tracking system with some of the providers that feel confident and proficient in collecting that level of data. >> that makes a lot of sense. and just to know that the training has been happening with the providers and it seem like especially a young group of people and that is the greatest effort that we can make as a city to do that training among the wide diversity of providers that we have in this city and i think that it could be a huge and actually advance the awareness that we have and the people in our communities that are here in this case and the lgbtq community. >> and 100 percent agree. >> and i do have to say that starting this school year, we are embarking on a new initiative to insure that we provide trainings regarding lgbtq qq alliship to all of the

sfusd middle cools and teachers and we are working closely with the curriculum and to create the mechanism and the tools on how we recognize the training if you call that meeting of all the city departments to come together, and i would also suggest that you include the school district in that conversation, so that we can then come together i agree with having the youth commission holding the monitoring in compliance perhaps, of the city departments administering the training. i like the suggestion of the having the controller and the performance measures and on whether or not to complete the trainings, and then also, the

suggestion to change the contract language, for our non-profit agencies that will then ask them to participate or mandate them to participate in these trainings. i am really impressed with our city departments and the department of public health and human services agency that they have started on this journey and we would love to look at the video and determine how to support and maybe start training our staff first. i think with that, i also echo that we do need a coordinated way to administer these trainings. >> great, thank you. >> thank you. >> so, we will reach out and pull together other departments and representatives from the departments to be together and kind of go together with what we have, next up we want to

call (inaudible) who is here from the department of (inaudible) provision department and who actually just is his own tracking came in on his own and i want to thank you for checking in with us today. >> thank you, supervisor. and members of the committee, as you know there are many causes of delinquency that bring the youth to the doors of the juvenile probation department. >> fractured families, peer abuse, and victimization and personal identity confusion and basic street survival are all noteworthy factors prompting some lgbtq youth to enter the juvenile justice system unless mitigated by an enlightened and understanding support system. and in addition to

addressinging their specific issues, lgbtq youth in the juvenile justice system face substantial changes in developing a positive self-identity, and gaining acceptance and support from others, and making successful transitions into adulthood, and especially when confined in the juvenile detention center. in regard to the lgbtq youth as a special group and possessing special needs and requiring our special understanding to insure specialized attention for care and supervision. now jbd's personal response abilities are to provide a safe and suitable care, and to initiate appropriate,

appropriate, based that will respond to each youth housing and counseling and additional health needs when released back to the community where we feel that the youth belong. we have a spy in the house and it is a good spy in the house, they insure every youth in our children and supervision and the living units and visit them several times every day 24/7. >> the personal disclosures who are admitted into detention and the department has made a concerted effort to insure that allpro baition officers and

juvenile hall counselors and log cabin ranch counselors reach training dealing with the treatment of the lgbtq youth in the juvenile justice system. >> and october 12, 2012, the california board of state and community corrections certified our department's working with lgbtq youth in juvenile justice system as a standard and training corrections program. and this is our course delivered by a licensed clinical social worker provides an overview of lgbtq youth including a developed understanding of who they are, the issues and challenges they face, and how to work with these youth effectively. our officers gain increased understanding of sexual identity, the coming out process. psycho social risk factors and issues impacting lgbtq youth of

color. we know the importance and the significance of pronouns. and a revelation that came to me in my personal out reach to jodi swarts when we needed some technical assistance and a matter involving a youth on one of our units and we are forever grateful for that consult and looking forward to more consults with miss swarts. >> specific issues impacting the youth in this training, are reviewed and including recent research on the youth. and factors impacting their detention, their experiences in detention, and emerging policies juvenile justice system policies related to those youth. >> residential care and counseling guidelines for working with these youth are presented with our officers

being able to actually practice their newly learned skills with lgbtq youth. finally, the course curriculum includes a section that identifies existing community support services in san francisco, for our officers to use when developing appropriate release and supervision plans. >> and a licensed clinical social worker paul gibson, a well established and experienced practicing psycho therapist, dealing with lgbtq youth, populations in san francisco, is our stc, certified instructer and delivers a curriculum that i have attached to the material here today. we intend to deliver this course two more times in the coming fiscal year having already done so in the last october, and we want to insure

that our entire staff, are informed and have the benefit of taking this course. please know that the juvenile probation department remains committed to entiring the development of a departmental culture of lgbtq youth acceptance, respect, among our staff and residents alike. i want to say that one of the populations that we know we can learn from are the lgbtq youth that come in contact with us in our detention center. >> and i have seen the power of this group in prompting the acceptance among their peers and on the living units. the efforts of the department to present the development and implementation of policies outlined in the prison rape elimination act, prea and this

is a big deal that was come down and it was passed in 2003, with lightning speed and our own senator was one of the sponsors and this act will bring force and might of federal law, into the administration of safe and secure institutions related to adults and juveniles and our department has already partnered with the sheriff's office and received grand funds to help us implement this act beginning in august. i would like to recognize the counselors and the ranch counselors and probation officers and our training coordinator was able to work out the arrangements and seek certification of mr. gibson's curriculum that is a comprehensive and extensive curriculum and our principal

