approach to now running this government is to also change the way we do things. it should not surprise you back my back of the and in housing, we are really going to do a lot more housing development, but very differently. we are not going to be begging as much, i think, about resources. we are going to actually be able

to put resources together and put different funding things together. it is an excitement that i know a lot of people who work with me in the communities for many years had expected that someone who is not as political as may be past mayors gets to do something from the heart but also something relief from the community. i wanted to talk to you tonight about something that i felt was one of the best programs ever put together by my predecessor, but it is something i inherited, and that was hope sf. it is a public/private partnership. i know all of you are seeking some of the best ways you can do this, and know this -- and i will say this over and over again -- those of you who have good community work and want to do good housing and want to build good neighborhoods in san francisco, you will find in there that will welcome public/private partnerships. as we know, we cannot do it alone. government is sometimes the worst answer.

you know you are in trouble when the government is proposing some solution, but i think that the solutions are in public/private partnerships, and that is why the foundations that you are representing and the experiences you have in the communities are so valuable because we can really be good partners if you continue advocating, if you continue prodding people who work in the government and hold us accountable to the things that we said that we were promised to do. with us in san francisco, we learned very quickly about the great program that was had back in the early hud days. i talk in the past since because i predict they will not be around in the future. they have been chopped off at the knees so much. but we learned that we can actually take a program, redefined it a bit, and then build it from the community perspective so that hope sf is our hope to our public housing

residents. for us, it, it's in some of -- eight of our worst housing developments of the city and it is an investment from our city. we have under mayor newsom invested $95 million of our own money not to just read build the housing, but to give it the spirit in which people wanted their lives, living along side of the people in mixed income. so we are rebuilding those communities, not just the physical part of the buildings, but in mixed views, mixed income developments. in developments where the residents actually participate in the design and building of those developments and they are actually trained. as we recently received a grant for $30.5 million, when we demonstrated that, residents of

alice griffith, in one of the worst housing developments, we demonstrated to the brookings institute, we demonstrated to the urban institute, we demonstrated to hud that residents can help us build their own housing and stay there on-site when we rebuild it so that we would not do this old redevelopment move of pushing people off and then they would never be able to come back. they get to rebuild that housing themselves, and we spent part of that $95 million commitment training them to evolve with the skill sets needed to have not only the jobs on that project but when it becomes the mixed income project that we desire it to be, those jobs that they have will be sustainable for the rest of their lives. we ought to make sure that their lives do not go back. so we are looking at public/private partnerships that not only transformed a physical nature of the housing but also those very lives that i think

are the real essence of your worked is the transformation of lives and the transformation of whole neighborhoods. that is what we want to do in san francisco. that is what basically i was born to do. when i went to law school, i took a different route. all my friends -- at least a lot of the friends that i knew -- had interviewed for corporate jobs. i just wanted to go work in chinatown. i wanted to talk with immigrants. i wanted to speak in chinese. i wanted to get them off of their fear of law and be able to understand in their own language what they were offered in this new country that they fought so hard to get to and that they could actually withhold their rent because they were paying for decent housing -- not for some basement hole in the wall with no heat and hot water. and i know supervisor kin -- kim just walked in. she and are working alongside many of the other supervisors.

the district she works in is really exciting because we see the public/private partnerships already working when we both got together and talk to a company called twitter. not only did we talk to them in terms of them being a company that potentially would have a lot of money. we also talked to them about what community benefits agreements that they could be part up. when they move in to mid-market, how they could be transformed it in their jobs, in the people that they hired, and in fact in the very building they are rehabilitating on 10th and market, and how the bankers to what we're trying to do in transforming the lives of people who live in the tenderloin and mid-market for many years. our hope sf is an example of what we're doing to transform lives, but that is not the only one wanted to talk to you about tonight because it does represent a lot of years of eve of meant of having done -- of

evolvement of having lived people out of their neighborhoods and realizing that a city cannot do that and try to sustain themselves. we have to rebuild our neighborhoods. we have to rebuild lives in those neighborhoods in order to do it right. that is what we're doing not only in the bayview-hunt is. , nudelman in alice griffith, but in mid-market, the tenderloin, that is what we desire to do. certainly in my administration, we will do this the right way, but we will depend a lot on what you are learning here in these next days. public/private partnerships are invaluable, and you have got to help us. you have got to tell us, remind us how we do it better, and you have got to make sure we are adhering to and being accountable to our neighborhoods. i know that people in government -- all my colleagues will listen to that and develop projects, even if they are just so we're projects.

even some of the projects that you would think our basic infrastructure projects like the ones we're doing with our puc. the head engineer and deputy at our public utilities commission is here. they are redoing the store lines. but what the puc did very smartly -- that is where all our day laborers work day in and day out. that is where they try to get jobs. when you go through that, let's work with the day laborers. let's also redesigned that st. so that you can use the storm water to make sure that we can have landscaping that captures the storm water. then, let's design parklets all along the street so that the community can take care of the streets and not consider them to be another highway that nobody takes care of. all of that got into the whole

design of just the sewer replacement of a major street, and now, it is becoming a neighborhood-designed liveable park looks full of people, including our daily burris, working together to maintain, as we get the infrastructure done, we will leave that in a 10 times better place with the community even more tighter together. so that is how we do projects and that is how you will find a mayor who has been at the home of d p w -- helm of dpw but also the human rights commission making sure that we do the right things and that we work with people and that people always come first. with that, i thank you very much for your days here and i hope you have a great conference. thank you. [applause]

>> hello. during -- i am resuming my mc duties for the evening. we are going to start with the dinner portion of the evening. this is a buffet that is set up in the back behind those closed doors, which will be opening very shortly, so if we can do sort of an orderly fashion, perhaps, starting with the tables in the back, and then we will resume in about 20 minutes. we will have supervisor kim give some remarks. thank you. i have the great pleasure of introducing a friend of mine. supervisor jane kim.

i have known her for what seems like probably close to 10 years. we are both alumni of 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 shangha