the committee. Thank you. Thank you. Recording in progress. Good afternoon and welcome to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. Social Services Committee meeting for April 28th, 2025. May I have a roll call please? Supervisorizer, 4 to 9, the boss. Present. Suvizer, Tim. Present. Thank you very much. We have a packed agenda today. So we'll get started with the first informational item on commercially sexually exploited children services. Yeah, and apologies upfront. We have a packed agenda because there's a holiday in May, and we won't have a meeting so I want to get everybody here today. So thank you. A few of our staff were not able to make it, so as each presenter comes forward,'m a management analyst with the commercial program, tower building internal infrastructure and capacity, our direct services, how we partner with the community and some projects that are coming up. We have three primary goals in our program. One is to create policies and practices that center around prevention, treatment, and support of young people who are at risk or have been victimized by exploitation. We also build capacity within our staff so they can effectively assess and support youth that are at risk or who are victims. And we also partner with community agencies, departments and organizations to create a community of safety against the sexual exploitation of children and young adults. So we'll have a couple of slides about our timeline of history bringing us up to the present. So in 2014 the state passed SB 855 and this created our CSEC program. Basically we were working with children who were victims already, many years, and this made us the agency of response. And then we started our interagency, steering committee the following year. And in 2019, we created an MOU with local public agency and community partners. 2021, we started a work group within the agency and then we contracted with our lived experience consultant, Amrahung. The following year we launched our cool aunt series. It's a prevention curriculum and we hosted our first virtual community event with the work group. The following year we awarded $60,000 in micro grants to community providers. In 2024, so last year, we hosted a regional becoming me training for trainers. We renewed our contract with Umrah Hung, and we became a member of the Mayor's Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, which is also called Mocked. This year, we're working on updating our MOU and we're adding new community partners and right now we have an RFP out for the second round of micro grants to the community. This is some data about the last 10 years of our program. You can see that we had a considerable rise of young people identified in the middle of the graph. The green represents people who are known to be victimized. We have some young people who have not disclosed that information or it's early in their victimization. So we don't always have everybody identified. We have young people who are identified as at-risk and that's always the majority of our population. It's important to understand that at-risk number also includes youth who are at-risk of labor exploitation. So the tool that we use that identifies them, captures all the risk elements, and then the victims are those who have disclosed it or it's known because of police involvement or hospital involvement or something like that. This is some information about our victim data type data from last year, calendar year 2024. You can see that most of our young people are at risk or identified as at risk. This means that something about their circumstance has made them especially vulnerable or that we know that they're being groomed in the community. The other numbers to the left of the circle are victim types. So some people are victimized before they enter foster care. And that's, we are the agency of response. So if that's happening in a community and a parent is unable to protect their child, they can come to the attention of our agency and we can serve them here. We also have children who are victimized while they're in foster care. And those are represented by the Victim and Family Reunification and the Victim and Family Maintenance sections. So next we'll talk about the way that we're building infrastructure and capacity. All right, so we do have a work group called Root to Bloom. Our memberships includes our lived experience consultant, Ms. Hung, DCFS staff, community partners, youth and parent advocates. And it's really to create a collaborative model across our entire county from both service agencies that are governmental and non-governmental, and to act as accountability structure for assisting in county wide coordination of services to these young people. In 2022, we've hosted our first virtual event for CWW's as child welfare workers to network and engage and take a deep dive into the work. of services to these young people. In 2022, we've hosted our first virtual event for CWWs, as child welfare workers, to network, engage, and take a deep dive into the work with community providers. So that they can learn which of our many, many community providers can intervene successfully at which points of the young person's experience with exploitation. So we can talk about some of the ways that we work on staff and Richmond and coaching. The first is that we have a lived experience consultant. This is a person who we have hired to support us in understanding the services and the experience for young people in this in exploitation. Her name is Umrah Hung. She provides coaching and training stress. She has provided individual supportive coaching to staff. She can also work with family members and young people. And we also worked with her to have her provide support for young people who have watched the Cool-Ont series in case anything comes up that's very upsetting to them. And she's a critical member of work groups throughout the county. So it brings us to the Cool-Ont. We contracted as an agency with the cool lot in 2022, and the following year, CDSS contracted with the organization for every county to have access. It's an hour long video-based curriculum about the streams of influence in the community, so things we see in the media, things that we understand just as culture and society to see how they influence vulnerabilities to help people be more aware of their risks. It's available to you that the independent living program in foster homes, in their own homes, and directly with their child welfare workers. The next item is our becoming knee training. So we've hosted two of these now. These are training for trainers. So you're certified as a facilitator once you have been through the two day curriculum, but it also gives you really valuable skills to work with young people in the important skill of harm reduction and in helping young people just make better choices when they're aware of the risks available to them and to talk every single day with them about safety. So far we've trained about 60 staff including the entire staff at West Coast Children's Clinic in the C-Change Program, which is the specific program that provides services to exploitation survivors and victims. And these are just some quotes from people who have taken the cool on. And so far, we've actually have more than 108 users who have completed it. We're gonna be rolling that out again to young people in our community to make sure that they have access to this prevention curriculum. So we'll be moving to our direct supports. We do have an allocation from the state and federal government every year, and part of what we use that for is discretionary funds. so we can do sort of emergency housing, placement support for caregivers who are willing to care for these youth. We can do rapid emergency gift cards, so things like food, hygiene products, for young people, it's really important for them to look good with their peers. So we can help them achieve those things with our gift cards. They can go get their hair done or their nails done. We have ring cameras for caregivers and parents who are worried about safety at their homes. We have books and resources for staff and caregivers. We have training and coaching to staff and that can come from our consultant and from trainings that we source. And we are also offering community micro grants for prevention and intervention activities. One of our bigger contracts in this program is our MISI contract. MISI is an organization that serves young people who are victimized by exploitation. When we had an assessment center open they were co-located there and we are hoping to have them located our future transitional shelter care facility. They work on site and off site to support youth and their team so they can do case consultations, they can speak with caregivers and parents about harm reduction, about understanding the language that the young people are using, and the risks to them. They can also consult directly with young people before they participate in their own child and family team meetings to help them navigate what can be a really stressful situation for them. And they can do brief with staff before and after those meetings and ongoing. We also have a contract with West Coast Children's Clinic. They are contracted to complete the SEID, which is the Commercial Sexual Exploitation Identification Tool, and I meet with them on a monthly basis and consult on every single SEID that's done, and we talk about those risk levels, if they're rising, if they're lowering, if there's a victimization or a new victimization, and I convey that information to child welfare workers. They also debrief with probation and their supervisory team. The C-Change program is the targeted intervention program. They do clinical treatment and support and case management to youth who are at risk and victims of commercial sexual exploitation. This is what our budget looks like for this year. These are actual costs so far and some projected costs. Most of our allocation comes from the state. It's just a little more than a million dollars each year. The federal allocation is smaller and is more specific on what it can be used for. So we, you can see that most of our funding is going to these contracts with West Coast and Missy who are providing those direct services to young people and their families. We do have some staff costs, including our consultant, and we are going to be adding to this the micro grants that will be awarded in a little less than a month. Some of our community collaborations are here. We have a steering committee that started in 2015 and we are reworking that with new members based on some updates from CDSS and on providers in the community. I'm a member of PACT. We have other members including Division Director William Nguyen. PACT is a preventing and addressing child trafficking organization that's supported by the state. the huge benefit to that program is that We are connected on regional level levels and across the state with partners who are doing this so For example two weeks ago I consulted with Contra Costa County San Mateo County and San Francisco County about some youth who were crossing those county lines and how to best serve them where they were Wanting to be but also where their services were most available and where their family was going to be. So it's a really big benefit to networking and to providing sort of an enhanced level of safety because people can track young people across county lines and support them that way. Moct is another community collaboration that we are members of. As you know, we have a mayor change in our city. And so we'll see if this continues, but we have been an active member of Moct over the last year. And it was basically created to see how the issues around exploitation can be addressed and managed in the city of Oakland. Another one of our collaborations is the Safety Net Roundtable. We have recently rejoined Safety Net. It's a multidisciplinary team that's led by the DA's office, including the DA, local community providers, educational partners, probation and child welfare. And the idea is that many of these young people are crossing systems. And so we want to identify services and supports that across all of those systems are able to serve them as well as possible. We've got future projects planned. We're reconvening our steering committee. We're updating our MOU with new partners. And like I said, to align with CDSS updates. We're going to be having a community microgrants deadline in May 23rd. And we and we're also going to be hosting another regional becoming knee training for trainers. A couple of other things that we're working on is instituting a multidisciplinary team within our own agency. We're going to be making a proposal to our department executive team coming up about how that could be implemented in our agency. And we are always, always, always working with our staff about harm reduction and ways to make that as available and usable and barrier free as possible to increase the safety of our young people in our community. Thank you so much. Thank you for that presentation. Supervisor Fortinata asked. Questions or comments? Thank you so much for the presentation. This is very helpful as a newer board member, especially because I represented for six years an area of Oakland that was very, very impacted by CSEC issues. My main question, and this was all very informative. It's good to hear also that the steering committee is being reconvened. My main question is, I do wanna hear a little bit more about the nature of the collaboration across departments. I saw a number of the departments were listed and I might be more interested in hearing about how housing is engaged, how workforce development is engaged, from my experience working on these issues. If it's possible to identify someone who has been victimized by these issues and wants to move on the access to housing, food security, as well as eventually job training is really critical and I'm curious to hear what that collaboration looks like. In addition to that, I'm also interested in hearing what the collaboration looks like with the Oakland Department of Violence Prevention because I've been supportive of expanding the gender-based violence program within that department. Are there ways that you could potentially collaborate with them more as you're reconvening the steering committee? I would be most equipped to respond to the first question, the second question is probably best addressed by saying that we're reconvening the steering committee, and so it would be them in that. For the first question most of the young people that we're working with are quite young and so I think you know when we're thinking about housing and we're thinking about food security and these things it is important to think about the young people's ability to achieve those things as they get older and for young people their focus is today their focus is now. And so what we're doing is working with them not only