to thank all of the members of the task force and it really was not as difficult as the introductory remarks might have suggested. and i think that maybe it was really cohesive and brought together by a sincere desire to make this situation better for seniors and for those of us who are seniors, now, or will become seniors soon. or you have been becoming seniors off in the distant future, there. and there is a reason for everyone in our community to rally behind these ideas. and i think that the task force, proved that, it can be done. and this is data driven and we want this to be a subnative report and we appreciate that you pointed that out.

they are all critical in their own way, and yes, some of them are more important than others. and in terms of the number of people, and it might effect. and or the amount of money that it might cost, but our view is that each and every one of these recommendations is going to help a significant number of seniors and a significant way. and so with that, i would just like to thank you all for having this hearing for accepting our recommendations, and i look forward to hearing what my colleagues in the public have to say as well. thank you very much. >> great. >> thank you very much. and we also want to acknowledge a couple of people in the audience, and i know that tom nolan who has also been doing a

great deal of work staffing the task forces here. and of course, we are always honored to have the executive director of the human rights commission teresa sparks and so with that i am going to read a number of speaker cards, and you each have three minutes, to speak. and so, if i call your name if you could please come up and if you don't mind lining up on your right or our left. ray are you dofl, ashley, len jordan, and michael costa, adelman. kevin fox. >> don't be shy. >> no. definitely not shy. at this point. but i do have a few notes because my eyes are not what they used to be. good morning, my name is ray

rudolf and i have been a resident of san francisco for 38 years and i have done my share of volunteer work along the way but in 2010 i joined the lbgt advisory committee to the human rights commission and i first thing that i asked to see was the 2003 report that they did on seniors. and i noticed that there are about 80 recommendations and none of them were acted upon and so, i put forth the idea of having a senior workforce. so, the advisory committee voted on it and for two years, i did chair that committee and we put on the city wide panels and the focus at that point was about dialogue and getting the information out there and we put on the panel at the common wealth club on maximizing the voices in the political process and we put on a panel on aging, and agism and adultment and enter generational connections

and out of that task force, bill ambron joined the group in the second year, and he came up with this idea for the aging policy task force. and so, we kind of pushed this forward. we met with both supervisor campos weiner and olague at the time and we moved this forward. and this became a very, very important, important thing that do in the community. but due to health reasons, i am a long term hiv survivor and due to the fact that new land lords took over my rent controlled building where i lived for 25 years. i had to step down from the aging policy task force and i had to cut back on my work. so all of us here need to have this report. not only accepted, but really acted upon. i'm a perfect example of that. and now, i am worried about, and just about to turn 64 in a

few weeks and i am worried about my housing and we just need to make this really, really happen now and not sit on the bench. so that is all that i have to say and i wanted to say that i really appreciate you can receptive to this from the beginning and helping us to move this idea forward and it has really taken form and so thank you very much and i expect good things to come out of this report. >> we all do. >> thank you, next speaker. >> and i will read a couple more names. >> michael breskin and tommy eka and robert maskinsky. >> i am lynn jordan and i have lived in san francisco for 47 years and currently residing in supervisor yee's district. and i have spent 44 years focused on as a founding member of metropolitan community church of san francisco and sovy been participating in the full span of all of the lgbt history since 1967 and i

continue to recognize the importance especially as i age of continuing to be finding ways to be active, engaged and supportive in the full spectrum of the definitions that are becoming my community, and my families of choice and many of who have lost to aids, and the inner personal relationships that i have established, my aging is increasing and it will require that i try to maintain my independence, and while i recognize my growing need for inner depent ans for the various services needed in this task force report. for over two years, i have been a volunteer for the open houses and the caring program and i bring with me as a journey of living into the now age 70 to the life affirming and life celebrating of lgbt senior community members who are often living in their invisibility of aloneness, vonnerbility and isolation. our senior lgbt community members too often speak with a

voice that is only unheard in the silence of their isolation and as the remaining circle of friends has declined or disappeared and becoming decreasingly alienated from their once familiar surroundings and being a senior community members and not only an invitation to listen but it is being opened and non-judge mental, window into what they choose to share about their life experiences what they hold close and protected and including all of the trauma and all of the physical and mental health concerns, we needed a place of common interest, and build the connections that far off out weigh any of our differences that we might have. and we may be the caring, the intervention and the emotional support that could be the difference in the quality of life challenges and obstacles that our senior members are now confronting whether it is as limiting as climbing up the stairs and intimidating task of accessing and having transportation to healthcare