partner, and the staff members of spy for their vigilence, compassion and i am pathy in relating to this population. thank you for being here and i really appreciate the work that your department has done and to speak on that here. >> we would love and appreciate your participation as well. >> thank you. >> we are looking forward to that. >> thank you, we actually will go on to public comment at this point, and i have a number of cards that i can call off. and sf you can call in the order that you hear your name called if you are in line you can line up by the tv set by the window. and go towards the back of the room that would be great. >> jodi swarts, and tom

penprano, river beck, alex berakron lorenzo harris, and pipe long and luis magera. good morning supervisors, thank you for allowing me to address you on this very important issue, we have been around to 25 years and we provide dreblgt services to the lgbtq and the youth as well as do the policy advocacy and technical assistance work and i just want to... my primary we have two

other things that access with the two other organizations around the lgbtq conclusion and we did a project and spiral and another two year project with the department of public health, around lgbtq youth access and inclusion for clinicians and grantees. this is actually seen as a strong provider in working with the youth to look at the access to the city's one stop system and then most recently we launched our school-based initiative with the san francisco unified school district which we have supported completely with private funding that has been happening for two and a half years and then i would just

say, to give you a sense of the very large number of requests that we get into lyric and literally every day. and from various city bodies and other cvos asking for our support and we see the need and a lot of folks who are really reaching out and wanting to become more culturally competent in supporting lgbtq youth. i actually have about 7 recommendations that i feel have been gleaned from lessons learned over the years, some of them have been touched upon certainly mandatory data collection for all city departments and agencies is critical. we know from sfusd, we have learned quite a bit. i think that also, the idea of quality standards lyric is actually designed quality standards, that we would love

to share, and use as kind of a beginning part of the conversation. i think, that clearly having any other recommendations that you want to add? >> i think that the question about training expertise is really critical and one of the things that we found is that training, that is a couple have not just with lgbtq youth inclusion but also is provided with a technical expertise within a certain area like workforce development or public health. that is really critical that whoever is doing the training and doing both of those things, i think that one of the things

that we found with our access project is that lgbtq youth inclusion, needs to be layered on top of really strong youth development framework as well as strong organizational change. in the organization and many of the cbos did not have the capacity to do that. >> just the last recommendation would be a actionable step to relief an rfp to establish a pool of providers that could do this kind of work that could match both lgbtq youth inclusion with those specialized skills and i would recommend looking at the model that moh currently uses and

compass point where it is a voucher system and to create a system that encourages to be able to access the supports that they need. and my primary purpose of hook here is to offer our expertise to our city in this process. >> thank you so much. >> next speaker. >> we are happy to be here with you today and i would like to thank avalos and other supervisors on this committee on this leadership on this issue on bringing it forward and i would like to thank the hard work of all of the youth commissioners and particularly

mia toomuch for bringing this issue forward and thank you. and san francisco is a sanctuary in city ways, we have led on queer issues and it has made our city a sanctuary not only for the youth who grew up here but from the youth around the world who come to our city as i did when i was 18. many of these youth who are coming to san francisco and many of them come here because of a lack of support in their homes or communities. and the club would like to see the city agencies provide the adequate and ininclusive support that these growth came here for and need. we support the youth's commissions ask for staff training ininclusive intake forms and identifying leadership to work on ongoing best practices and implementation of nxefl. we look forward to working with the youth commission the family and the elected officials to insure that 12 n is fully implemented in a timely manner,

thank you. >> next speaker. >> hi, thanks for having this today, i'm super excited to see all of the people in the room and for the enthusiasm for the board of supervisors and so thank you. my name is pipe long and i work with health initiatives for youth. we have already been doing these trainings and offering provider trainings for lgbtq competency for 20 years we are a dcyf contracted agency and i just wanted to say that i think that there is a lot of room for collaboration and basically they said that actually there is already funding in every agency's budget for ongoing training and professional development and if we can prioritize making this something that is a priority and saying that every agency needs to say this is required and let's do it and i mean that every staff has to go through

certain training. and so i do love the fact that there is a video and i do agree that there does need to be the human one on one component and we do the training, and it is always the discussion, we do the popular education-based training so they are not boring and they are absolutely interactive and they really put the training recipient at the center of the conversation so that they can then use their own experience to learn about that the other people's experience and i find that to be really effective. and so i would say, you know, recommendations include the human component and actually in our offices we do provide the mass trainings that anyone is welcome to come to obviously we don't have so much room and we also go to agency and do the trainings all of the time so this is the kind of thing that

we can collaborate with other agency and standardize the forms that we have been using for 15 plus years and we are just really excited about the opportunity to be part of the conversation and i brought a couple of the queer young folks to come to our fabulous folks to come to the center to tell you about their experiences. and in closing i want to add to what jodi said about really making sure that there is particularly housing. and a component of understanding the barriers for queer, young folks. people come here and i was a homeless young youth and it is really hard, it is hard to find affordable housing. so particularly emphasizing how to get the folks into more permanent housing, and so thank you so much. >> >> it was really good. >> next speaker please.

