sincerist appreciation to you supervisor avalos and this committee for leading this call for action on behave of city leadership to once again foster city wide awareness and enforcement of the 12 ordinance that mandates the training and cultural competency. and i have been asked to give a breathe back growth as to how it comes before the committee for your consideration. i would refer to my colleagues with the youth commission and the department of public youth to provide the overview and speak to the status at 12 n ordinance. >> however, i will echo a little bit of the history. in may, 1998, the city and county of san francisco created the lesbian, gay, bisexual transgender queer and questioning yoegt task force to recommend the board of supervisors the adoption of legislation to insure the full implementation of the 1996 recommendations from the san

francisco human rights commission regarding the needs of lgbtq youth in san francisco. this proposed legislation was to address the needs for sensitivity training and cultural competency for all of the departments and for the city departments and their contracted agencies who are receiving pardon me, $50,000 or more for city-funded administration for youth services. the training would address at a minimum, lgbtq youth with disabilities, lgbtq youth with hiv, immigrant lgbtq youth, and lgbtq of color, sexually abused lgbtq youth, run away and homeless lgbtq youth and lgbtq for non-accepting households although this was enacted 14 years ago unfortunately a significant amount of time has passed without action on this item until late 2010, and when the critical issues effecting the lgbtq youth community begin to have a greater prominence on

a national stage as we saw an increase on the incidents of the lgbtq suicide and bullying. as part of an hrc advocacy for the communities and other marginalized communities, they began to sphere head the revitalization to this issue to foster enforcement by working in conjunction with the youth commission to identify efficient ways to provide the impact and departments with the resources needed for greater enforcement of 12 n, and the culture sensitive to the cultural come penalty training. >> as one can imagine, funding was at issue and it was to you know, for the strategy development of the training. we were able to identify the department of public health had already in place a similar training protocol upon which we could perhaps build upon and design the training module.

they began to meet regularly to determine and develop a training module and seeking out and we were in contact with an agency. helping us move forward with this application related awareness and training. that organization suffered its own funding issues and had to pull out, and that presented a challenge, however, thanks to dph's stewart ship, we were able to identify the source within the dph and able to us to work, and which is the bay view center for arts and technology to produce a training video of which commissioner toomuch has referenced in which we are excited with the end results.

i think that it is important to know that once again san francisco was the only city in the nation with this type of ordinance to record. and the human rights commission is committed to the practices in following the legacy of insuring that all communities in san francisco diverse mosaic is treated with the same amount of dignity and respect of all other communities. we are hoping and very appreciative of the committee and with supervisor avalos leading the charge to help us further proceed on the 12 n because this is an extremely important that effects the lgbtq youth. and of course, speaking to that, not only will we be able to aid the youth community in improving their quality of life but also the quality of life for the whole lgbtq community in san francisco. with that i certainly welcome to answer whatever questions

you may have of me at this time. >> thank you, for your presentation and thank you for your work and for how we can actually have models to implement from and here in san francisco. and it is great to know that we have something at least going on with the public health department and i think that it will be a little bit, and we will be able to replicate and use elsewhere. and but i appreciate your work on this. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> okay. next up is michael baxter from the department of public health. >> thank you for the opportunity to be here, i am putting up a powerpoint and i can't speak these days without one. i want to thank you for the invitation to speak today and talk about the process that we have gone through in the department of public hel and

this it has been a process to take us two years to get here today and i want to acknowledge the youth commission and i would like just to say a shout out to mario who was the director a couple of years ago and was really was someone who helped to push this and a special thanks to the youth women over there who have really worked so close with us, and the youth commission works these days and really pushing issues. >> i agree. >> thank you. >> so, just very quickly, to talk about a time line, as i just said in spring of 2011, is when the youth commission approached dph and said there is something on the books for a number of years, how about if you step up and take the lead and start doing some work around the 12 n ordinance. it took us a few months in the department to really meet to talk about what we thought that we could do. we are a department that has about 8,000 employees and i think as people have mentioned the notion of having to come up with a training with no funding and educating people is not an

easy deal. but i think from the very beginning we got the notion that this is the right thing to do and we must do it. by the fall of 2011 we were able to bring together what i am going to call a steering committee and a group of representatives from the department of public health and the youth commission and david from the human rights commission and in the end, what we really came up to was that probably the best approach here is to create a video because we had to develop something where we could reach a lot of people, and not a lot of money. and really wanted to impact the behavior, attitudes and knowledge, so in the end when we came up with the video that would really speak for the youth's voice and to the audiences they are trying to educate. we were lucky that the state of california passed something called the mental health services act which is really about all insurancing that the people of san francisco have

