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tv   SF GovTV Presents  SFGTV  January 17, 2023 7:30pm-8:01pm PST

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>> i don't want to be involved in the process after it happens. i want to be there at the front end to help people with something in my mind from a very early age. our community is the important way to look at things even now. george floyd was huge. it opened up wounds and a discussion on something festering for a long time. before rodney king. you can look at all the
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instances where there are calls for change. i think we are involved in change right now in this moment that is going to be long lasting. it is very challenging. i was the victim of a crime when i was in middle school. some kids at recess came around at pe class and came to the locker room and tried to steal my watch and physically assaulted me. the officer that helped afterwards went out of his way to check the time to see how i was. that is the kind of work, the kind of perspective i like to have in our sheriff's office regardless of circumstance. that influenced me a lot. some of the storefronts have changed. what is mys is that i still see some things that trigger memories. the barbershop and the shoe store is another one that i
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remember buying shoestrings and getting my dad's old army boots fixed. we would see movies after the first run. my brother and i would go there. itit is nice. if you keep walking down sacramento. the nice think about the city it takes you to japan town. that is where my grandparents were brought up. that is the traditional foods or movies. they were able to celebrate the culture in that community. my family also had a dry-cleaning business. very hard work. the family grew up with apartments above the business. we have a built-in work force. 19 had 1 as -- 1941 as soon as that happened the entire community was fixed.
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>> determined to do the job as democracy should with real consideration for the people involved. >> the decision to take every one of japan niece american -- o japanese from their homes. my family went to the mountains and experienced winter and summer and springs. they tried to make their home a home. the community came together to share. they tried to infuse each home are little things. they created things. i remember my grand mother saying they were very scared. they were worried. they also felt the great sense of pride. >> japanese americans. >> my grand granduncle joined the
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442nd. when the opportunity came when the time that was not right. they were in the campaign in italy. they were there every step of the way. >> president truman pays tribute. >> that was the most decorated unit in the history of the united states army. commitment and loyal to to the country despite that their families were in the camp at that time. they chose to come back to san francisco even after all of that. my father was a civil servant as well and served the state of california workers' compensation attorney and judge and appellate board. my parents influenced me to look at civil service s.i applied to
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police and sheriff's department at the same time. the sheriff's department grabbed me first. it was unique. it was not just me in that moment it was everyone. it wasn't me looking at the crowd. it was all of us being together. i was standing there alone. i felt everyone standing next to me. the only way to describe it. it is not about me. it is from my father. my father couldn't be there. he was sick. the first person i saw was him. i still sometimes am surprised by the fact i see my name as the sheriff. i am happy to be in the position i am in to honor their memory doing what i am doing now to help the larger comment.
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when i say that we want to be especially focused on marginalized communities that have been wronged. coming from my background and my family experienced what they did. that didn't happen in a vacuum. it was a decision made by the government. nobody raised their voice. now, i think we are in a better place as country and community. when we see something wrong we have change agents step up to help the community affected. that is a important thing to continue to do. you talk about change and being a leader in change and not knowing whether you have successes or results. the fact of the matter is by choosing to push for change you have already changed things. through inspiration for others, take up the matter or whether it is through actual functional
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change as a result of your voice being heard. i think you have already started on a path to change by choosing that path. in doing that in april of itself creates change. i continue in that type of service for my family. something i hope to see in my children. i have a pretty good chance with five children one will go into some sort of civil service. i hope that happens to continue that legacy. >> i am paul sheriff of san francisco. [ music ]
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[music] san francisco emergency home program is a safety net for sustableable commuters if you bike walk take public transit or shares mobility you are eligible for a free and safe roadway home the city will reimburse you up to $150 dlrs in an event of an emergency.
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to learn more how to submit a reimbursement visit sferh. when i shoot chinatown, i shoot the architecture that people not just events, i shoot what's going on in daily life and everything changes. murals graffiti store opening. store closing. the bakery. i shoot anything and everything in chinatown. i shoot daily life. i'm a crazy animal. i'm shooting for fun.