to work toward what we know will be their adult goals but also safety right now. So we're working with transitional housing providers, we're working with foster care home caregivers and we're a lot of our children, our young people go to the independent living program, they go to the youth employment program. They go to these community-based providers that are working with transitional HUs. So youths uprising. Some of the housing programs do have employment components within them. Five keys is a popular one. So we're working with this sort of adolescent level of engaging in education at the level where they are and then working toward employment where they are so that later on they have those skills to build upon. I think that it is long been our goal to have a more sustainable adult housing program but I think that because most of our young people are quite young, some of these young people are 10. We really are focused on getting them through age appropriate, educational, and working toward employment and housing goals as they're older. Michelle may have more to say on that. I think you answered it beautifully. Melissa, supervisor, I think the other key component is for housing as we are talking about foster youth, we're responsible for their housing until their 21st birthday. What the allocation allows us to do, though, is often provide additional resources to caregivers. We've had some caregivers who, because of the criminality that sometimes follows seasick behavior, we've been able to provide things like ring cameras that allows them to feel safe in their home, especially if they've had people come and present themselves. So I think Melissa answered, I think you captured it all. Thanks, it did occur to me while I was listening to you. We have a bringing families home component in our agency. I don't know if that's been presented here before, but we do have families who are participating in bringing families home, which is a housing subsidy for I think 18 months through a board services. And we do have families with children with CEC concerns living in home with their families and receiving supported services from a boat. So that's another way that this is being approached for those families who need additional help, additional, you know, the young people wouldn't wanna call it childcare, but it is childcare, it's having a place for young people to be after school, things like that. We're able to work with bringing families home in that way too. Thank you. Just one quick observation. the direct amount of money that the county receives for this work is relatively small in relation to the magnitude of the problem and the impact on children. So that's just an observation certainly through the mayor's advisory commission and through other work. I think we have a bigger sense of what the ecosystem is and a lot of investments going into supporting this population. But I might be curious in the future perhaps to have a one-on-one reading to hear more about this and whether there's ways that the county can, as a two-reconvening misduring committee, really increase the collaboration and see what gaps we might be able to fill. Thank you. Thank you for those questions. I think that clearly it takes a major collaborative effort as you describe. So even though the funding may be about a million dollars from the state for this SB 85 effort, I assume it's been like that for about 10 years. And I know that in today's PAL committee we are asking for maintenance of funding for at least like bringing families home program, which is a separate pot that also provides support for children, especially those that are C-sect. In terms of the staffing, you don't have a lot allocated, so most of the program funding goes to Missy and West Coast. Yes. And what exactly do they do in terms of like that overall referral that you were talking about? Like for example, with housing with kids that need to be reconnected with families and getting the protections they need. Well they provide a broad range. So I think to try to give a concise answer. So Missy does direct intervention and prevention services. So they're with young people directly or engaging with them by phone and by text, which is often the preferred adolescent way. To talk to them about where they are, are they safe, making plans to check in, to do important things that they need to do, like, get medical care, and have a meal and take a shower, and reconnect with people they need to connect with. I have worked with Misi, I was a child welfare worker before this, and I work with Misi quite a lot, and they were in the community with our young people all the time. So they were helping massage family relationships that had been challenged or had been broken. Or that maybe through generations of the family needed a great deal of work. They were doing that work. But a lot of it is providing basic services, driving them to the DMV to get their ID, those kinds of things, collaborating with them in meetings about their placement decisions, because those can be really stressful to young people. They're going to have to move somewhere, or they need to make a major change in their own actions to be able to stay somewhere. So they can also provide that sort of moral support kind of. So that's kind of the direct model that they provide, but they also consult with the Child Welfare Worker staff to help the staff understand what this young person is working through and how the staff can support. With West Coast, that's a clinical program. So they're doing the therapeutic work there, and they're diving into the deep, deep moral injury and shame that happens when a young person understands what has happened to them when they've been exploited. So they're first navigating safety and the relational aspects of becoming safe, and then they're diving into those deeper things, and they can do family work as well. I'm not sure if I've totally answered your question, but I think it's a very broad question, but the agency is going to be working deeper on family finding an engagement, and so that can be something that we partner with as well, but child welfare workers are doing that work on a day-debasis. I think that partially answers my question. I, even though there's like a million dollars or so that's been allocated, I just wanted to understand like how they leveraged the resources from their partners, whether they, like you said, provide medical support, referrals maybe to Covenant House or foster partners, whether they, like you said, provide medical support, referrals, maybe to covenant house or foster systems and trying to understand how that whole system is working for the child. So with West Coast, we've actually leveraged the dollars with behavioral health to provide and we've given a portion behavioral health was able to match us for that. Full out for 300, it's like twice as much clinical support that they're able to see more youth. We also have a program where they actually go out and look for our AWOL youth that are C-Sec involved. And so it allowed them more clinical staff to do that direct work. In terms of the community, we're part of leveraging are those micro grants. So we do have a number of community providers in Alameda County and those micro grants allows us to share the money the state gave us to do this CEC work with the broader Alameda County community that is also participating in trying to address this issue. It's a small dollar amount from the state 1.2 million I think is what we tend to get. It is also one of the largest allocations in the state to a county for this work because of the need in Alameda County. So there wasn't a whole lot budget it in the initial state budget. I think it was $14 million and they first implemented a leg out a huge portion I think we got one of the other huge portions with $1 million so I appreciate that and it may be a small amount but we are able like you said to leverage and partnership with behavioral health with housing and other agencies and then other providers that are doing this work, those micro grants have been hugely successful and popular. The becoming me training that we offered, we offer that to the broader community. So any provider that was in Alameda County that was doing this work was invited to participate and we've done that twice. We'll likely do that again. So whenever possible, we try to engage the whole network of people that are addressing this issue for the resources we have, so that when we lift the whole community up, it helps our youth as well. That's good to know. And then based on your charting of the victims versus those that risk at least since 2015. It shows that there is, it's interesting that it shows like there is a decline at least in the number of at risk, but for some reason the number of victims are kind of similar, even though we're at the lowest since 2015 with 44 victims. It's kind of stayed around like 41, 58, the highest was probably 61 in 2017. So can you help me understand the proportion between those are our victims and those are at risk. The at risk total has actually declined. Yes, I can speak to that. So you'll see a large growth in those, the at risk numbers starting in 2017 for a couple of years. And what happened then is we had a staff member who was dedicated to this program. That was how her work hours were allotted. And she spent a great deal of time with the assessment center, working directly with Missy Onside and with the young people. She got to know quite a few of the young people. And she came into the units. She came into the units and did presentations. She came in and met with us. She consulted with our supervisors, our supervisors reviewed our entire case so twice a month with us to talk about are these young people properly identified? And what's also important? Excuse me, could you speak into the mic so that people on Zoom... Sorry about that. Sure. What she also did was educate us all on the at-risk definition, per the state who creates these definitions, also includes people at risk of any kind of exploitation, including labor trafficking. So, if a young person is being made to sell drugs, that is also trafficking. And I remember somebody on my case that I was thinking, oh, this person is not at risk for sexual exploitation, what's this about? And she explained it to me and said, you're absolutely right. This is going on for this young man. And so, what we was we saw a greater attention and staff dedication to that. And so we were able to more accurately I think identify the number of young people with vulnerabilities to this and what happened then is that person retired. And about a year, a year and a half after that, the pandemic started, and young people stayed in foster care longer. So people who are already 18, between 18 and 21 at that point, stayed in foster care an extra amount of time. The state allowed that to happen. And so more people were turning 18 who had been at risk of victims. So basically the number goes up, nobody exits care. And then at the end of 2021, all of those people exited care, so that's when you see the drop. And we don't have a dedicated staff member in that way anymore. I'm probably the closest at this point, and you can see by the staff allocation that I'm not doing the level of work in this program as that person was. And so the numbers drop because people start exiting care again. Now I do a monthly identification. I am gonna be launching a data cleanup in the next few weeks with all of our child welfare workers to do basically what we did before, go into every caseload, do those kinds of things. But you're right, our victim numbers stay fairly similar. And so I think it's important to know that we are fairly accurately identifying our young people who have been victimized. It is important to know though that research shows that young people have been very seriously groomed or victimized for some time before that comes out. Before they talk about it, before it's discovered, things like this. It's very hidden, it's very subtle. And they're basically forming these relationships with people who are harming them, but telling them to keep it a secret, because it's just for them, right? So, you know, when we find out, we identify them, or if they intercare because of it, we identify them. But it stays fairly steady. And so I think it is important to remember that the risks are great, and it is devastating when any child is victimized, But we're seeing study numbers, which tells us that we have a fairly steady population in our agency that is the dedicated agency to serving these young people. And so it's important to figure out what are the specific needs of those people who are victimized and make sure that all the community providers, whether we have a contract with them or not, are engaged through our community steering project, a steering committee, and that we're offering micro-brands to be able to support their services in the community. That's really helpful. Appreciate that explanation. Because obviously we want to see results. We want to see that we are making a difference, right? I did want to add thank you so much. The way that the coding works for the state level of definition, once you have been victimized, you always carry that code. Even if you reach a stage of maintenance or recovery, including at risk. So if you've been identified at risk and your risk level goes down and you're safe in the community, you still have that code in our database. So it is important to remember that these these carry with the young person until they leave foster care. So it's some of these young people are not at risk at this moment. Some of these people are not being victimized. They're in a stage of recovery, which is great news. Okay. Thank you. The last question I had refers to the references to the direct grants and the mini grants or micro grants. So, supervisor, fortune out of bass, she was president of the Oakland City Council. We checked in with each other and we share an area in Oakland that has been known for a lot of CSEC activities. And one of the business owners there, she took it upon herself to provide food, provide hygiene like showers for those that are victims. but I don't, and then later on we heard that her business got targeted by the people that were part of the exploitation effort. But would she qualify for some of these microgrants or how do we decide or how do we outreach on the micro grants? Right now we've been sending the application to the providers that we are well aware of and there's been a pretty big we have a pretty good network of who the providers are. We can also publish it on EPUB, the application. Andres newsletter that goes out to the community so we can send out to there and we can give you the application. I think we look at services that are being provided, but I do believe there's some flexibility. I'd have to go back and look to make sure that qualified because we have to stay within our allocation of how we're