Folk behind me who represent the Funding Community that has so wonderfully stepped up. Thank you, dr. Sandra hernandez and your colleagues. I of course want to thank all the amazing nonprofit social Service Providers and immigrant rights organizations that have been part of the fabric of why im so proud of San Francisco as a city that welcomes and protects our immigrant communities. And i also want to take a moment and thank all of you. Youre taking pictures of us because i think behind us represents the diversity of our city. But we are looking at you. If you actually looked among yourselves, this room effects the diversity of the world. San francisco, we were built by immigrants. The presence of our city is successful because of the vitality of our immigrant community. And we know the future of San Francisco rests with the future of our immigration and i am grab community. So, i want to thank you for being part of this. ~ immigrant as adrian mentioned in the late 1990s, the first tim
San francisco is the Innovation Capital of the world and in that way all of the different ethnicities that arrive in San Francisco of all different backgrounds need to be part of this innovation, because innovation is not about just one particular group of people. Its about everybody participating. And you should hear some of the tech kids that are in the city who want to hear from the chinese american community, the Southeast Asian american haunted, the african immigrant community, the latino immigrant community, Southeast Asian community, all of them, they want to hear how they can innovate technology with everyone else and how they can improve lives ~. Technology is there for our use and one of the reasons we support it is its got to improve our lives for everybody. You cannot improve ones life if youre not communicating with people that speak spanish only. Or in the shadows. This is why were making this announcement. Were also making a timely announcement and adrian is very strateg
And the San Francisco foundation is extremely proud to have partnered with this group, to bring it together. We look forward to three years of learning and to reaching as many of these folks as we can, to have them become citizens, and to come to Health Commission meetings and tell the director of health and all of our other commissioners what it is they would like to see their city be. Thank you very much on behalf of the San Francisco foundation. applause thank you, dr. Hernandez. A final aspect of the San Francisco pathway to Citizenship Initiative is Civic Engagement. This component is not just another hurdle potential citizens must pass to complete naturalization exam, but an opportunity to instill lifelong active engagement among our new naturalized citizens and to encourage meaningful participation, to contribute to San Franciscos overall success and prosperity. Seven local communitybased organizations with decades of expertise were selected for the pilot year of this initiative
Challenge for us these days, that you need in order to keep healthy . All of these kinds of issues, including input in the government, weve always wanted to improve. Well, today there is over 100,000 permanent residents in San Francisco who are not fully engaged yet in everything that they can be doing in registering their voice. And, so, we want to announce today a new initiative, its the San Francisco pathways to Citizenship Initiative. Its job, its focus is to work with all the communitybased organizations in the publicprivate way, work with the foundations with historically supported these efforts to bring voice and communication to hidden communities and unannounced communities, and to bring them to a path of citizenship, and to talk in culturally competent ways what the benefits of full citizen participation are, and there are many. If you are becoming a citizen or if you become a citizen, youre going to have a lot more fuller rights. For one thing, you get to vote in San Francis
Is the [speaker not understood], the Southeast Asian community center, [speaker not understood] media, of course San Francisco immigrant rights commission. Well, ive often said in many speeches that our immigrant population is important. Well, over a third of our population are immigrants and we acknowledge that. But i dont just want to say it as an announcement. Everybody knows that. What we want is full participation. We want people to not be afraid or not be meeting as many barriers as they are today, from activating themselves in full participation. And i do want to have people of all languages and all heritages telling us how they want our parks to be managed, how they want community safety, how they want transportation to be had, all these things everybody else gets to do, and they weigh in pretty heavily. But i want full participation of that. And until we get so, well always feel were not representing everybody in this city. And, so, this effort is to get to the additional 100,