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that's what i love. >> i'm frank jane. i'm a community photographer for the last i think about 20 years. i joined the chinese historical society. it was a way i could practice my society and i can give the community memories. i've been practicing and get to know everybody and everybody knew me pretty much documenting the history i don't just shoot events. i'm telling a story in whatever photos that i post on facebook it's just like being there from front to end, i do a good job
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and i take hundreds and hundreds of photos. and i was specializing in chinese american history. i want to cover what's happening in chinatown. what's happening in my community. i shoot a lot of government officials. i probably have thousands of photos of mayor lee and all the dignitaries. but they treat me like one of the family members because they see me all the time. they appreciate me. even the local cops the firemen, you know i feel at home. i was born in chinese hospital 1954. we grew up dirt poor. our family was lucky to grew up. when i was in junior high, i had a degree in hotel management restaurant. i was working in the restaurant
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business for probably about 15 years. i started when i was 12 years old. when i got married, my wife had an import business. i figured, the restaurant business i got tired of it. i said come work for the family business. i said okay. it's going to be interesting and so interesting i lasted for 30 years. i'm married i have one daughter. she's a registered nurse. she lives in los angeles now. and two grandsons. we have fun. i got into photography when i was in junior high and high school. shooting cameras. the black and white days i was able to process my own film. i wasn't really that good because you know color film and processing was expensive and i kind of left it alone for about
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30 years. i was doing product photography for advertising. and kind of got back into it. everybody said oh, digital photography, the year 2000. it was a ghost town in chinatown. i figured it's time to shoot chinatown store front nobody. everybody on grand avenue. there was not a soul out walking around chinatown. a new asia restaurant it used to be the biggest restaurant in chinatown. it can hold about a 1,000 people and i had been shooting events there for many years. it turned into a supermarket.
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and i got in. i shot the supermarket. you know and its transformation. even the owner of the restaurant the restaurant it's 50 years old. i said yeah. it looks awful. history. because i'm shooting history. and it's impressive because it's history because you can't repeat. it's gone it's gone. >> you stick with her, she'll teach you everything. >> cellphone photography that's going to be the generation. i think cellphones in the next two, three years, the big cameras are obsolete already. mirrorless camera is going to take over market and the cellphone is going to be better.
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but nobody's going to archive it. nobody's going to keep good history. everybody's going to take snapshots, but nobody's going to catalog. they don't care. >> i want to see you. >> it's not a keepsake. there's no memories behind it. everybody's sticking in the cloud. they lose it who cares. but, you know i care. >> last september of 2020 i had a minor stroke and my daughter caught it on zoom. i was having a zoom call for my grand kids. and my daughter and my these little kids said hey you sound strange. yeah. i said i'm not able to speak
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properly. they said what happened. my wife was taking a nap and my daughter, she called home and said he's having a stroke. get him to the hospital. five minutes later, you know, the ambulance came and took me away and i was at i.c.u. for four days. i have hundreds of messages wishing me get well soon. everybody wished that i'm okay and back to normal. you know i was up and kicking two weeks after my hospital stay. it was a wake-up call. i needed to get my life in order and try to organize things especially organize my photos. >> probably took two million photos in the last 20 years.
