APA Family Support Services’ permanent home becomes a new landmark in Excelsior

SAN FRANCISCO — Under the leadership of Executive Director Fanny Lam and Board Chair Rose Chung, APA Family Support Services (APAFSS) has significantly expanded its services for the Chinese and Asian community in recent years. In October, APAFSS acquired and opened a brand new permanent home in the heart of Excelsior where the Asian population has continuously grown as one of the largest Asian neighborhoods in San Francisco.

APAFSS's newly-opened Excelsior Resource Center is located at 4377-4379 Mission Street with a 5,073-square-foot office space, 15-foot high ceilings and a good amount of street frontage that makes the new center a landmark for the Excelsior neighborhood.

The Excelsior Resource Center also serves as the hub for the Asian and Pacific Islander Family Resources Network (APIFRN), which is a program under APAFSS of collaboration of over 20 agencies in the city in order to provide comprehensive family support services to Asian families with children aged 0–18.

In the past, there was a small office at 292 Ocean Avenue rented by APAFSS in Excelsior for years. APAFSS acquired the spacious Excelsior Resource Center on Mission Street for $1.42 million in April 2025 that showed a strong commitment to serving the growing Asian communities in Excelsior and nearby neighborhoods with a large Asian immigrant population in the southside of San Francisco, including Oceanview, Outer Mission and Portola.

"With deep gratitude to our Board, staff, donors, and neighbors, APIFRN now has its permanent home at 4377 Mission—the largest family resource center in our history, built to meet growing community needs,” said Lam, who joined APAFSS as a Board member in 2016 and has taken up the role of Executive Director since May 2022.

Prior to the opening of Excelsior Resource Center, APAFSS led by Lam opened two more new centers since 2022, Chinatown Family Resource Center at 518 Grant Avenue in December 2023 and Visitacion Valley Strong Families Center at 1099 Sunnydale Avenue in March 2025.

Board Chair Rose Chung acknowledged and thanked Lam for leading APAFSS to another level of success to serve a bigger community. "I am just so grateful for our visionary leader Fanny who constantly thinks of ways to better serve our clients and uplift her team, so they remain motivated to do their good work," said Chung, who also has dedicated to serving APAFSS and the Asian community for over 40 years.

Chung is well known to the Asian community as a highly regarded leader serving in different capacities. She founded the Miss Asian Global Pageant in 1985. 2025 marked the 40th anniversary of the pageant event in San Francisco. She was the top winner in the Chinese Chamber of Commerce pageant in 1981 crowned as Miss Chinatown USA.

In her profession, Chung is a radiologic technologist and served at the San Francisco General Hospital for decades. She joined the Board of Directors in early years after APAFSS was established in the city’s General Hospital where she worked. Chung has served as APAFSS’s Board Chair for 34 years.

Looking back at the history of APAFSS, it was formerly named Asian Perinatal Advocates (APA) and founded in 1987 by Dr. Don Wong at the San Francisco General Hospital.

In the late 1980s, professionals and experienced home visitors from the APA aimed to help families at risk cope with the challenges of raising young children, particularly the immigrant Asian parents who faced language and cultural barriers.

Today for almost 40 years in service, APAFSS has extended its services from primarily Asian new immigrants to all families who face the challenges of parenthood, including hardships on financial insecurity, familial problems, domestic violence and child neglect.

APAFSS also has expanded its office sites from the San Francisco General Hospital to 7 offices in 5 neighborhoods throughout the city, including Chinatown, Excelsior, Visitacion Valley, and Potrero Hill.

In addition to English, currently APAFSS offers services in 8 languages, Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Thai, and Spanish.

In 1995, APAFSS launched the API Parental Stress Line at 415-642-6850 which is a hotline service to offer free appropriate emotional support and resources for parents in need.

District 11 (D11), which covers Excelsior and Oceanview neighborhoods in San Francisco, outnumbered District 4 (D4), which extends over Sunset and Parkside, for the first time in 2022 as the supervisorial district with a highest percentage of Asian residents, 56.56%, up from 51.39% in 2012. Historically D4 was the largest Asian district in the city for decades. D4’s Asian population was 57.75% in 2012 and down to 54.51% in 2022.

Although D11 has become the top supervisorial district in the Asian population in San Francisco, there are still very few social services available for the Asian community within the district. APAFSS is one of the very few agencies that established a permanent office in D11.

“APAFSS has proven to be an invaluable resource for San Francisco’s families, especially within the Asian and Pacific Islander communities,” D11 Supervisor Chyanne Chen said when she joined the ribbon cutting opening ceremony on October 19 at the new Excelsior Resource Center.

“Their new home in District 11 represents a renewed commitment to strengthening families and building a resilient, inclusive community, where we have the highest number of children between 0-12," Chen said. "The grand opening signifies a new chapter for APAFSS as they continue their mission to serve San Francisco’s most vulnerable children, youth, and families."

In addition to the core family services offered in all APAFSS centers citywide, it is unique to the Excelsior center that APIFRN offers community-building services and provides training to support collaborative partner agencies.

With the increasing needs of API families with children in Excelsior and the growth of the API population, APAFSS's new Excelsior center provides expanded space and resources to offer services that were previously limited due to insufficient facilities and capacity, according to the APAFSS.

Other services that Excelsior Resource Center offers including parent support groups, parenting education workshops, diaper bank services, case management addressing family functioning issues, school-based behavorial health, child abuse and domestic violence prevention programs, family events and field trips, youth development services, the Positive Parenting Program, and student engagement and success services.

More information about APAFSS and their programs is available online by visiting www.apafss.org.