Dear Friends,
From July 2007 to June 2008, PPGG advanced comprehensive health care, education, and advocacy, demonstrating our outreach message: “Planned Parenthood is for everyone.” Delivering on that claim in tough times took greater effort—and your generous support. It fueled our actions for reproductive and social justice, even more critical this year.
Our mission to improve the health of all Bay Area residents—of every income, age, sex, gender, culture, and race—is highly challenging in the best of times. The six counties we serve are incredibly diverse. Consider this: in San Francisco today, there is no ethnic or racial majority, and over one-third of the city’s residents were born outside the United States. In this rainbow region, especially during a financial downturn, it was imperative to offer many culturally competent services and affordable choices to the most vulnerable.
We stepped up awareness of the scope of our reproductive and primary health care services with a wide-reaching, grassroots marketing campaign. Bilingual PPGG posters featuring photographs of local, culturally diverse youths blanketed our region, displaying our long list of services in the places people eat, shop, and gather. Whatever their income, whatever their health care need—an annual wellness or pelvic exam, vaccination, birth control, or HIV and STI detection and treatment—PPGG had them covered. It was a particularly reassuring message for young and medically underserved clients as their budgets began to sink along with the state fiscal emergency.
Under this downward pressure, prevention took on even greater importance as our top goal in health care. We launched a new program called PreventionFirst to offer holistic care to clients struggling with all dimensions of intimate partner violence, depression, and substance abuse. We also expanded our rapid HIV testing services to halt infection and encourage treatment, and made available newly approved choices in safe, effective birth control. And over the course of the year, our Community Outreach “marketeers” distributed over 61,000 PPGG-branded “Prevention Packs” through Bay Area high schools, colleges, businesses, and community organizations and events.
Our commitment to a commonsense prevention agenda also inspired our state and national advocacy work. Throughout FY2008, we fought to strengthen Medicaid coverage of family planning services, eliminate federal funding for abstinence-only sex ed programs, and keep the price of birth control within reach of students and low-income women. In a key victory, Governor Schwarzenegger signed SB 94, giving California women with the least means greater access to time-sensitive, cost-effective family planning services by increasing Medi-Cal reimbursement rates for that care. At the end of the year—once again—we successfully mobilized the 2008 Campaign for Teen Safety to push back another dangerous parental notification initiative, defeated in November 2008 with your help.
This year, as always, upholding the value that Planned Parenthood is for everyone took conscience, coalition building, and the courage of our best efforts. Thank you for keeping the health care safety net strong for every Bay Area resident!
Dian J. Harrison, M.S.W., President and CEO
Nancy Tompkins, Chair, Board of Trustees
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