providers and addressing an interruption in benefits or requiring the assistance of legal referral in a housing crisis or end of life decisions we are both a bridge and resipateer of this training. thank you. >> thank you very much. >> next speaker. >> good morning, i'm ashley mccumber and the executive director of meals of wheels on san francisco and a great opportunity to be a task force member and also a resident of the castro and i want to first of all start off with a few thank yous. i want to thank the first two speakers and i think that it was perfect that these two people have been leading on issues and committing their time and issues are leading this discussion in the open comment and we have a lot to learn from the efforts and we need to listen to what they have to say and i want to thank the supervisors who sponsored this task force in particular i want to thank my supervisors weiner for supporting my efforts to be a part of this task force and thank you for allowing me the opportunities to serve and i want to thank

bill and the rest of my task force members for really helping me be a better person in my job. and helping me to learn, every day through their knowledge, and through their efforts. and there are a couple of things that i would like to kind of reiterate that may have been said all right, i do think that it is important that we give equal weight to all of the recommendations in the task force and it is easy to pick the ones that are hot and movable right now, but they are all equally important and i particularly want to under score the need to collect data. and data will drive policy, and data will drive how we allocate resource and we will tell us where the gaps are and also, in absolutely linked to cultural competence and humility, and we cannot collect the data if we don't know how to do it so those two things need to flow to the top and the other thing that i would encourage you to do is to move beyond the obvious solution and first of all we need to recognize and support the agencies in the

field and supporting this work before anyone else thought of supporting it. but we also need to go deeper than that and make sure that the union yus place wheres we put the funding and support also happen. i think that we also need to have a sense of urgency. people like me who are stone wall are going to knock the doors down and are going to demand what we need from the service delivery system in the city but there are a lot of people still who are not comfortable with that and they are needing the services now and so i think that this is not a tomorrow issue and it is a today issue. and we need to move particularly on more marginalized populations and i also think that i would encourage you as an out come of this task force to create a mechanism of the follow up for the recommendations and that we have active follow up on these things and frankly we hold you accountable make sure that they happen. and lastly, i would not be doing my job if i didn't tell you that we need to make sure that we are also funding basic services across the city like food, and nutrition and support services and senior centers

because without those things we can't go up deeper, and to some of the issues that we recommend and so thank you for your time. >> thank you, i am going to read a couple more names, danielle and donna but any member of the public that would like to speak, come on up. next speaker? >> good morning, my name is michael costa i am a health policy analyst and an economist to the health economists and i had the pleasure of serving on the task force and i want to thank supervisors weiner and campos and former supervisor olague for your vision in putting this together because it would not have happened unless you would have done that, i also want to thank bill in particular on the task force and i very much appreciated my colleagues but bill put this together and pulled it together in an effective way and we would not have had the report that we had without his guidance. and so, one of the things that we quickly realizes is that

there are many issues facing our community and we tried to do things and stagger them a little bit and some of the recommendations that we made are what we could call the low hanging fruit and expanding access to existing services by leveraging an examining program in dos does not require much money and easily doable and could reach out to a lot of people and where it began to get more difficult is when we got into the housing issues because that is for aging lgbt is for everyone else in the city, and the 800 pound gorilla, and i looked at what other cities have done and there are two existing lgbt houses up and running and one in philadelphia and one in los angeles and they both got up and running through a series of rather innovative and complex financing that involve private or public sector city and state money. and so i would encourage that as you think about addressing some of these housing issues, you really look widely, for

funding sources. and so you really think of it as a potential public private partnership and something that the state would get involved in. and finally there is an underlying theme in all of our recommendations that it is something that all of us on the task force became aware of as we gathered data. and that is, a lot of us who are aging now, the boomer generation, and we really wanted to stay in our own homes. and as long as possible. and out of the home, that our parents might be in now, and it is a generational thing, i think. and so, a lot of our recommendations actually attempted to begin to instead of look at how you do that, how do you allow people to be or live in the community as long as possible? and i think that is going to be an ongoing dialogue and i would encourage the board to think about a formation of a group of people, who begin to look at that issue.

