“New Gen” has built a reputation with San Francisco youth as a place with “Answers, not Attitude.”  That’s the “New Gen” motto and what youth want when it comes to their health.  

New Generation Health Center targets our services to urban youth ages 12 – 24. New Generation provides approximately 5,500 clinical reproductive health care visits to 2,500 unduplicated clients annually. The majority of our clients are low-income, and reside in the Mission District or Bayview Hunter’s Point neighborhoods of San Francisco, the areas of the city that report highest teen pregnancy and STD rates. Roughly 10% of our patients are male. About 12% of patients have limited English proficiency.

New Generation was founded in 1974 as a one-day a week teen clinic within San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH). At that time, teen patients told us they’d really like to have their own health center, one designed specifically for youth. A formal needs assessment helped to confirm these impressions and gave us further insight into what type of health center youth would like. 

When our current location on Potrero Ave. became available in 1997, we jumped at the chance, appointed a teen advisory board which chose our name, “New Generation Health Center,” and moved in.  In less than a year we were seeing twice as many young women (and a lot more young men) than we had ever seen at SFGH.  With volunteers from SFGH and UCSF, funding from the State of California’s Family PACT program, and start-up grants from the Gold and Goldman foundations, “NewGen” as it came to be called grew and developed, and came to fill a need for services for youth in our community.