Your language capabilities so that youre able to navigate these Employment Training programs and all the other engaging programs that we have. 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 spea
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 100,000 permanent residents to encourage them to get to the citizenship, enjoy all those benefits. Those benefits are numerous. Youre going to be able to situate yourself in better jobs. Youre going to get qualified for Training Programs that are only offered sometimes to citizenships. Youre going to always obviously we want to improve your language capabilities so that youre able to navigate these employment Training Programs and all the other engaging pr
Family has been here, at some point in your lineage, you came to this country, you came to this state, you came to San Francisco, and part of what were seeing today is we all deserve to be here. We deserve to make San Francisco and america great. Thank you very much. applause thank you, supervisor. Many of you may not know that over 35 of San Francisco Small Businesses are owned by and operated by immigrants today. Our next speaker is a real role model for many of us, a ceo of the San Francisco foundation, dr. Sandra hernandez is an advocate, a physician of philanthropic leader, a role model and definitely a ground breaker ~. Shes the former director of San Francisco department of Public Health and nationally renowned expert on health care and nonprofit sustainability. Dr. Hernandez. applause well, good morning, everybody. Thank you, adrian. I want to appreciate you, mayor lee, supervisor chiu, and really all of Philanthropic Partners that are launching this extraordinary pathway to ci
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 Francisco. You get to vote in america. And that voting right is so precious. And we saw just a month ago or less than a month ago how we revisited how valuable that Voting R
And all of the philanthropic organizations that are part of this Pathway Initiative likewise believe that our democracy is better when everybody is included in it. The San Francisco foundation is proud to be a leader and investor in this necessary work, bringing together the deep commitment of all of our immigrant communities, their partners, to assure economic mobility, education, health care access, and, of course, that they are civickly engaged. As the mayor and supervisor chiu said, we are a nation ~ and a city of immigrants. We are a testament to americas spirit of risk and its spirit of innovation. And the heart of every immigrant is a risk taker, a bold and courageous person who has risked everything to make a better life for themselves, but also to make a better life for all of their neighbors and communities in which they live ~. Like mayor lee and the supervisor, im a proud daughter of american immigrants. They came to this country with odds stacked against them to build a Be