>> i am alex (inaudible) and i am one of the youth here in san francisco, i do a lot of the classes and trainings with hifi and do a lot of volunteer work at the lgbtq center. i have actually seen you there. >> i used to be in foster care, and it was really hard as a transyouth and to identify as a pgp, >> and they were put. >> i was put into... >> an all girls group home and i was in a room with a fellow roommate who was actually transgender phobic and i had to deal with it to advocate to be put in my own room or someone i would be comfortable. it took three months to get my

own room and put up with this girl for a long time. >> and afterwards they put me in a foster home where the family told me that i couldn't stay there and i had to be a female if i was living with them >> it was very hard. but, you had to get through it. i don't think that any youth should have to deal with that. >> thank you. >> thank you for sharing that. >> next speaker please? >> hi, my name is lorenzo harris and i am also a youth here in san francisco and i actually just arrived here four weeks ago away from washington state because things were not going well there. and i came here because i thought things would be better and i have used a lot of the

services here and i mean, so far, everything has been... i just feel like why is this even an issue? you know? you know what i mean? like, yeah. i feel there should not be an issue and i feel like we should not have to have a whole thing about this simple respect for lgbtq people, yeah. >> thank you. >> next speaker please? >> and anyone else who would like to speak, if you could just line up over by the wall or collect at the podium after this speaker. >> i want to say the same (inaudible) youth for showing up today and actually we have leaders tomorrow and today and it is a change that you can actually do today and an update. and you can do it for a while now. >> and so my name is mckera and

i actually work for a high five as well. but more than at high five worker, i have been a youth immigrant in the city. and i am moving in without knowing anything and actually being treated very nice way in the city to which way is challenging and i think that is enough to actually getting both into trainings. and something that we have noticed and the thing that was brought up in the conversation here is that the importance of when we talk about lgbtq issues, we not just talk about sexual orientation, but i think that there are quite important as understanding the different levels of sexuality like sexual orientation or gender identity. and sexual assignment at birth and as well as gender expression and those are things that i have not seen happening in a long time, actually never. and at high five as well as the most itemization in san francisco we have been trying to get that approach and we have noticed results out of that.

what i am going to make is i am going to tell you a little bit of the feedback from comments and reactions we get from city workers and actually it is enough to work with the school district and we work with a system and other cbos as well as dcyf and we have this one exercise that we ask the people that are working with the youth to actually and a question, whatever question they have about working with the youth. what are some of the challenges and we ask them to write on a piece of paper without putting their names or anything that is going to identify them. >> and it is interesting to see the questions that came out of those. of that exercise and i will take the random questions and some of those are what is transgender? >> and i mean, actually people that are working with transgender youth have no idea what it is. >> and another question is how

do i pretend that i expect something that they tell me it is for. >> and they actually know how to manage, the youth, because ne could... (inaudible) that is something wrong for them. and another question is... i believe that is supposed to hurry up. how could we effect when the security and administration and even other teachers keep making the comments and the jokes. what can i do? and we have more here and the number one comment that we get from city workers is i get it, i understand, but there is nothing that i can do. and that is actually i think something that one of the many parts of having 12 is going to implement... >> thank you very much and i also want to welcome, the students from bella vista school in oakland and welcome to san francisco city hall and thank you for being well

behaved and it is very impressive and i hope that you are enjoying your visit. >> next speaker. >> my name is mia (inaudible) and i am the chair woman of the san francisco youth commission and i am used to being one of the youngest person in the room clearly not at the minute. >> we just want to start out and the youth commission is excited to hear about it and the fact that there are these departments that are creating these different trainings and listening to their remarks and one of the things is to keep them from the need of the centralized authority responsible for compliance and we do not feel that should be the authority and we would love to be a youth consultant on people creating their trainings we serve one year term we don't have enough capacity to be the one telling the program.

why aren't you doing the training. >> and that set and we also want to say that the dph, 30-minute video is great but clearly if there are these other departments that are able to create much, much longer trainings. there is more that can be done. that can be fully captured in 30 minutes. so it is a great first step and a great kind of catalyst, but, we don't want to create a situation where every department shows the 30-minute video and then they are done because the actual demographic that were spelled out in 12 n such ases hiv and positive youth and abused youth and disabled youth they are not fully addressed in that video because it is the first step for a training and i think that everyone has echoed so far that the 30 minute training video would never be enough without some sort of a discussion and facilitation and more than that. so, that is essentially our main point, we just want to

make sure that what is going on so far is the beginning of the process to expand and to resource these trainings and to prioritize them because they are important and also to recognize the fact that the lgbtq sensitivity trainings don't insure attitudes and behaviors and to access the best practice to make sure that the youth are actually receiving the quality care and one of the ways to do that is by tracking them. how do we know that they are not slipping through the tracks if they are not tracking who they are. and obviously the different people have come up with different concerns for that and i am not a legal genius and i just want to urge that is important. because, youth access and services is already a challenge, and it is already a struggle that the youth go through, so to receive for the youth to actually feel safe receiving the services that we provide as a city and we need to have these best practices creath