giving the services so that that's where it gets a little tricky We have to know that they're providing Even though that is a service with the state considers a service Yeah, I mean obviously this business owner. I'm thinking of doesn't do it because she's trying to get an application in place or grant But I was thinking that it would be good if we can make some connections to provide some additional resources if she is especially doing this because she wants to be helpful to the community. Absolutely. We could get her connected, definitely. Okay. Thank you. Are there any public comments on this item? There are no speakers. Okay, thank you so much for that presentation. Let's move to the next one on the Child Abuse Prevention Services. We're all about protecting children today. Oh, good afternoon. My name is Brittany Walker-Petigroul. I'm a division director with the Department of Children and Family Services. And I will apologize in advance because I learned right now that I am presenting this information to you today. My staff is unable to make it. So, but I'm familiar with these services. So hopefully I'll be of help. Thank you. All right, so the, um, oh, what we're going to go through today is the Child Abuse Prevention Services, our CAPIT and CB CAP contracts, and the CAPIT acronym and CB CAP acronyms are spelled out right below that title. And our ARPA CBCAP work. We'll also talk about the movement and the state around mandated reporting to community supporting our county's prevention plan and the community pathways, which is our latest innovation, expansion of our direct services work. Okay. The Child Abuse Prevention Task Force, next slide. The purpose of this task force is to review and make recommendations around child abuse prevention services and conduct community needs assessments and set priorities for funding and provide recommendations to the board. There's a list of the task force members there. And Colette Catwala is our main coordinator for this. He's been doing it for a number of years and is actually very active at the state level in helping to inform child abuse prevention efforts. So we're very fortunate in this county to have such strong leadership in that role. Under the cap it and CB cap contracts. This is how we address the needs. Primarily the primary and secondary level of prevention, primary level prevention is the prevention that's at the community level that helps keep all members of the community safe from the risks of child abuse and neglect. And secondary level is when there are risk factors present, it helps prevent the occurrence of child maltreatment. So our capet providers and our contracts, their contracts are two year contracts that are signed with 12 different organizations in the county. We actually just went through the RFP process, so we have a couple of new providers on board that we're pretty excited about, some that target immigration support. And we also, they provide prevention services, including primarily in the area of concrete supports, but also in the area of referrals and parent education, they offer case management system navigation kind of things and different kinds of services that address the kinds of risk issues that can develop into a child abuser neglect situation if not addressed or arrested at a lower level of risk. The strong family alliance which locked in 2010 is a group of those capitals. This was their effort to try to better coordinate their services instead of working in 12 agency silos. So they meet regularly. There's a website that that providers in the community can be pointed to in order to access these providers. And then the CBCAP funding, which is a community-based child abuse prevention funding, is to provide public awareness and educational programming around the prevention of child abuse and neglect and really how to create healthy and connected families to prevent the circumstances that give rise to child abuse and neglect, and every month they coordinate the strong family alliance members to help promote child safety and family supports using their website and other community events, social media, things like that. So the next slide talks about what the CAPPET services actually look like. They fund prevention programs. They utilize a multidisciplinary approach. Each of these 12 agencies are different agencies, have different area of focus. So they don't all provide the same things. It's not a, like an exact mirror or carbon copy of the services. So there really is kind of a diverse network of different kinds of support. The CBCAP services are provided primarily to support the coordination of these resources and activities. When they're better, we are a resource rich area in that regard. We have a very long standing prevention network that are very, very committed to providing services to families prior to needing like higher levels of intervention. And so they work really hard to coordinate those efforts so that everybody knows about them so they don't become underutilized for lack of anyone knowing that they exist. So to get a deeper dive into the kinds of services that the Caput providers provide, there are, I mentioned before, basic needs and concrete supports. Those are the kinds of supports that are things like, you know, help with rent support or help with childcare, finding resources for different types of needs that people have. Calico Center and International Rescue Committee are the two agencies that have a big significant focus on that. There are also behavioral health services, meaning like there be clinical support for families and those agencies listed there are the ones that have dedicated units of service for that. Case management, which generally helps people address the needs that they've identified, using community supports, information and referrals, pretty straightforward. They're a hub to call to find out where to go. Legal services are available through Calico Center. Parenting education also has a lot of different touchpoints in the county where people can get parenting support. A lot of coaching, it comes in the group format and a lot of coaching as well. There are also peer support programs where families can just build community amongst themselves, especially when being disconnected from your community can be its own risk factor, its own liability for children and families. And also the youth programs, these programs really target how to strengthen the youth community connections. You hear people talk about like a quality third place that's not home or school. What's the safe third place a child can go and get support? So the Strong Family Alliance is what I mentioned before, mostly a network of capet providers who provide these services. And the goal of Strong Family Alliance is to provide a cross referral process. Because what they found years ago was that they were all kind of working in silos, so they wanted to be able to know more about each other and cross-refer- refer to each other when they receive a client that has like a strength that has needs outside of their area of strain. So there are the next one, the next slide has the list, the website information, there's a QR code and and those are the links and handles on our social media. Child Abuse Prevention Month is this month and these are some of the activities that we sponsored through, for Child Abuse Prevention Month including We Are blue for kids Kids Day, and the Children's Memorial Day, which was just last Friday. Next, the community-based, this ARPA CBCAP, I am used to say, acron and the community based and the community based and the community based and the community based and the community based and the community based and the community based and the community based and the community based and the community based and the community of this year to provide concrete supports. So there are agencies in our county who will do the administrative work to access the funds and then they can get reimbursed through this fund. The real strategy here is that we've been able to provide case management and other kinds of supports. There's funding for that through the CAPIT and CB CAP, but what families were also identifying is that they needed really basic things like help with rent, help paying bills, help locating and paying for childcare, especially when there's a crisis or something that puts a family in a financial setback. So to be able to have this fund to provide these kinds of concrete supports to help close a gap and help them pull themselves out of a crisis is really we are very much looking forward to spending all that money by the end of the year. And so this just tells you a little bit about the process. We did have an RFP. The contracts began last December. And so they, the each contractor was awarded about $147,000 to administer the concrete supports. And that's a list of kind of the kinds of supports that families are looking forward to having things like rental assistance, bill payment, assistance car payment, car repairs, other basic needs that have been identified by families. And these are the contractors that can be contacted to provide those supports. Mandate reporting and community supporting is a movement that has been an initiative that has been gaining momentum throughout the state. The idea here is that we're trying to mitigate the damage that has been caused by mandated reporting. It has created systems of surveillance for families that has made it difficult for families to seek help when they actually need it. And so they're trying to amplify the opportunities to support a family through community-based supports and minimize the damage caused by a mandated report that may make a family feel fearful for seeking help when they need it. So there's the community supporting piece of that was there in order to develop the recommendations for this there is a statewide task force with subcommittees and as I mentioned, collect Catwala was on the statewide task force to help develop the recommendations. And then there were some key changes in the law that helped change the definition of what is reportable general neglect to clarify that poverty and parents economic disadvantage is not a mandated report to CPS, which is very different from what some of our community providers had an understanding of. And in lieu of that reporting, the idea of transitioning to community supporting, I think one of the things that we're asking providers to do is ask yourself when you become concerned about a family, not when should I call CPS, but rather who can I call to help this family? And since we have such a huge network of providers, I think it's a real opportunity to help market and scale up those possibilities. So there are trainings that have been provided by the Child Abuse Coordinator in this county, Colette Catwala, she developed trainings to help support mandated reporters. In addition to the mandated trainings that their organizations may provide, she provides some free of charge as part of their job description, but she also created some supplemental trainings that help these mandated reporters better discern who can be best positioned to help a family. This allows our child welfare agency to really focus on the intervention of child maltreatment and not be spread too thin addressing families that are in need of some assistance, but it doesn't necessarily need to come from the child welfare agency. The two, I meant, I just highlight the two examples of those trainings, one was called the four-reasonable suspicion. And then the other one is the impact after reporting. It just helps people have a better understanding of what happens when you make a child to be support and also what other options you have if you're not. If you don't need to make a child to be support, but you really wanna help help a family. The County Comprehensive Prevention Plan is born out of the Family Support Services Act. No, Family First Prevention Services Act from 2018 that allowed us to seek title for E-Dollars to fund prevention work when we hadn't really been able to have that accessible to us in the past. So the plan that we have focuses on supporting and empowering families through the engagement of both child welfare and juvenile justice systems, but also our community providers. And so we have developed a large network of stakeholders who have come together with us to help us plan. And this is really a scaling up of the work that Alameda County has done since 2007. So in 2007 we participated in the Title 4E waiver, which aimed to reduce the number of children in foster care in Alameda County. And we accomplished the school by better serving families without using the typical government systems to do that. We found that genuine engagement of the voices of lived experience in every step of our journey has helped our ability to respond better to families. as well as cross-sector collaboration. So we've done some active engagement with behavioral healthcare and probation in order to develop this plan. The stakeholders come together regularly and we think innovatively and we make concrete plans for next steps. We challenge systems to look at how our work and processes are experienced by the people we serve and then help to make adjustments and pivot so that where our services are more in alignment with our intent. The stakeholder meetings have increased our networking and relationship between the providers and there is a strong commitment to share the resources and identify community supports countywide. So we are in our plan is I want to say three phases. The first phase of our plan is this community pathway. And the community pathway is a scaling up of the current another road to safety program. Another road to safety program is a differentiated response program specifically differentiated response refers to helping a family or responding to a family in the community that may be exhibiting some risk issues but is not at the level that merits a child welfare agency response. So the prior to this prevention planning phase that we're in now, you could access those services mostly through a call to the hotline. of if the Child Abuse Reporting Hotline had gotten a report about a family, a path one referral would be to refer the family directly to another road to safety program right off the hotline. That's if the case does not merit an in-person response, it doesn't rise to the definition of needing an in-person child abuse response. In the path to, you can be referred to another road to safety program if we've actually made an in-person investigation but found that there is no abuser neglect that merits intervention. However, the family could use some assistance and we don't want the risk to get higher over time. So, and they agree that they could use some help. So we referred them to another road to safety. That's path two. The community pathway is the third pathway that was added as a result of the family first Presention Service, FFPSA, Family First Prevention Services