 My name is Kathleen Lee and I am working in conjunction with the street medicine team and I do outreach. I'm a team lead. Right now I've got four to six people that outreach particular districts of the city and I'm their lead. The program is pretty new. The direction of the program is new. So it's in flux and we're developing a whole new program, not unlike when I first started at the library, how the program was pretty new and it's evolving as the library program had evolved as well. The library has made an impact in different parts of my life in many different ways. Like getting me out of the rain when I need to get out of the rain to changing the whole direction of my life, which is where I'm at today and it's directly responsible. The library and this program here is directly responsible for what I'm doing today. My partner and I had a business that failed in 2008 with the financial crisis and also attributing to that failure of our business was the fact that we had had a heroin addiction for about 15 years at that same time. So during the course of like nine months we lost our house, we lost the business, there was just no work and we were very accustomed to a pretty good lifestyle even though we had this drug addiction because we had pretty good jobs all the time. So anyway when all of a sudden done there and there's no more house, the house is empty, we've sold everything and all that, we came to San Francisco and through the social services of San Francisco we were able to clean up. The hot team picked us up as clients and put in a stabilization room. My case manager asked me, did I want to work at the library? And that's all he said and I thought, I can distinctly remember the conversation with my partner Susan going, what do they want me to do at the library? Shelf books? I mean, I don't get, you know, I had no idea. So I went home and I thought, well I can probably do this. It's money, you know, it's awaited. And it didn't take me very long to figure out that it was really quite an amazing opportunity and I was pretty good at it. I could connect with the people pretty well. It just opened doors for my whole life. So I know this is what I'm going to be doing until I stop working. There's really nothing quite as powerful as a shared experience. So if I know firsthand what the issues and not just the issues but that feeling that you have of being in kind of a survival state all the time, you don't really get much past that because it takes most all your efforts every day to just find a place to stay, find food, stay safe, to keep yourself contained in some kind of sanity. So you're always in a state of crisis all the time. It's just a matter of having the tools so you need to know the resources. Those are the kinds of things that you need to have a knowledge base so when you are approaching someone you actually have something to offer. So I can tell them where to go eat. I can tell them where to get clothes or whatever it is their needs are or where they can stay the night, where their shelters are, how to get into shelter, how to go find the housing list right here in the library. There's access to all those things right here so if I know those things then I have something to offer. Other things that I learned was how to push myself to stretch my own limitations or my own perceived limitations so how to learn to approach people that are strangers to me and make that work for both of us so I can answer a need that they may have and do my job properly. That was esteem building and confidence building that makes me feel like I have something to offer and that's all attributed back to the program itself. It's the whole attitude towards making everyone be counted. No one is excluded, it's really amazing. That's just an amazing thing so that's down to this public library, to San Francisco's library that they really wanted to address this issue as one library and not make it be separate. So it's not like how can we get this out? It's like how can we incorporate this in? That's really phenomenal and that's on this side of it and on the other side of the same coin is me and how they incorporated me into that same picture and allowed me to take the seed planted here and take it as far as I wish to take it. That's mind boggling. Who does that? Who does that? It's really quite amazing. It's a star, definitely a star.