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i want to donate to an organization that's going to use it. i'm just doing it from the heart. i enjoy doing it to give back to the community. that's the most important. give back to the community. >> it's a lot for the community. >> i was a born hustler. i'm too busy to slow down. i love what i'm doing. i love to be busy. i go nuts when i'm not doing anything. i'm 67 this year. i figured 70 i'm ready to retire. i'm wishing to train a couple for photographers to take over my place. the younger generation they have a passion, to document the history because it's going to be forgotten in ten years, 20
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years, maybe i will be forgotten when i'm gone in a couple years but i want to be remembered for my work and, you know photographs will be a remembrance. i'm frank jane. i'm a community photographer. this is my story. >> when you're not looking, frank's there. he'll snap that and then he'll send me an e-mail or two and they're always the best. >> these are all my p p p p p p p
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partner all ended up wanting to start the business and retire and i did was very important to me so i bought them oust and two weeks later the pandemic h-4 one of the moments i thought to myself we have to have the worse business in a lifetime or the best. >> we created the oasis out of a need basically so other people bars and turning them into a space and when the last place we were performing wasn't used turned those buildings into condos so we decided to have a
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space. >> what the pandemic did for us is made us on of that we felt we had to do this immediately and created this. >> (unintelligible). >> where we would offer food delivery services with a curbside professionalism live music to bring spectacular to lives we are going through and as well as employ on the caterers and the performers and drivers very for that i think also for everyone to do something. we had ordinary on the roof and life performances and with a restaurant to support the system where we are and even
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with that had terribly initiative and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt had to pay our rent we decided to have an old-fashioned one we created club hours where you can watch to online and or be on the phone and raised over one quarter of a million dollar that of incredible and something that northbound thought we could do. >> we got ourselves back and made me realize how for that people will show up if i was blown away but also had the courage but the commitment now i can't let anyone down i have to make the space serviceable so while this is a full process
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business it became much more about a space that was used by the community. and it became less about starting up a business and more about the heart of what we're doing. this building used to be a- and one of the first one we started working on had we came out what a mural to wrap the building and took a while but able to raise the money and pay 5 artists to make a design around many this to represent what is happening on the side and also important this is who we are this is us putting it out there because satisfies other people we don't realize how much we affect the community around there when he i want to put that out there and show up and show ourselves
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outside of those walls more fabulous. and inspires other people to be more fabulous and everyone want to be more fabulous and less hatred and hostility and that is how we change the
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>> we have private and public gardens throughout the garden tour. all of the gardens are volunteers. the only requirement is you're willing to show your garden for a day. so we have gardens that vary from all stages of development and all gardens, family gardens private gardens, some of them as small as postage stamps and others pretty expansive. it's a variety -- all of the world is represented in our gardens here in the portola. >> i have been coming to the portola garden tour for the past seven or eight years ever since i learned about it because it is the most important event of the neighborhood and the reason it is so important is because it links this neighborhood back to its history. in the early 1800s the portola
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was farmland. the region's flowers were grown in this neighborhood. if you wanted flowers anywhere future bay area you would come to this area to get them. in the past decade the area has tried to reclaim its roots as the garden district. one of the ways it has done that is through the portola garden tour where neighbors open their gardens open their gardens to people of san francisco so they can share that history. >> when i started meeting with the neighbors and seeing their gardens i came up with this idea that it would be a great idea to fundraise. we started doing this as a fund-raiser. since we established it we awarded 23 scholarships and six
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work projects for the students. >> the scholarship programs that we have developed in association with the portola is just a win-win-win situation all around. >> the scholarship program is important because it helps people to be able to tin in their situation and afford to take classes. >> i was not sure how i would stay in san francisco. it is so expensive here. i prayed so i would receive enough so i could stay in san francisco and finish my school which is fantastic, because i don't know where else i would have gone to finish. >> the scholarships make the difference between students being able to stay here in the city and take classes and having to go somewhere else. [♪] [♪] >> you come into someone's home and it's they're private and
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personal space. it's all about them and really their garden and in the city and urban environment, the garden is the extension of their indoor environment, their outdoor living room. >> why are you here at this garden core? it's amazing and i volunteer here every year. this is fantastic. it's a beautiful day. you walk around and look at gardens. you meet people that love gardens. it's fantastic. >> the portola garden tour is the last saturday in september every year. mark your calendars every year. you can see us on the website
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>> ladies and gentlemen, the esteemed guests welcome. to introduce our program today, i'm honored to introduce greg of the saloni people who worked to preserve his heritage for over three decades and he's the culture director, the people indigenous to the san francisco peninsula, mr. castro welcome. [applause] >> [foreign language] greetings to everyone. welcome to the ramaytush homeland. this area we call for thousands of years