Act. And that pathway allows staff, I'm sorry, allows community to refer directly to another road to safety program. And then the ARS program has its own intake process to assure that this isn't a family that really should be referred to us to our child abuse reporting hotline. But they also meet the criteria as being a potential candidate for entering child welfare if they don't address the risk at this low level. So we've just begun. In this last fiscal year, we just begun taking these referrals. We've only just begun marketing. The presence, the community of prevention providers is very excited. We have prioritized marketing to schools because the majority of our child abuse reports come from education providers in the county. And they also tend to have the lowest substantiation rates the schools do. But it's, you know, just for a variety of reasons. So to give them an opportunity to consider who else they could call besides the child welfare agency, that's where we've primarily focused, but we do and have made this available. So far we have, I want to say eight families that have accepted services so far. So, and they're all going very well. They're the only difference in the kinds of services they receive is just the pathway to getting to the agency. Once they're brought in, once they've gone through the intake process, the kind of service they get is the same as any family referred through Path 1 or Path 2. They get about six months worth of services. It's all voluntary and families have reported feeling for sure much more better off as a result. So it's a very high performing program and it has been for some time. So, that's it for me today. I'm not on that, but I again, I'm Brittany Walker-Petigrew. I'm a division director. My email address is w-a-l-k-e-b-b at a-c-gov.org. Thank you for stepping in and doing such a good job. Supervisor Fortune out of ass. Questions, comments? I'll just share a couple sets of questions. And thank you so much for stepping in, as Chair Tam said. Really great to hear about the program and the services, especially the more preventative early intervention services that are being provided. In terms of CAPIT, do we have data on the referrals made, especially for housing and are we tracking whether housing was found? Perhaps, but I don't know. Okay, Fine. If you don't know, I'll put it on your head. Yeah. That seems like important in terms of family stability. Yes. Housing, I mean, I can tell you that are another road to safety program talks anecdotally quite a bit about housing support. They've been fairly helpful at helping families find, or be able to have housing advocacy. A lot of times people have housing, but they're struggling with it, or they are struggling with the landlord or something like that. So they've been very helpful in those circumstances, but I don't have any actual data. Okay, thank you. And for Capit again, how much funding do we have for providers and how long have those contracts and how long have those contracts been in place? Are they multi-year and are you tracking the outcomes? I can't do the math, but each provider gets about $78,000 a year to provide the service they provide. Listening to the providers, they find that they're able to often reach a family that doesn't fit into the eligibility criteria for other services. So it's a great way of closing of closing some like holes in our safety net. That was the first question is 78,000 times 12. That's how much money is given to that. What's the next question? I was curious if you're tracking the outcomes for that work. We use a protective services, it's called. PSF, Blinken, protective factors survey. That's what it's called to track beginning and so that is tracked. And every, because it's hard to compare, you know, different services because they're all provide something different, but they do generally, their goal is to try to meet families exactly where they are. Families do report generally that they are better off, and they're often able to bridge them, after six months of services to something else, if not to their own community without any additional support from the agency to another program within their agency or another program in the county that can help. So we are tracking that. Don't have it off the top of my head. Thank you. And my last question, it's good to hear about the collaboration across divisions, departments, agencies. How does the child welfare agency collaborate with probation and behavioral health? We actually have very strong partnerships right now. Our probation collaborations have deepened over the last, I would say, eight to 10 years. And we have regular partnerships, I mean regular communication at a high level. There's a lot of noticing back and forth, especially at the senior management level when, you know, complex issues come up. We have ways of communicating with one another, staffing cases to strategize how to respond. So I would say those partnerships are very strong with behavioral health care. We are working on developing. The partnerships are very strong at the senior management level. And what we're doing in all areas is to try to help bring those partnerships down, if that makes sense, to so that at the supervisor level, people know how to connect with one another, that we build structure for that, so that it is not just related to like who knows whom. So, but I do think we have great working relationships. We are usually able to brainstorm around difficult, complex needs that come up for families. And in fact, because our prevention efforts are so effective, many of the families that do end up coming into child welfare or juvenile justice are families and youth and children that have like complex needs, the things that can be handled through resources and money are handled by our prevention network. So there's a higher need for us to collaborate and we do. Thank you. Just to follow up on that response, you said $78,000 a year per provider or you had $78,000 per month for the year or is it 12 providers? $78,000 per year for 12 providers. Okay, so it's 936,000. It's about a million dollars. Thank you. Yes, that sounds exactly right. I just have a couple questions because I did have a chance early on when I started to visit the Calcow Center, the one in San Leandro, and have a fairly extensive briefing from Their staff. Obviously, they get funding from all sources besides social service they get. Yes, also from law enforcement. So when they provide, so a lot of these agencies that I see on the list that are capet providers providers, they also get funding from other sources, it seems like. For example, as I mentioned, what portion do they really get that provides the basic needs for the supporters? Because they're more of a forensic organization. And then similarly, the International Rescue Committee, we provide a lot of funding for refugee and immigrant support. So I'm trying to like figure out are we categorizing certain types of services through the same agencies. The reason I'm asking is because when you go through a number of the programs that we're asking for homeless care and coordination, you see rental assistance pervasive throughout to help families from this sort of situation, whether it's trying to lift them up because of poverty issues, to child abuse cases. So how do we distinguish and determine that this funding is for specifically that program with an agency that does multiple, I guess, services among different agencies in the county. If I'm understanding your question, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, if I'm understanding your question, how can Calico Center, which does primarily forensic interviewing, like, what role do they play in providing basic needs and concrete supports, and how do use this funding. I would say it's true for every one of the organizations on here that they provide that service on some level across the spectrum and then families may fall into certain categories of eligibility through certain funding sources. And then where the providers have told me that there are families that just don't fall into one of those categories. They want to help them, they need this kind of help, but they don't meet, you know, XYZ eligibility criteria out of this funding. So they end up using their capet funding. They love the flexibility of the capet funding because it helps them serve families until they can figure out how to get them connected with an agency they're more connected to. So where I international rescue committees actually brand new capet providers. So we're still learning each other. I don't even think we've yeah, we're still learning what what can be delivered and leverage there. I know one of the things they are already moving in the space. And we've started to see more and more families who are struggling with the kinds of risks that if you can't meet your basic needs, you make risky decisions. And when you make a risky decision and and it could lead to child maltreatment, like their families who are able to identify that up front, but then they're even more fearful to seek help. So if they can go to another organization, that's not the child welfare agency, and get help. For example, I need to move suddenly because the police were at the house, and now I can't stay there. I need to move and find another room. And I've already paid rent in this one place. And because I don't feel comfortable like advocating to get my rent money back, I'm gonna have to move to this other place and I need help. You know what I mean? It's that kind of thing that helps us to move quickly. Calico Center also, a lot of the, they do a lot of victims of crime work. And so even though there's VOC funding available, sometimes that VOC funding takes a process and you need a certain eligibility criteria. And if you need a victim, like relocation services, like you need to be able to change your living situation or add more security to your current living situation or participating in the prosecution meant that you lost hours at work or whatever. It's those kinds of things that end up becoming a byproduct of their involvement with a case either in the prosecution or in the work of doing the interview process and the aftermath of it. So does a case manager kind of decide like where to pick resources from in terms of providing that care for that family or that child. Yeah, typically a family will self identify what their needs are. I mean, as a case manager, when I was a case manager, you would start with like, what does the family say they need? And then you would just try to figure out how you can get it. So you start with wherever they're identifying are their key needs and you start figuring out how to piece together funds or resources or connections that can help meet those needs and then it allows you to get to something deeper or more root cause issues but people cannot focus on root cause issues if they are worried about how to pay the rent. They're not going to participate in mental health services if they don't want to go to therapy and talk about how they can't pay the rent. They want to pay the rent and then they won't be as depressed. So I think that's why I would say like a lot of these agencies already operate in the space that they're doing. They have a niche level of support like I know East Bay Agency for Children has a lot of school-based services but they also have restorative justice programs and things like that. So when they provide their services, if they encounter a family that isn't quite neatly fit into those categories but has a need they use their capet funds to help meet that basic need until they can get them bridged to somewhere else. Okay, thank you. That's helpful. On the ARPA funds, the $736,000 or so. How much is left in that before we have to use it by the end of the year? A lot. A lot? Yes. We've only had a few ARPA right now. It got a late start. We had some fits and starts in trying to get the contracts done. So it took us a long time to get through the procurement process in order to get the agencies on board. It's even, there's still, we still rarely have this amount of money for concrete supports. People were, the providers were confused as to what we were even offering. So it took a long time to get the providers to understand what we were asking of them. And so it's, so we didn't really get our contracts done until December of this year, of last, last December. So what we've expect, we've had a few, but it's just getting the word out and we only really just begun doing that. There's a reason I was asking about that. So typically with ARPA funding, we don't want agencies to rely on it because it's usually one time we don't want them to fall off the physical cliff. And a lot of the programs that got funded, including safe passage, were actually seeking funding from the state now through legislative requests. So the funding that we're earmarking through ARPA, is it just a augment, the things they're already doing, or is it the pilot certain programs? It is both and. We, the ARPA grant possibilities could largely be used to do something like build the strong family alliance, which we already have. However, since we already have that, what all of those providers said they were lacking is funding for concrete supports. They usually have to engage in a lot of private fundraising to do that. So that's how they've been doing it all these years. So to have an opportunity to apply for this grant and in Alameda County because we have such a robust prevention network, we decided to ask for all of it on concrete supports because that was the area of the greatest need to that was the real opportunity we went for. So yes, it is this one time thing, but it is what our providers were asking for. And when we look at the research on providing concrete supports and how it mitigates the effects, the risk factors around child abuse and neglect, it is a good investment. And it would be worth it to be able to use the funds that we can leverage this year to see the impact and maybe use those the outcomes to perhaps advocate for more robust funding in that area if we invest in getting families what they need to address their basic needs. Time and again they'll be able to make safe decisions on behalf of their children. They'll be able to assure the safety and well-being of their children. So this is why we have this amount of money. And I personally looking at it, I'm thinking with the cost of living in this area, I didn't think it was going to last very long. So I feel like if we just help a few people out with rent, we'll be, that childcare is also very, very expensive for most families. And so it's just to be able to help folks out with those things. I feel like we'll get through it at the end of the year. Absolutely. I agree with you with respect to the escalating cost. It's calico one of the agencies that are applying for the concrete support funding. The ARPA CBCAP providers, the contractors are ESPE agency for children, bananas, which does primarily child care, La Familia, family support services, and safe passages. And all of these programs or programs that have longstanding reputation in the county, providing a variety of support, I've spoken to a few of these providers who have talked about the way that they have been able to provide concrete supports in the past is just by private fundraising they have to go and have gallows and things like that to get this so I imagine that's what they'll revert back to when this opportunity is over. But there it's not exclusively clients of their organization that can access this they just have to come there there. So let's say a person is working with one of the family resource centers, let's say it's highly. If one of those families needed like assistance with that kind of concrete support rent, housing, childcare, or something like that. A person, a case manager at Hydeley can contact one of these agencies and ask for assistance, you see. And then the agency, let's say it's family support services, will front the money to them to pay for this concrete need and then use the fund to reimburse themselves. Okay, so these are the five contractors and others would have to ask. And of these five contractors, you expect them to use up the full 736 by the end of the year. That is the hope. Yes. That's your plan. That is my plan. Use every penny of it. Okay. Just Calico asked me with me because they're having the same issues about sustainability and the cost of staffing increases and so I didn't know that. It is an ongoing. Yes, I mean the every provider and the community prevention network is having the same, they're obviously having the same challenges. And actually, one of the biggest challenges is the mindset that families who are struggling somehow deserve it and therefore aren't worthy of, you know, this kind of concrete support help because there are those in our community who view that as a handout that leads to dependency on these agencies. But our experience has been that when you help people invest and launch into their own resiliency, they actually don't want to stay connected and receiving these supports. They tend to give back to their own communities. Okay. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Do we have any public comment on this item? There are no speakers. Okay. Thank you so much. Let's move to the next item on the Foster Care program update. I have to note supervisors, my name is Jeff Somp, I'm a program manager with Alameda County Social Services Agency and I'm here with Melissa Figuerd. We'll be talking about what foster care looks like right now in Alameda County and just fill in in some details there. So focusing first on children age 0 to 17 sort of our traditional foster care population, we're currently serving right around 700 young people in through Alameda County. And most about 92 and a half percent of those youth that are in foster care, so who are separated from their family of origin, their parents, are in some other family setting. Most of them are with relatives, but community resource families refers to other foster homes, sort of what we traditionally think of as foster homes. Foster family agency homes are similar, just provided through nonprofits. A legal guardian is a caregiver. Many of them relatives, but not exclusively, who has made a long-term legal commitment to care for the child. And the short-term residential treatment program is the only group represented there that's not a family type setting. It's a congregate care setting with staff and it's therapeutic green ridge. So they have therapists on staff and often nurses as well that are helping children with emotional and behavioral problems get back to a place where they're able to succeed in a family setting. So it's meant to be a short-term intervention. And then additionally, we report up there about a quarter of all the children that we're working with are actually at home with their parents or guardians, but that's sort of separate from the foster care population. And then the, in, I think it was 2011, 2012 right around there, the state of California expanded foster care to include young people that were in foster care to younger age would historically have aged out at age 18, we realized developmentally, most young people are not really ready to succeed on their own at 18. So it's been expanded through their 20th year until they turn 21. Right now we're serving a little over 200 youth in that category. And you'll see the types of foster care that are used by this group are really different. They're clustered mostly in those last two categories. Transitional housing programs often what that looks like is an apartment that's shared with a roommate, which developmentally that's for a lot of people at age want to be. And supervised independent living placements are just a less structured environment. Sometimes it's with relatives or with friends, but it's some sort of living situation that the young person has chosen, and that we visit on a monthly basis to make sure that everything's safe and that they're doing OK. And so our young adults are choosing more sort of grown. And also it includes college dorms. But that's where a lot of those young people are. Focusing mostly on what we used to call foster homes and now we're referred to as resource family homes. We, one of the powers that Alameda County has is to evaluate and approve foster homes or resource family homes. This is a quick schematic of what that process looks like. We first do a lot of checking to make sure that the people associated with that home and the physical home itself are a safe place for children to be. And then we provide a lot of training to make sure that the applicants are gonna be excellent caregivers for the children who are in foster care. It's about 13 hours hold together of training that not just covers sort of the technical mechanics of foster care, but also the clinical realities, the sort of emotional realities of youth who are in foster care, who've often survived traumatic or really difficult circumstances, and may require experienced parents to learn new skills or step outside of what's comfortable in order to provide good care for those children. And then we also have an extensive family evaluation component where we do interviews with the various people in the home, especially the parents. And get character references really to try to understand what is it going to be like for a child living in this home. And we produce a written report, which is then available to any social worker who would place a child in that home. And this is sort of the results of our efforts for the last eight years while we've been under the current set of rules for resource family approval. So that started in January of 2017 and that lowest line on the graph shows how many homes per year we've approved. You'll see the numbers are a little bit higher in the first few years. A lot of that was converting old licensed foster homes into the current system of resource family homes. And then in current years, it's got a little bit lower. That has to do, I think, primarily with the number that you'll see, or the line you'll see at the top of the graph, which is how many children we have in foster care through Elimita County, and you'll see over that same period, it's been a pretty significant decline. It's actually a much longer trend of the past couple of decades. We've had fewer and fewer children in foster care as we've had really successful efforts to provide successful preventive services. And then the line in between there is cumulative total of how many foster homes we have approved through Alameda County and you'll see that number jumps up a lot at the beginning as we were converting the old homes to sort of the new homes. And now we're more or less at equilibrium. And when I look at this graph, I look at the tiny gap there between the of homes we have, the number of youth, we have, and it's helpful to remember that many of the homes that we have actually have capacity for more than one child. So if we were counting beds instead of homes, we'd probably have more than we have children, but that doesn't mean that they're always well matched. Many of these homes are actually relatives who became approved for a particular child that's in foster care. So they're not looking for just any child to stay in their home. They're really wanting to focus on a particular individual. It's also issues of geography or language or age range of the child and what the foster parents are motivated in terms of who they want to care for. But that's an aggregate what we're looking at in terms of our foster care resources and the children who need them. And that's, so that was sort of how we've been doing over the last few years. This is more about where we're headed. So we have joined a demonstration project with CDSS and some community partners to focus on further enhancing our performance with getting relatives to provide foster care to youth. In California, Alameda County is a leader in this area. Our statistics relative to other counties and statewide performance are excellent. And we think we can do even better. And so we're looking at a variety of efforts, including pretty aggressive family finding through contracted agencies to help make sure that children who have to be away from their parents have the option of being with extended family. And that happens to coincide with federal work to create a separate streamlined process to make it easier for relatives to be approved as foster care providers quickly. And while we're doing that, we still need to comply with existing federal law, including the Multiethnic Placement Act, which requires consistent recruiting for homes that reflect the diversity of the young people that we serve. We have a full-time resource parent recruiter of the talented Miss Flescher Brown who is out there in the community talking to folks that show any interest in encouraging them to apply with our county to become resource parents. And she's also a leader in some statewide efforts to coordinate between counties, share best practices between recruiters to try to get as many foster parents as we can for youth that we serve. And I'll turn it over to Melissa. Thank you, Jeff. Good afternoon. I'm Melissa Fiegerger. I'm the program manager of placement services with the department. So my staff or staff at finding homes who require out of home care. And I'm also the site manager for Alameda County's transitional shelter care facility. Today I'll be providing some updates regarding our transitional shelter care facility and also sharing a little bit of the work that we've been doing to increase emergency housing capacity in our county. So in July of 2024, our transitional shelter care facility in Hayward closed its operations. We are now the owner of a wonderful property in Castro Valley that will serve as our new transitional shelter care facility. Much like our previous location, the new location will be licensed, it will be confidential, and it will be an unlocked facility to serve our children youth and non-minor dependence. A non-minor dependent is a young person ages 18 to 21. We will continue our partnership with West Coast Children's Clinic to provide the day-to-day care and operations, clinical services, mental health assessments for our youth. We'll also continue our partnership with the Alameda County Public Health Department where we will have a public health nurse on site to meet the needs medically for any of our youth. And we'll also continue our partnerships with community-based organizations, Missy, who are on site once we reopen. And then also the Youth Acceptance Collaborative, which provides support and services to our LGBTQIA plus youth and community. We will continue to operate under the 72 hour time frame meaning that we strive to get every young person transitioned out of our facility within 72 hours. Our placement staff work really hard to meet that mandate. There are times depending on the youth's complex needs where it takes a little bit longer, but the majority of our youth are transitioned out by the 72 hours. As a licensed facility, there are three state mandates that we must meet. The first is to ensure that any children that arrive to the transitional shelter care facility ages 0 to 6 are there because they have no other options. We make a really good effort, as you've heard before, to place our children with relatives and kin and any children of this age 0 to 6. We really want to make sure that we've explored all other options before they come to our transitional shelter care facility. The second mandate that we are required to meet is that we reduce our reliance on the transitional shelter care facility. And what this means is that our facility really should be the last resort or any youth and young adults who have nowhere else to go. And finally, we want to reduce the number of youth that remain past 72 hours, also known as an overstay. And we have made incredible strides in meeting all three of these mandates over the last three years. And we have made incredible strides in meeting all three of these mandates over the last three years. And we continue to to continue to meet these mandates moving forward once our new transitional shelter care facility opens up. One of the other ways that we have been reducing our reliance on the transitional shelter care facility is our recruitment efforts to recruit community members to become resource family homes in our county. Some of the things that we have done is as I mentioned really focusing on kin, really focusing on relatives that are available to support youth that are being placed into protective custody. We also have a goal of engaging our 50 or so inactive resource family homes to see if they would be willing and able to become active again and particularly serving our older youth and our teen population. What we have found over the years is that our hardest population to place right now is our teens, particularly our teen girls ages 12 to 17. And so we're really making every effort to try and encourage community members and placement providers to receive this particular population of youth. We've also been offering emergency stipends. And what this does is that it allows a caregiver if they are able to accept a placement within hours of receiving a call from a placement worker on my team. And these stipends have been very beneficial and very successful in securing placements, particularly when our transitional shelter care facility is currently on diversion. So in addition to the recruitment efforts, in addition to these stipends, we have established a number of partnerships throughout the community to enhance our emergency placement resources. We currently partner with Refuge to provide six overflow beds, which is a 72 hour temporary placement for male and female ages 12 to 17. We also have established four emergency beds for our younger