and how do we keep people in the community as long as possible and thank you. >> thank you very much. >> mr. costa, next speaker. >> good morning, supervisors. i'm dr. edelman a former task force member and a co-founder of the open house and the co-founder to the private practice in the city and i want to thank all of my colleagues for all of the hard work that went into the task force recommendations, and special shout out to dos. for all of their support, and we could not have done the work that we did with the task force could not have done the work that we did without their support. i want to talk to you this morning about a crisis. that the city and the lgbt community is facing together. and it is in demencika, do not let your response to this crisis be lost in the urgent and important recommendations

for housing security and affordability and other much needed services. by 2020, the total population of older adults in san francisco living with alzheimer's disease will be 26,774 older adults. and another ten,000 people will be living with some other form of dementia. using the city's 12 percent estimate of the lgbt senior population it can be extrapolated that by 2020 over 4,000 lgbt older adults over the age of 65 will be challenged by some form of als hiemer dementia. heterosexual rely on family members to secure medical information and access service and to provide support, but research has shown that elder adults that are twice as likely to be single and live along as heterosexual and less likely to

have adult children that support them. they rely on family of choice for support but the families of choice are not friends similar in age who may have relocated passed away or in need of services themselves. this difficult as it is, there are chronic illnesses that a person can manage at home on their own such as asthma. the older adults with alzheimer's who are without benefits of the formal support system are vulnerable to receiving little or no care to assist them to remain in their homes, if you don't have a place and a plan and some understanding of the disease in its progression, it is too easy to become isolated and forced from your home. it has been well documented that seniors are less likely to access long term services and discrimination keeps the seniors with depen shall in the care giverers from coming out, it is imperative that the board of supervisors address this crisis, now. and the city needs to fund an

educational program, resource tools and a community awareness campaign to assist the lgbt community in meeting this crisis. and the task force recommendations are an urgent call to action. unlike the aids epidemic, we see this crisis coming, there is time. but we must act now. >> thank you, doctor, next speaker? >> thank you, for this time, i'm just going to wing it, i'm on the receiving end of these organizations, and that are in place to help people, seniors of the lgbt community. and i have been in california in the bay area since i was about three and a half weeks old. and i have moved into san francisco in 1969. and at a volunteer job at let it slip that i was having a very bad living situation and someone there give me a

referral to open house. and fortunately through that, it was, i have adequate housing. and i felt that after all of this time, what am i going to do, just sit in the apartment and live with my dog, and not do anything. and i was grateful that the same time that i was aggravated, because so many people need housing, and so many people have been waiting on waiting lists for years and years, and there was recently a purge, that is the housing authority's word on purging the list and a lot of the people on the list have impairments in terms of maybe not a permanent address but of a friends address and they may not go there to check their mail or be in what impaired by bad choices of lifestyle. and to be waiting on a list and

be eliminated is just seems in congress with the whole idea with the housing authority is supposed to do. and i would like to see more moneys spent rather than someone leaving a legacy of a coliseum down on the water front, and i would like to see those moneys spent on issues concerning seniors by going and not dwell in the past so that the people that passed away, during the pandemic, and i feel the need to let them go. and to live the rest of my life all of a sudden by going to the open house, i realize that i am a senior, and i was lost in my mind to remembering all of these people, and downtown and i would go to the stores and see them in the window and i stuff and i thought that it was not fair for myself or the either the people who are no longer here. and just think more funding for

not just open house but all of the organizations that help the lgbt and if this is not dealt with now, it will just be pushed into the future when it will be far more expensive to deal with, thanks again for your time. >> thank you very much. >> next speaker please? >> hello, my name is kevin fox and i will keep it short and also receiving on the receiving end of this services of the open house, and just wanted to point out that the open house, is critical to survival of seniors. and if it weren't not for the open house i would not have any connection to the world. i mean, they address and attack isolated issues and that they are visiting friend services and that out reach, that they do, and i just think that it is critical that the housing and

the open house get money. and basically, they need their funding. thank you. >> thank you. >> next speaker? >> good morning, my name is tony meca and i am with the housing rights committee of san francisco and i also served as the housing subcommittee chair for the aging task force. and i am myself a senior and i am 62 years old. and i would like to talk a little bit about housing, because it has been mentioned a lot and it is absolutely a vital issue right now. i would like to urge you to not shy away from i recommendation or an eviction protection. and i realize that what we are proposing that seniors, that they get prohibition on evicting seniors may not be possible. but, i urge you to push it as far as you can. it is actually urgent, eviction is a health issue. and when the people get evicted

it effects their health and their life and we know this. and so i would like to urge you to look at this as a matter of life-and-death. we must keep our seniors in their housing, and we must not allow what is happening now, where investors and speculators are evicting the seniors for profit and we must not allow that to happen. in terms of building housing, which is another recommendation that we make, i would like to urge you to stick to our recommendation of building housing in the castro. during the late 90s, we lost a lot of our elders because they were evicted by the speculators in the first dot com boom and we are seeing that again and i think that it is important that our seniors get to live in the castro. and it should be the place that we get to retire and to live out the rest of our lives and so i would like to urge you to look at housing in the castro for lgbt seniors and in that regard, i would like you also to consider a more