adequate access to mental health services. and we were able to get an innovation's grant under that money to, and bay cat that is working on in third street and with the youth to train the youth and do the video and do this kind of work they were amazing ta work with. we did focus groups with the queer youth and family members and interviews with professionals. and in the end, we did much of the filming at the dimensions clinic which is at the castro mission's health center where we come in on thursday evenings and saturday afternoons and run a clinic for lgbtq youth and it is interesting to me that in 1998, when they opened the door is the year that 12 n was passed and i have say that looking back i didn't know that it was serindipdus that it came

together. it took six months to work with bay cat and make it. and the process was really very closely pulled together between bay cat working with the steering committee and we had a number of meetings and went back and forth and viewed the video and made the changes and also got to what we thought was an amazing product in july of 2012, the video was actually released our training goals in this video are pretty simple. the bottom line is that it is all about fostering and promoting respect and dignity for the young people that we serve. we hope through the video give people working with the youth people a sense of you can help to promote self-empowerment and a little bit of information and how to create a safe space and inviting people to come to and that really what we want the staff to do is to approach, the people who we work with compassion and acceptance and

bottom line, san francisco is staoet that is noted for its tolerance and this is something that we feel that this is critical to the work that we are doing in this. >> and some basic learning adjustment as i said is that we wanted to get some knowledge out there, and people sometimes have just the hardest time and how to initially approach somebody and talk to somebody. i think that the video says things like if you don't know something and you are conservative, ask, people will be much better if you ask a request rather than make assumptions and do it wrong. >> so then, what we did, to make sure that before we started writing this out in a larger fashion is that we did several pilot trainings. we chose to do two of the clinics that actually supervises the department of public health which is the school based clinic and the youth clinic located in the haight and serves young people from around the city. in the training we do a pretest and talk about the background

of 12 n and the goals and objectives and everyone watches a video which is about 30 minutes long and a post test and we open it up for discussion. and i think that in creating this video, again because looking at dph with so many employees we had to look at how we can get something out to many people so that is the video that we can make it web based and it has been made web based but the pilot also taught us that the ability to have the discussion among staff is pretty critical to this process. watching the video will impact you some what, being able to talk about and ask questions is i have to say, in my own mind really cheated this process. that is a good news and i think that we can make a better impact that way and the bad news is that costs a lot more money because you have facility tores but that is the way that we would like to go. >> we do have training for many purposes here at city hall, and

city officials taking up the trainings on sexual harassment and it might make sense that we need to have a training on lgbtq youth and how to best serve the community. >> absolutely. >> so just to give you a sense of some of the feedback that we got in these initial showings, people felt this video was powerful and p personalized the issues and it was the young people talking to them and i think that they like that had and it was professionally done and found the discussion to be rich and official and it is better than one on one training. i think that what this may do is think a little bit and so some of the comments were, humble and flexible and you are in a learning mode that is key. and also, number of people who really said if you are going to do this, have you to have a professional, or a good discussion guide we would performed a trained facilitator. so far to date, we have not made huge progress, i have to say in reaching 8,000 people

but we have done 7 trainings, in what under 200 people and have five trainings already schedule in july. and as i mentioned earlier it is available now on-line, it is web based and 173 people have completed that. we are seeing how much we can rely on that and in the coming fiscal year. it will be be that it is mandated for all dph employees and continue to work on rolling this out in a bigger fashion. >> also the department of health contracts out to many agency and this will be in the languages and searching for the contracts. and also, this video that we have made, we are happy to make it available to other city departments. because, it is the process to do this. and so we can give a process that is two years and they can pick it up and use it and happy

to share our expertise other. >> the training can be used with other departments not specifically dph. >> we have tried and i have to say that because we are a clinical program, there may be a sense and it was shot a lot at the dimensions clinic. and but yesterday, i think that it is appropriate to be able to use by other departments absolutely. and just to close my presentation, i just wanted to thank everybody that is on, on the committee, and knowing that all of the money, and the training manager and lisa is in the audience and the evaluator who did the work and come up with the preand post test to see if we are making a change and mia on the youth commission, thank you. >> and to david from the human rights commission, his participation was really very helpful. >> thank you. >> questions? >> great, thank you. >> i just really appreciate the real amount of thought that went into the video.