population ages 3 to 12 for both male and female. In addition, we have secured four emergency beds at Refuge STRTP for youth that are already approved for a short-term residential treatment program level of care, which is pretty much the highest level of care that we can place a young person in, as well as four emergency beds at Lighthouse. We're really excited because this summer we're hoping to finalize a contract with alternative family services for an additional 10 emergency beds. If we are successful in securing this contract, it will bring our total number of emergency resources. family services for an additional 10 emergency beds. If we are successful in securing this contract, it'll bring our total number of emergency resource beds to 28. And that is almost the same number that our previous location had the capacity to serve, which was 30 youth. So we are very hopeful in securing this partnership this summer. And finally, in addition to the recruitment events, we've also participated in several town hall meetings with Supervisor Hobburt and Supervisor Marquez in really getting the word out about the need for resource homes, the needs of foster youth and the targeted support for our resource families. So with that, Jeff is going to speak a little bit about some of the ways that we appreciate our county resource parents. I had to put in a quick plug for our caregiver appreciation dinner. Hopefully everyone's gotten their invitations. The event this year will be on May 16th, the double tree in Pleasanton. And we come together for one night and tell our resource parents that we love them and that we just could not do this work without their support. Many of the resource parents bring the kids they're carrying for along and everyone enjoys a nice dinner together. Members of the community, a lot of businesses contribute. Gift baskets, which were able to sort of raffle off and everyone just has a really nice time. And fortunately, supervisors Howard and Mark Kessery able to join us the last couple of years and we'd love for anyone else who can to come celebrate with us. That's it. Thank you. We did get the invitation and I will be there. Survivor, fortune out of pass. Questions? Thank you. We did get the invitation and I will be there. Thank you. I'm advisor for to not pass questions. Thank you. Thank you so much for your work as well as the presentation. I'm also looking forward to the event. I have just a couple questions. So maybe starting first with the data. So 21% of youth are placed in foster family agencies. I've been hearing about high insurance costs. Is that an issue that has been coming up and if so, what is currently being done to address that? Yeah, so we are definitely hearing from our FFA partners about their insurance costs. We are not in Alameda County home to very many FFAs. A lot of them are centered elsewhere in the state. I've been hearing from sister counties about their FFA's closing We have one FFA well we have two FFA's right now that are impacted one of them is very very tiny And just had a handful of homes the other one Is working really hard to sort things out with their insurer for the time being they're not closing. It's a better way, FFA, but they are working with their resource family homes to transfer over to other FFA's or to the county. It's actually one of the benefits of the RFA regime that came on in 2017 is that all foster homes in California have the right and the ability to take their approval and move to another agency or to a county. So we are currently working with, I want to say, about 12 homes across that organization and a few others that are trying to come over to us right now and we're happy to work with them. Thank you. And then my other question is about the transitional shelter care facility. So I know it well first it's good to hear that there's been progress over the past three years and with the opening of the Castro Valley facility and the beds that were mentioned, there'll be a lot more capacity. So I am aware that over the past few years there have been a number of instances of supposed overstays, sometimes well overstays as well as allegedly some youth who've experienced homelessness. And so I am interested in hearing about compliance with AB 2083 and the implementation of the MOU that's supposed to outline the roles and responsibilities with various agencies. That was something that I recall last year, two of our legislators asked for an audit of. So it sounds like we're making progress and I would like to hear specifically about the progress being made and the status of that potential audit. So we're in compliance with 283 we've been meeting as a county for several years. We are in the middle of that audit currently. Sorry, could you say that one more time? We are in the middle of the requested audit currently. Yeah. I could tell you offline, but we have to limit what we say publicly. That's good to hear. I mean, from the reported sounds like there's progress, good to hear. We're in compliance. Yeah, we've been in compliance. I think sometimes there's confusion for people understanding the purpose of 2083 in terms of collaboration with system partners regional center and the office of education and truly understanding the intention of that committee But we've been meeting and now we have an executive committee With the department directors at Andreas level and her peers. So. Great, thank you. Any other comments? Can you pull up slide five? I just want a better understanding of sort of the resources and how we're matching them. So you mentioned that, I know the prints kind of small, but let me try to make sure I understand it. It is small. So the top mine in 2024 peaks up at 711 and then the middle line, which is a number of approved RFA homes, are at 650, but she said that that gap is not that significant because you get multiple kids in a home. So we're talking about like 61 which is not a significant amount in your in your mind. But what about the gap between the middle line and the bottom one? Yeah. The bottom one just shows throughput. So that's how many homes per year were approving. But as we're approving homes, some of the people who are currently foster care providers are choosing to stop. Sometimes it's because they adopted a child and they've completed their family and they're not interested in providing more foster care. Sometimes they were caring for a relative and that relative goes home to their parents. And so they're done. There's a variety of circumstances where that happens. So the bottom line is just how many per year we're doing. And the middle line is as a total at the end of each year, how many approved foster homes we have. OK, because I, um, I have also heard the same thing about how, um, I think surprise or fortune out of acid, the number of, uh, foster homes that we were able to find and place have been challenging, um, especially given the cost of housing in the county. But oh, yeah. Well, so I should say this is part of the story, right? Because there was a foster care regime before 2017, where we had licensed foster homes, which is different than the current system. And I don't represent those numbers here because they're kind of hard to sort out. But we used to have way more foster homes, but we also had a huge foster care population. Going back just about 20 years, we had about 5,000 youth in care. And so of course we had a lot more homes because we had to meet that need. So right now our number of foster homes is declined a lot, but that's proportional to the number of kids that need care. Okay, that's helpful to understand. Just following up on a couple questions that surprise your fortunate to ask. So the difficulty in securing insurance because you were saying that's really hard to place teenage girls between 12 and 17. Is Is it because of the SEM liability that got extended with the law in 2020 that it's difficult for some of these facilities to get insurance? So I'm no expert on FFA insurance, but yes, that's my understanding that's what I've been told. The difficulty in getting placements for that age group has more to do with their developmental behaviors than anything else. The insurance, we do have, you find more property damage the older a youth can happen. And so the same way insurance providers are cracking down on homes in fire areas. They're also cracking down where there is likely to be a claim. And the older youth is, I mean, we've had you do upwards of $15,000, $16,000 damage in a foster home before. And so insurance providers are just trying to, I guess, they solve it by not paying out claims. So this is just a high risk area to do climbing. Okay. So it's not related to no old liability. Now older youth are hard to place because typically an older youth has been in care longer and the longer you are in care, you develop more complicating factors, more trauma from being in foster care. And then you add that with the developmental issues of being a teenager. Yes, I can understand that. On the question about the assessment center in Castle Valley, is that open yet? We are not yet open. The department has done everything that we needed to do for our license. So we submitted our program statement which outlines the policies and procedures. We are, there are two properties on the location and we are close to securing the fire alarm system that is needed for our fire clearance. And once we have our fire clearance, then the state can come back out to do a final walk through to issue our provisional license. At that point, we hope to be able to serve you in that first home. And we're working on the same procedure for the second home that's on the property. But we're not yet open. Are you expecting to move in by the end of the year? I'll take that question. It supervise, yes, there is an expectation we will move into the first home. Before the end of the year we're working very closely with GSA. So most of the work has with her with GSA, Alameda County Fire and Public Works. But as an agency we have and we continue to do all we can, it's going to top of that opening. Because we have some control over the fire permitting, right? Yeah, it's with those agencies that agencies that just mentioned, a public works, Alameda County Fire and GSA, building maintenance department. Okay, tell us if you need us to light a fire. Yeah, Michelle and I met with supervisor Halbert earlier this morning and he echoed the same sentiments. Thank you. Last question is just to follow up on the audit. I know that we had a joint meeting with a number of providers. It's been about a year and a half, right? September. I think it was in September 2023. Right. 2023. So, some of those providers want to continue that dialogue. And I think we had talked about it in prior social services community that there are forms in which they are present do Are those same providers that we met with back in September? Getting updates on where we're at with the audit and and moving forward how they can continue to be part of the discussion with our strategic planning. Yeah, when we last had our joint health social services agency meeting, Michelle, did provide an update. And also at that time I mentioned that Matthew from the behavioral health collaborative attends that meeting and the expectations that he would provide the group with an update because he's there to represent the entire group. We had our meeting last week. Matthew was there that topic didn't come up because we had other agenda items, but once again that is the expectation is that the updates will come from him. But once we meet again next month, I'll make sure that I find out what the status of his communication with him is. And if I could add Matthew came to our meeting on Friday and we came up with three areas we will focus on and we told him we would invite him back to that committee in 60 days. So he'll be giving updates from our committee as well on the areas we identified that he can take back to the Alliance. So that's very good to know. Thank you for that follow-up. That's all the questions I have. Are there any public comments on this item? There are no speakers. Okay hearing none. Let's go to the CalFresh program update. Thank you. We're're gonna welcome Roland Schau to the podium to provide our annual Cal Fresh program update Good afternoon vice president, supervisor Fortana Bass. My name is Roland Schau. I am one of the program specialists for the CalFresh program for the Workforce and Benefits Administration. Today we're going to go over just a brief, hopefully brief update of our CalFresh program. We're going to start with an overview of the CalFresh program leading up to our CalFresh awarenessness month activities, then we'll follow up with our Sunbuck's Boat 2024 and 2025 recap. We also will talk about our restaurant meals program, RMP, and then we'll also talk about our A-BOD, A-BODied adults without dependence, and then we'll talk about our EBT Electronic Threat update. And finally, to round things out, we'll go over some of our CalFresh program data. So just to give a brief overview, CalFresh is federally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP. It is the largest food assistance program in California, and it does serve as a hunger safety net for millions of Californians. Unofficially or previously we have proven by other names such as the Food Stamps program, but in California we do go by CalFresh. CalFresh does provide eligible individuals and their households that they purchase a pair of meals with, with electronic benefits to purchase foods at grocery stores and markets. For CalFresh, we have a 30-day period to process applications, but every application that we receive in Alameda County, we do screen them to see if they qualify for expedited service, which means we will, if they are ES or expedited service entitled, we will grant them that months benefits within three business days. Sorry, three calendar days. Also, CalFresh benefits, they are loaded onto an EBT card, which looks and functions similar to a debit card. So that's why we kind of shift away from the whole food stamps previous name because we no longer use stamps. We've kind of modernized how CalFresh works and functions. And you're interested individuals can apply either by phone, mail, facts in person at our six office locations throughout Alameda County and also online at BenefitsCal.com. Next we'll talk about our CalFresh Awareness Month. Every year the state of California celebrates CalFresh Awareness Month. Counties can have their own themes or they can participate in a general CalFresh Awareness Month campaign with California Department of Social Services. Here in Alameda County for the past 12, 13, ever since I've been here. Since we've started celebrating CalFresh Awareness Month, Alameda County has developed its own theme each year. It's a theme that we try to change every year. We want to target a specific niche within the CalFresh program. And so for this upcoming May 2025, our CalFresh Awareness