Dozens of people gathered in San Francisco’s Castro District Thursday evening to rally against proposed city budget cuts to services for LGBTQ people.
A coalition of community-based organizations, led by the Harvey Milk LGBTQ+ Democratic Club, rallied at the Jane Warner Plaza to speak out against cuts by the city to services for HIV prevention and treatment, health services, and programs focused on trans people.
Anya Worley-Ziegmamn is an activist with the People’s Budget Coalition — a collective of organizations that has been examining the city budget. Worley-Ziegmamn said millions of dollars earmarked to be cut from health programs, specifically those dedicated to trans and LGBTQ organizations, put these communities at serious harm and lawmakers have yet to provide them with a convincing rationale.
“What we’re hearing is a lot of deflection onto the Trump administration,” said Worley-Ziegmamn. “We as a community know you don’t need to make the most harmful cuts when you do this work. (City lawmakers) tell us, there’s hard choices that need to be made, but the SFPD are not going to be asked to bear it when they’re going to get 14% wage increases.”
San Francisco AIDS Foundation Chief Executive Officer Tyler TerMeer said the ongoing attacks on the LGBTQ community nationwide have a tangible impact in San Francisco. He said cuts from the federal government down through to the local level threaten to unravel decades of progress in addressing serious public health problems — where now rates of STI and HIV have been at historic lows.
“When you cut funding from San Francisco AIDS Foundation, you don’t just cut one organization, you weaken the entire system,” said TerMeer. “San Francisco AIDS Foundation is facing disproportionate cuts, not because we’re failing, but because we’ve been effective, because we’ve expanded our services, because we’re doing work to build more sustainable future.”
A nonprofit with a more focused approach on providing health care and resources for trans people is the Lyon-Martin Community Health Center. Executive Director JM Jaffe said the over 3,000 people seen a year by the organization are at risk of losing access to critical resources. They also said it was more cost effective to spend money on communities at risk than to reinvest the money down the road.
“It’s like death by a thousand cuts,” said Jaffe. “The city cuts on top of (federal cuts) will drastically impact our ability, not only to continue serving people at the rate that we already have been, but also to expand.”
The city’s Board of Supervisors will continue to meet on Wednesdays before finalizing a budget for the upcoming years. The next Budget and Appropriations Committee meeting on housing and homelessness will be held on Wednesday.