Among the most drastic of Mayor Lurie’s cuts to city services is the planned closure of three specialized community clinics serving some of San Francisco’s most vulnerable: Michael Baxter Larkin Street Youth Clinic, Cole Street Youth Clinic, and South East Mission Geriatric Services Clinic.

Wednesday, May 27, SEIU 1021 members working at these clinics and the nonprofit organizations that house them and provide wraparound services rallied outside Larkin Street Youth Clinic, calling out the billionaires and rich CEOs pouring millions into a misleading advertising campaign to defeat Prop D, which would ensure the funding to protect the clinics and the many other city services threatened by current and future budget cuts. Supervisor Bilal Mahmood joined them and spoke in support of protecting the clinics.

“These clinics are not just service sites. They’re trusted lifelines for youth who already face enormous barriers to care,” said Larkin Street Youth Clinic behavorial health clinician Sophia Padilla at the rally. “Closing them means disrupting mental health treatment, severing long-standing relationships with providers, and pushing youth away from care when our city is already facing a mental health crisis.”

Youth who receive services at Larkin Street also spoke out at the rally. 

The SF Department of Public Health has argued that the clinics should be “consolidated” because of supposed “low utilization” numbers. However, the “consolidation” plan is just sending current patients to larger facilities, and the “low utilization” numbers used by SFDPH are misleading at best and outright wrong at worst. For these clinics’ patients, losing the place and providers that have provided safety and stability would be devastating—in some cases, even fatal.

“This clinic really has changed my life,” said 22-year-old Larkin Street client Alyana Perez at the May 18 Health Commission Bielenson hearing about the clinic closure. “I was in a very abusive household before I graduated from high school. Struggling with homelessness, struggling with having no job, I went into the clinic and Lisa saved my life by giving me another chance to build my self-esteem up. If you take these clinics away, it really will kill a lot of people.”

The Lisa she was referring to was medical evaluation assistant Lisa Cadillo, aka “Auntie Lisa,” whose story made waves on Instagram as she spoke about what a loss to the community the clinic’s closure would represent. “Closing this clinic is not right-sizing or optimization. It is choosing which youth get written off,” Cadillo said at the Health Commission hearing. “Larkin is one of many youth clinics in our city that help the homeless, LGBTQ+, undocumented, trafficked youth where they can just walk in and be seen. Instead of supporting us, the department and our management starved of us of provider coverage. Now it’s changed from ‘low utilization’ to ‘too expensive to run,’ when our CBOs cover all the overhead. When you close Larkin, they won’t transfer—they don’t stand in lines, they don’t like security guards. They will disappear from care. They’ll go back to street medicine, to the ER and survival sex work, overdoses, and suicide.” 

SFDPH has pushed the timeline for the youth clinics to close back from August to October after outcry about making such a big change during the summer break. South East Mission Geriatric Clinic is still scheduled to close August 28 if the mayor and Board of Supervisors don’t take action to stop the closure.