Month theme is increased your food dollars. We came to that idea based on insights we took from the recent elections, also polls from voters and individuals throughout the county, kind of what their concerns are. We learned that rising food costs, inflation, those are some of the key items that have been on the forefront of everyone's mind. So we feel that this theme will serve as a strong call to action to not only raise awareness for CalFresh, but also to have interested individuals apply. During CalFresh Awareness Month, there are three goals. These three goals are the overall CalFresh Awareness Month, whether it's in our county or statewide. The first is to raise public awareness of the CalFresh program. Again, a lot of folks may not know CalFresh as well. They may know it as SNAP or as food stamps. So we want to raise awareness of CalFresh awareness. The second is to dispel myths surrounding the CalFresh program. A lot of times we hear a lot of inaccurate rumors and myths that can cause individuals some hesitation in applying. Some of these would include that if I'm a legal permanent resident, if I apply for CalFresh, it's going to impact my legal standing or my odds of becoming a U.S. citizen. Those are false. Since 2019, we've changed the rules so that if you are receiving SSI or SSP benefits, you are potentially eligible for CalFresh benefits. The third goal of CalFresh Awareness Month is once we've raised awareness and dispelled these myths, we want to help eligible residents apply for CalFresh. And so every year we partner with the Alameda County Community Food Bank along with local community-based organizations throughout the county to help us without reach, to help us spread the word, dispel the myths and rumors that may be pervasive within the communities. We want to stamp that out and encourage everyone to apply. And so on the right hand side, that's just our latest graphic of a fly that we have developed for this year's campaign. Also for CalFresh Awareness Month, we're very fortunate in this county that we are pretty innovative. Every year we try to do something that will attract a lot of attention and get the message out about cow fresh. And so this year we are doing a Bart takeover as we call it of the Lake Merit station. We're also working on a second station at the Hayward location but more to come on that as we kind of settle on the details of that. But essentially what this bar takeover is going to consist of is at the Lake Merit station, everywhere that generally would be an advertisement in that station, that's 102 advertisement spaces. We are going to take all the advertisements down, beginning May 6th, and we're gonna be putting up all of our CalFresh Awareness Month posters and advertisements with flyers to kind of raise awareness and we have mockups here of what that is going to look like. And so although CalFresh Awareness Month is in May, we do get the bar takeover. Originally it was set for I think it was supposed to be only three months but we got additional months for free so now it's going to be extended through August 25th. Next, we're going to talk about our 2024 Sunbucks campaign that wrapped up. So just as a brief overview, Sunbucks is a federally funded food program that's separate from the CalFresh program. It is administered by the California Department of Social Services and counties are mainly responsible for sharing information about the Sunbucks program and to direct interested families to the CDSS website for Sunbucks. So as part of the 2024 Sunbucks campaign, eligible children received $40 per month or $120 total for the months of June, July, and August 2024 on a separate Sunbucks card that looks and functions just like a CalFresh EBT card or a debit card. All of the 2024 Sunbucks cards have been mailed out. The last cards were mailed out by late December of 2024. That's important to note because the benefits on the sunbucks card do have an expiration date. They expire 122 days after the card issuance date. So depending on when the cards were mailed out because there was such a wide time frame of when those cards were being mailed out to the I think it was 5.6 million eligible children. We do recommend that if you still have a sandbox card and you're not sure when the expiration date is to call the number on the back of the sunbooks card that's the sunbooks hotline to see when your benefits will expire. On the right hand side, this is a preliminary statewide report out from the California Department of Social Services on the 2024 Sunbuck's campaign. So approximately 77% of all of the cards that have been sent out have been pinned. That's 4.3 million sunbucks cards. That's out of a total of again 5.6 million. Of those 4.3 million cards that have been pinned as a total of 517 million dollars worth of sunbucks benefits that again function and serve just like cow fresh benefits to use to purchase groceries and foods at grocery stores and markets. Of that 517 million approximately 97% of that has been spent. This is as of April 6th of this month. So it's about just under $500 million. So that's really good in terms of we're seeing great usage out of the folks that are actually using their sunbucks cards. For 2025, we did just find out earlier this month that the United States Department of Agriculture, USDA, Food and Nutrition Services, they have approved the state's 2025 plan for sunbucks, so we will be enacting Sunbuck's June 1st of 2025 through September 1st of 2025. The benefit allotment is still going to be the same. It'll still be $120 for the three months of June August or June July and August. Again, a total of $120 or $40 per month. The way that children will be eligible for sunbooks, there's two paths. The first is the streamlined certified eligibility that CDSS has named it. This is for children that are between the ages of six to 18 and they're participating in a public benefits program such as CalWORKS, CalFresh, MediCal, or they're between the ages of 0 to 22 and they're attending a school or a certified national school lunch or school breakfast program and they're approved for free or reduced meals. So CDSS will automatically be using data from CalSaus, which is what we use to determine CalFresh, CalWorks and Medical eligibility, or CalPADS, which is the California Department of Education database that tracks the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs. All other children that aren't automatically directly streamlined certified, They will need to apply. That's children between the ages of 0 to 22 that may be attending a school that's certified for National School Lunch or Breakfast Program. But for one reason or another, either they submitted their application after CDSS has pulled the data to see who's automatically eligible or their application was still in pending and it hasn't been approved yet. On the right hand side this is the latest income requirements beginning July 1st of 2025 through June 30th. This is essentially the limits for either free or reduced price meals for households depending on the sizing on the left column there. Continuing with our 2025 Sunbuck's program, the CDSS still estimates that we're still gonna be serving approximately 5.6 million of that 5.6 million, 4.4 million, just a little under 80%, will be streamlined certified. So again, this is the group that will not need to submit an application for sunbooks. Their eligibility is automatically going to be determined based off of data pull from CalSaus and CalPads. That leaves 1.1 million children approximately that will have to apply for sunbucks for 2025. The cards, they are going to be will receive one sunbuck's card under their name. So if there's a family that has two eligible children, they will receive two cards one under each child's name. And similar to 2024, the sunbuck's benefits will expire within 122 days from the date of issuance on the card. Rollin, can I interrupt just for a second? Yes. On the Sun Box issue. Oakland Thrise recently was asked to consider supplementing the summer school lunch program in Oakland. And it sounds like these kids would normally get or they would be eligible for sun box at the $120. Yes, so they can still receive summer meals. This will not impact whether or not a child is receiving summer meals or not. This is in addition to that, so if they are receiving those summer meals from other organizations. So I think the issue was I, because of potential USDA federal funded cuts that they may not get the school lunch program in the summer but they will still have the Sun Box card, right? Correct. So the latest that we've heard is this is already a bit pre-approved by USDFNS. So the funds are there and they will be given out sunbooks. In terms of, I think you're talking about the school lunch during the summer, like a separate program, not the additional benefits, that we haven't heard any updates about. So I can't say for certain what the current situation is regarding the availability. We have heard rumors that those funding was being cut, but I don't think we've seen anything. We haven't heard anything from the state on that. Thank you. Get that answer to your question, supervisor. Yes, I mean, it sounds like the kids would get $120, even if the program got cut and they could use that for buying groceries, each kid in the household. And this is on top of programs that the family may be getting, right? Correct. Or CalFresh. Yeah, so this is separate of CalFresh. The benefits here that you receive from Sunbugs don't impact CalFresh eligibility and vice versa. So this is strictly whether or not the child is receiving more eligible for Sunbugs. They're going to get the Sunbugs, the $120 for those three months. In light of the concern that Oakland has with the uncertainty over the school lunch program being funded, would we be able to do like a special outreach to make sure these kids apply for the sunbucks card? So we we definitely can do outreach. Last year we did do outreach as well but I think a large majority of children will be directly certified so they don't even need to apply so that's kind of the good thing about Sunbuck. So it's about 80% that CDSS is estimating based off of 2024's results were about 80%. I think 77% of children were automatically enrolled for this. So we do do outreach both at a county level but also at a state level. and so we definitely will be doing some outreach towards the summer months before this kicks off to let folks know whether that they may potentially be automatically, their children might be automatically eligible for these for some bucks or that they may need to apply. And then they should reach out to their school districts because their school districts will have the applications for them if they need to apply. Thank you. Next we'll talk about our CalFresh Restaurant Meals program, also known as RMP. So RMP allows CalFresh individuals to use their CalFresh benefits to purchase prepared meals at participating restaurants. Most CalFresh households, if they don't qualify for RMP, they have to purchase uncooked and like non-hot meals, so they usually would purchase groceries produce. But for individuals that receive RMP, they can go to participating restaurants and buy hot prepared meals with their cow fresh benefits. There is a change coming to the RMP beginning May 19th, so next month, all household members, excluding their spouses, will be required to be RMP eligible, which means they would have to either be aged, which is 60 or older, blind, disabled, and or homeless. That's everyone in the household, again, excluding the spouses prior to this. So currently that the rules for RMP are a little bit different. Currently, you just needed one person in your household that had to be age blind or disabled or homeless to qualify for RMP. But again, beginning May 19th due to policy change or clarification. That's why the RMP eligibility requirements are changing. A full list of the participating R&P locations can be found online at cdss.ca.gov slash R&P. Here in Alameda County we have last I checked it was 91 participating restaurants throughout the county. For any restaurant owners, businesses that are interested in accepting R&P benefits from our CalFresh recipients, They can sign up online at cdss.ca slash RMP slash partners. Next, I also wanted to touch on the A-BOD or the A-BODied adults without dependence update. So A-BODs, again, they are a subset of our CalFresh recipients. And that's kind of what that graphic on the right is showing. That first outer circle, that is everyone that's receiving CalFresh. Within that population, we have a smaller subset who are work registrants. And then within that subset, we have our A-bots. And then even further within that subset, further refined, these are our A-bots that are subject to the time limit. They do not meet an exemption from the A-bots time limit. And so typically A-bots are, we're defining them as between the ages of 18 to 54. They are able to work and they do not have any children in their household that under the age of 18. A-bots, if they don't meet the work requirement or meet an exemption, the work requirement is 20 hours per week or an average of 80 hours per month. If they don't meet that work requirement or they don't meet an exemption, then they would be limited to three full months of CalFresh within a 36-month time frame. We currently are on a A-BOD time limit exemption, so that exempts all Californians from the work requirement. That was set to expire October 31st of 2025. However, this past January, we received an approval for a two-year extension. So now our A-BOD time limit waiver is now extended through July 31st of 2027. So again, that's just to reiterate that we don't have a work requirement for receiving CalFresh at least through January 31st of 2027. Next, we're going to talk about our EBT electronic theft update, just an overview of CalFresh EBT theft. The federal policy allows households to receive up to two months worth of replacement cow fresh benefits for electronically stolen benefits. Households are limited to two replacements within each federal fiscal year, which runs from October 1st of the current year through September 30th of the following year. In order to submit a claim for CalFresh reimbursement of EBT electronic theft, households do need to submit the form EBT 2259 within 90 calendar days of the date of theft. We used to have a 10-day reporting requirement, but that has been removed, so it's now just submitting that form within 90 days. Additionally, as part of our EBT theft mitigation strategies, statewide and also within the county, we highly recommend all EBT card holders to download the EBT edge mobile application. There are, we are aware that there are other third party applications that function similar to what the EBT edge mobile application does however we strongly discourage people from downloading those applications as we cannot verify this safety and privacy and security of Individuals information