i have not seen the video yet. so shame on me. i want to see it right away and it is on-line as well and we can find it on-line? >> yeah, i can certainly send you a link to that, and i am happy to give you guys copies if you would like. >> thank you. >> that would be great. >> thank you. >> okay. next up is linda simons from department of human resources. >> good morning, supervisors, my name is maggie and linda could not be with us and i am a program manager with family and children services and i am really appreciative of you holding this hearing you know the tremendous partners that are here in the supervisors chambers and we look forward to working closely with you you and our community partners and our peer agencies to insure full implementation of 12 n.

okay. >> so i do have a little powerpoint. first i just want to say that the language of prop n while it has not been actually implemented with the human services agency and we have undertaken a number of efforts across our agency to do training with the sensitivity or learners our youth as well as our senior citizens, and i wanted to just previously talk about those. did that come up? >> all of the entire human agency staff are required to participate in a cultural come

pency training and this was to appreciate diversety and addressing issues of sexual orientation and how to work with our clients. >> commissioner campos? >> a quick question? >> is gender a deandy part of that? >> i am getting to that. >> our agency and our staff development willing partnering to begin the training that we are called understanding sexual orientation and this training will be specifically educating our staff on issues of homo phobia and gender expression and gender identity and to increase sensitivity and awareness for our staff and not only work withing our clients and our youth but also with each other. on >> on the training up to this

point, has gender identity been included in any of that? >> as far as i know, but i am with the family and children's services but what i have understand is that they have addressed sexual orientation and i am not sure if they have addressed sexual identity but that is part of the awareness that the staff development is bringing into the department and again, i believe that we are probably going to be contracting with the human rights commission to develop the curriculum and it is so exciting that dph has this video available to us because we really like to take a look at it and corporate it. >> but no gender identity. >> in terms of the whole department, not that i know of. >> thank you. >> again, moving towards that which is..., which is great to hear. >> yeah. >> that will be part of the training forward and in a way, this hearing, is really, just with the progress and where we are moving over to. so i think that it is serving a purpose to bring the attention

to the need for the changes within the department. >> totally welcome this. and i am just really impressed with mia's presentation, i did not have the opportunity to work with them a long time ago and i agree with michael and very effective. so the family and children services which the agency that i am with, i think that probably the biggest impact that has been for us is working with our community partners including family build and hers bringing into our agency the capability and capacity to do training for our staff. and in 2012, we had three specific trainings for all of our child wear fair workers and management team that focus on issues of gender identity and we brought in the youth to talk to the staff about what they had experienced in the foster care system as gay identified lgbtq youth. >> and we now have a contingent and i know that this is not

totally prop n. we have one that reaches in the gay pride parade and reaching out to identify and recruit foster parents and relative care givers who are gay and we are also incorporating into our training for foster parents and care givers all of the different issues around gender identity and what young people do as they go through and explore their gender identity. and i think that the biggest initiative has been putting pride into program, p four which we partnered with family members on and in terms of what we accomplished so far, we have changed all of the internal forms within the agency that our staff used to make them gender neutral and so now, instead of just male, female we now have a category of gender identified. and we are in the process of revising the handbook to incorporate the awareness of the issues of sexual orientation and gender identity and also resources.

because this is so important. how do we make sure that we are utilizing the resources in the community and making the appropriate referals and we are about to embark on the training for the supervisors and we are also in the process of, and one of the things that we did to address the racial disparity issues is that we brought it down to our units and we called it conversations and i think that it would be so cool is to... and we actually have funds to do this and then looking at how we can partner with the other department and we do have funds set aside for training and both in staff development and family and children's services but to bring in somebody like mia to do the conversations with our staff on a very small level, where people feel more comfortable and safe talking about engagement and how to really have these conversations with youth who are in our system. i think that one of the things that has been, where we take tremendous leadership has been

our department of aging and adult services. while they are not specifically focused on youth, we do have youth with disabilities and what some of the initiatives that they are rolling out could be promising practices for what else we are doing in our agency. and so, we have a monthly training series on issues effecting seniors and younger adults and now we do monthly trainings for our community providers which is not something that we instituted anywhere else in the department and i think that we need to. and we just entered into a contract with open house which is formally the rainbow adult community housing and it is a non-profit and funding them to do training for our staff. so, the data challenges and i think that this is really important because without advocacy at the state level it is going to be impossible to collect accurate data on the san francisco foster youth who identify as gay and are working through their gender identity