non-traditional root, which is community land trust and it is one of the under utilized gems in our city and it is a way to keep the housing affordable forever and there are limitations in other forms of affordable housing such as tax credit programs and there is no limitation or a land trust and we can keep that housing affordable forever and i urge you to look at that and finally in terms of shelter, we do talk about the shelters in our report and as much as i support having the lgbt shelters i would like to remind folks that shelters are not housing. shelters are something that arose in this country because of an emergency, i think that there is still an emergency measure we should not look at them as a solution as a way to house people. they are not housing. so, i hope that while we make our shul ters lgbt senior friendly, we also recognize that is an emergency measure and that the real goal is to put our seniors in housing, and

keep them in the housing that they are in right now. thank you. >> thank you, next speaker please? >> hello. >> i would like to acknowledge the importance of all of the recommendations in particular social services. such as the program that open house provides. i moved to san francisco, my name is robert and i moved to san francisco in 1974, and i am a gay senior, and i have a lover of 26 years, i had a job of 23 years. and then suddenly i was homeless and living in my car, a friend of mine recommended i go to the open house men's senior support group at the lgbt center it was through them that i met scott at open house, and scott became my case manager, and he had continuous and encouragement and counseling and support for me, he recommended, he referred me to the tom ladel clinic where i

got a primary care doctor in healthy sf and scott also referred me to the progress foundation senior treatment program, where i had a three-month residency, and i went to a hotel and then to baker places. and then it was through a social worker at the clinic that i got the housing and shelter plus care, and permanent housing. also, scott, referred me to the bay area, legal aid, and through the progress foundation, and i was referred to positive resource and got ga and food stamps and also scott at open house referred me to the grief group where i have been going for the last year and a half from 5:15 to 7 p.m. every thursday. and also, scott at open house and ellen at open house, referred me to the friendly visitor program where my friendly visitor, and his name is russell and i have been meeting for the last year on mondays. and he is a fantastic person.

and then, scott also referred me to the lion's health project where i got therapy, psychiatrist and medications. because of open house, i have food, support, medicines, shelter, housing and healthcare and hope, thank you. >> thank you, very much. >> next speaker? >> good morning, gentleman, my name is michael berseskin and i am a san francisco resident and i live in supervisor yee's district and i am a registered nurse and a volunteer with the open house. and i just want to mention a few things about open house, and they i lived through the aids epidemic of the 80s i am a long term hiv survivor. i can equate that experience with holocaust survivors, today

the older gay men have lost their cohort group to aids. many of them live alone and open house reaches out to these people who are depressed. despondent and despaired and possibly worse. and they reach out with a plethera of activities. and not forced upon them and not judging, activities where these older gay people can meet new friends, get out, have lives, get out of their house, not isolate. and not be afraid to engage a new social group. so, this is what my concern, with open house. that they do this social out reach which is so very, very important today. thank you. >> thank you very much.

next speaker? >> good morning, supervisors my name is daniel red man and i am a resident of supervisor weiner's district and i served as a member of the task force and chaired the legal work group on the task force and first i wanted to thank supervisor weiner and campos and the board of supervisors for this hearing today and for their work to make this task force happen. and i urge the board to seriously consider our recommendations and take steps to implement them. and as bill and others have said, all of the recommendations passed unanimously by the task force and all of them deserve your full attention and i want to speak about two of the recommendations and all of the care recommendation and the life plan and document recommendation, which were the focal point of the legal work group. lgbt seniors are at risk in care facilities across the country, 80 percent of the

respondents said that they will not feel safe coming out in a facility and, 50 percent of respondents say that they or someone that they knew had faced discrimination in a care facility. and the seniors and care facilities are some of the most vulnerable in our community and for those who lack the capacity or have disability effecting communication they can be literally voiceless. and the report lays out a comprehensive plan for insuring the lgbt folks with safety, and dignity and respect. and thank you so much for making a priority so far and thank you for your consideration. >> and terms of life plan and document, lgbt seniors lack access to appropriate and affordable life planning document services forms may not be appropriate for them or affordable services may be hard to find, it lays out a two part approach, and based on successful efforts and other cities, used by other cities in organizations, for number one, getting lgbt seniors the sample

formeds that they need that are specific to their needs and establishing widening the availability of the low cost and probono services in this area of law and so thank you for your time and your commitment to all of the members of our diverse, lgbt communities. >> thank you. >> next speaker. >> hello, gentleman, my name is dana veacof and for 40 years i have been a resident of san francisco and most recently in supervisor weiner's district and i am a member of aarp and i used open house services. and i am with the san francisco organizing project who merged with the interfaith action and are part of the pico national network. and in november, we held an action that addressed issues of aging lgbt aging and healthcare. and we asked tom nolan