issues. there is no way to capture this information using the data base that the state provides us and the state forms there is no capacity within the state forums to capture this information. >> are remandated to use the state forms? >> yes. >> and so i think that this is really an area for advocacy at the state level and also on the human rights commission and we are certainly at the table. and another, you know, something else that we need to look at and we can really use the help from the youth commission in this is that how to talk to the youth about their sexual orientation and sometimes the youth are... but there is a stigma attached to that and they don't want to talk about who they are and i think that having that kind of information, you know with someone like mia would be helpful. >> and we do know that 20 to 40 percent of youth who are homeless or in the foster care

are lgbtq, that is the only data that we have that we can apply to the youth in our welfare system. >> what percent? >> 20 to 40 percent. >> and so, without being able to, you know, have forums that would track that in the data base and how are they able... >> it was the homeless youth that was conducted in 2008 by the california research bureau and it was because of the advocacy youth organizations that they got this data and like i said there is no real way to collect this data without changing and bringing in to the state, processes and protocol and awareness of who these youth are. >> and do you believe that you are going to make those changes in terms of the data base and what forms are being used, that can be done administratively or does it have to be legislatively produced? >> i think that it would have to be both. >> because it would take the

legislators to mandate that the state do this. >> and... >> it is hard to get the state agencies to move forward without a lot of ground swell of public support and legislative action as you know. >> right. >> okay. >> and anything that you are aware of? >> not that i know of. >> you know, we worked with the california, youth coalition, a lot and again, i just don't know where this is and that is why this hearing is so important, it really is important. >> that is something that we can bring up with the state legislators and perhaps the assembly member might be very interested. >> absolutely. and we are available to work with you in any capacity. >> great, thank you. >> so the last thing is and michael touched on this a little bit too, and if we are looking at full implementation of prop n, some of our recommendations are around the definition of sensitivity training, we are hoping that there would be flexibility incorporated into that and in

terms of the types of trainers, that we are currently working with that they would be also part of that conversation, we have also got an existing curriculum that we are developing and so we want to just make sure that that is reflected and that there has some... i think that what is missing is there is no standardization of practice. ross the agencies who serve this population. and it is really agency by agency, i mean i have no idea what michael was doing. so yeah, a connection. and i think that the second thing is that the way that the process and 12 m is currently worded it requires that documentation from the contractors be submitted to our commission and then submitted to the youth commission for monitoring compliance and the documentation should go to the youth commission because we also recommend that the controller's office needs to add the compliance language

into the joint fiscal monitoring tools that we use when we go out and monitor the yrters and i think that is important and i also think that we need to look at the impact on the contractors we have so many agencies that worked with the youth in the city and how we can support them and implementing 12 n and i think that it is really important. so, thank you, again for bringing this issue forward. and really look forward to also, of the full implementation and again as i said this is critical. thank you for being here. you are representing your department and you are more in the family services section of the department. >> yes. >> and so, and your presentation is really important. how would you insure that your

getting to the other departments. >> right we do have a lot of divisions in the agency. >> i work really closely with the staff development and they are the ones who gave me the information and we sat down and talked and we also do co-trainings with them and noel just sits around the corner from me and she is the board liaison and the director of the policy and development and i know that this is the priority for i believe all of us and whatever recommendations, questions, that you have, i am going to take those back to the staff development to noel and to trent and we really want to see this happen. >> and across that you mentioned right now is critical. >> and you just from being part of here in the room when michael baxter presented dph's version i think that it is good to get the departments that are here to actually come together and have just a roundtable about where things are at and that is would be a good next

step in communication so we can share what practices are being done and having that cross pollenization as well. >> i think that it would be useful to have the youth facilitate that. >> they have the language in terms of tracking the services in the developments and you said that there is no 12 n language and so that, perhaps that is actually interesting that there is a measure to put in place and that there can be oversights in the controller's office and you know who is most responsibility in the controller's office for doing that work? >> no i don't and we can follow through with that and i think that also, we have boilerplate language that goes in the contracts about what is very specific about what we need the contractor to comply with in terms of the priorities of the city and county of san francisco. and the prop n language is not in that broiler plate language and so that i think is something that we really have to do.

right? >> before we can fully implement this. >> thank you. >> and then just on commissioner presentation and mentioned three goals, training established you covered really well and, talked about intake forms which you touched upon and included in the presentation and also including the best practices within the departments around creating structures for rest rooms, and things like that. what is your department, how is your department moving on? >> you know, i have a feeling that... well i don't have a feeling. most of the direct services for youth are through our contractors. and we don't really have a lot of youth who come into our administrative buildings, and they are really served out in the community. so i think that would be something that you know that i know that has been an issue,