being protected by those other third party apps the EBT edge mobile application was developed by CDSS and with FIS Global which is the servicer, the producer of the EBT cards. And so on the right hand side I have two graphics, the top one. This is a look back of our CalFresh EBT theft reports that we received. It goes back all the way through September of 2023. You can kind of see we've had a good decrease, a decreasing trend in CalFresh reported EBT thefts. It has started to pick up again and kind of ebbs and flows. But we are at a place where we are receiving less EBT thefts than we did when we first experienced the widespread eBT theft that was going on. And then below that, we have the QR codes for both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store for the eBT edge mobile application that is developed by CDSS and FIS Global. Other strategies to mitigate EBT theft in Alameda County, we receive a month, a list each month, of suspected fraudulent activity tied to an EBT account. Typically Typically this is someone, the same phone number calling about a different number of cards. So it's the same phone number calling, inquiring on the balance of 25, 30, 40 cards. We will flag all of those cards that that person is calling about and that will be put on a list of suspicious activity. We will then match those card numbers to our CalFresh recipients, and then we will send them a robocall text or email that they've opted into the latter to warn them that there may be potentially suspicious activity tied to their EBT account, and that we recommend they either request a new eBT card or they at the very least change their pit number. This messaging goes out at the end of each month because CalFresh benefits are loaded within the first 10 days of each month. So we want to make sure that we capture every warning people before the first issuances go out for the following month. strategies that have been developed statewide as of February 24, 2025, we implemented the new chip and tap EBT card. So previous prior to this, all EBT cards, you had to swipe them at the terminals when you're purchasing groceries. The new EBT card now has been modernized, so it has the chip and tap features. These features will only work if the retailer at the stores, if their cards have been, their card ring machines have been updated. The companies that make these machines have already told us and the state that they have put out all of the necessary updates to the machines. So it's really on retailers to either download the updates or if their machines are too old that they need to eventually upgrade to new machines that can accept chip and tab. For existing card holders, the California Department of Social Services is currently in phase two out of three phases with replacing EVT cards that have the previous non-chip and tap versions. Phase one, we replaced everyone's cards that had an active CalFresh and cash account. Currently phase two is just everyone that has an active cash account only. And then phase three will be replacing card holders that have only an active CalFresh account on their EBT. And next we're gonna go over our CalFresh program data and just to note that the data that's referenced in these next slides are pulled and accurate as of February 2025 unless stated otherwise. So we'll start with our caseload data. So as of February 2025, there are approximately 112,000 CalFresh households that we're serving that equates to about 177,000 CalF individuals. And on the graphic below, we have that distribution by district of the number or percentage of recipients within each district. There is one that's not applicable. And that's about less than 1%, I think, it was about 0.7%. And those are our individuals that are currently transitioning from Alameda County to another county. And so we will update their address and they were just waiting for the county that they're moving to to confirm with us that they have received all the necessary information and they can assist the client in their county. Next, we have, again, this is our caseload, but this is a one year lookback at our caseload on the left-hand side. This is our one year lookback for a caseload, and then on the right-hand side, this is the number of recipients. So they generally will match up pretty closely in the overall trend or direction of the graph. And so if you look at the graphs, you will see that for the most part, we have been trending upward month over month. It's just the most recent one. We have this little bit of a downturn. It looks pretty severe, but in actuality, the caseload on the left-hand side, it's a decrease of about 1,000 cases between January 2025 and February 2025, and on the CalFresh recipients on the right-hand side, that is a decrease of approximately 2,500 individuals. So this next one will take a look at the demographics of our CalFresh recipients, starting with our top, our gender. That is approximately 56% identified as female, that's the green, and 44 identify as male. Below that is our age ranges. 50% of our cal fresh recipients are between the ages of 18 to 64 below that at 27% that is our 0 to 17 age range and then below that are shortest bar that is our seniors that are 64 and older or 64 plus or 65 and older. On the right hand side top, that is our language preference. The top bar that is our preferred or our clients reported preferred language that's English as the top, followed by Spanish, Cantonese, other which is all or the language is not listed. Vietnamese, Mandarin, and lastly, Farsi. Below that is our ethnicity breakdown. The top bar is our largest, it is unknown or no response because the ethnicity is a question on the application that applicants do not have to answer. It's on a mandatory question, so they're free to leave a blank and most do leave that response blank. But after that our next most populous are Hispanic, followed by Black or African American, other, and then Chinese, wider Caucasian, Vietnamese, and Filipino. Next we're going to discuss our homeless demographics and our SSI recipient demographics. And so just to be clear, these are CalFresh recipients that are reporting as homeless and receiving SSI, not the total population of homeless within Alameda County. So of our approximately 112,000 calFresh households, 12,000 are reporting as homeless, and that's about 15,000 individuals. So it's about 8.5% of our total CalFresh individual that we're serving are reporting as homeless. And then we have the breakdown below and green for our homeless individuals and homeless households as split up by district and then on the right hand side we have our SSI recipients that are receiving how fresh about 25,000 cases or caseloads and 29,000 individuals that's about what is that like? I don now? 16% of our individual, our individual recipients are receiving SSI. And so again, we have that breakdown below and we do have about approximately 1% in the non-applicable. Those again are individuals that are moving out of Alameda County to another county. And so they have a zip code listed in our CalSauce system that's not conforming to one of the five districts here in Alameda County. Next, we'll talk about our benefit allotments. And so to reiterate what a CalFresh household is, a CalFresh household is anyone that lives together and they regularly purchase, prepare their meals together. The benefit amount that each household receives is dependent on the household size, that household's income and the expenses that they have and claim. There is a type along this one. The greater than sign should actually be than sign. Should be flipped, but most households total gross monthly income has to be equal to or less than 200% of the federal poverty level. 200% of the federal poverty level for October 1st, 2024 through September 30th, 2025 is that middle column on the graph on the right or the chart on the right. And that also breaks down, just goes from left to right based off of their household side. And that rightmost column that is the maximum benefit that they can receive. It's important to note that the maximum benefit or the benefit amount someone receives will vary based off of each case's unique circumstances. The average CalFresh monthly benefit this past February 2025 was $310 per household. And to show kind of what that means economically locally, the total number of CalFresh benefits that we as a county issued out in February was equivalent to 33.8 million dollars. If we do a one year look back of the total issuance from March of 2024 to February, these 12 months we have issued out a total of approximately $397 million in CalFresh benefits. That's an average of 33.1 million per month. The economic impact on this, you would think that if we issued out $397 million, that means the impact is $397 million for the county. But in actuality, it's actually closer to $611 million dollars a year economic stimulus for the county or $51 million per month. And that's based off of the USDA's estimation that every dollar and cow fresh benefits will generate $1.54 in local economic activity. That's because recipients are using their benefits within the county. That benefits typically are seen at grocery stores, farmers markets, which can help drive up not just the economic activity, but also lead to job growth. These are all benefits, but keep in mind that these are bonuses. We like to say on top of the true purpose of CalFresh, which is to help CalFresh individuals, recipients, applicants, be able to purchase healthy foods for themselves and their families. And that concludes my presentation. I'll take any questions. Thank you, Surveys, or fortune, or a bass? Thank you. I'll try to be brief given that time, but this was a very comprehensive presentation. And also for me as a new supervisor, a great introduction to CalFresh. Firstly, you mentioned that sunbucks is pre-approved for the totality of the programs that you described or any of them under threat in terms of the state or federal budget? Currently they're not. The the Sunbuck's plan has been approved from the latest meeting that we had with the California Department of Social Services. That was earlier this month. So April I want to say eighth or so I could be wrong. But it was the first Thursday we have a meeting with the state. And so these funds for sunbucks have been approved. Sunbucks is a program that's not just limited to California. It's actually a statewide, I mean, a nationwide program. So every state will have sunbucks for these summer months for eligible children. Okay. And for the overall CalFresh program, is that potentially under any federal threat? So CalFresh or SNAP funding and budget that's dictated by the Farm Bill. So that's renegotiated every approximately six years. We are overdue for the farm bill. I think the last farm bill was back in 2018, if I'm not mistaken. So we currently, I've been talking with our community outreach partners. They have been sending their, they've been sending out teams to Washington DC to lobby lawmakers to let them know of the potential impacts that we would suffer the negative impacts if they were to reduce cow fresh funding, snap funding, which is a real possibility with its current administration. OK, thank you. I do have a few questions. I'd be happy to potentially take the answers over email as well, just to be transparent. I do need to leave at 5.30 for something I can't push off. So in the interest of time, I'll just share my questions. If you have answers, that's fine. I'm happy to also take them over email. In terms of the program data, I am curious whether we have data going back to 2019 before the pandemic and what the trend has been. Where the case loads higher before the pandemic, how can we potentially compare? So I can, I don't have the data in front of me, but I can let you know for a fact that our case loads have been increasing every year. So we definitely have a higher case load today than we did back in 2019. On average, we typically see about a percent or two growth or increase in our CalFresh caseload. Again, we just had that one dip in February of 2025, but I did take a look at our preliminary March 2025 data. It did bounce back up a little bit. So we're now kind of in the investigative process of figuring out kind of why did we have that dip, was it potentially related to concerns from this current administration? Was it just a month where people weren't applying? We have seen a statewide trend of decreasing number of CalFresh applications statewide since November of 2024. So that is something we are keeping an eye on. Thank you. And in terms of eligibility versus actual enrollment, is there data on that so that we know sort of what the trend is in terms of more people who are eligible and willing? So we generally, our application volume does vary between each month, typically right now we're in our slower period of people applying, which is also why the state I think had CalFresh awareness month in May to kind of put a little boost to our CalFresh application numbers. But in Alameda County, we typically will have anywhere between six to 10,000 applications per month. And the number of approvals versus denials really varies. But it's typically about 50 to 60% approval rate. Again, it just kind of varies depending on each month. Thank you. And is there a network of community providers we work with on enrollment? So we do have, we work closely with the Alameda County Community Food Bank. They are our closest partner that we have and through them we utilize their network of I believe last count was 200 providers at 500 different sites throughout Alameda County. And so through our partnership with the Alameda County community food bank we are able to reach out and have our community-based organizations help us with outreach but also the other way around. If they have questions, they'll often come to me and ask for questions clarifying on eligibility, any policy changes, things of those nature, and we will also go out and do presentations at least twice a year. Thank you. And speaking of the food bank, do we also have data on usage for emergency food? I believe we do. I don't have that information on the top of my head, but I can definitely get back to you on that. I'd be curious to follow up and just to see here to know what the trend is and whether that is also going up sort of pre-pandemic to now. And then finally, the marketing at late MeritBart looks amazing. I'm excited to see that. Good to hear that it might also be up at Heyward. Heyward, I am curious whether AC Transit is another agency that we've worked with or not on this. So we also have plans to expand our CalFresh awareness month, but also general CalFresh outreach. So part of that is to have our flyers and posters on the sides of the AC Transit and the Tri-Valley Metro Network. So we are working on that. We just get an approval for that. So I'm hoping that's going to be implemented hopefully in May, but it may be towards the later half of May, it really depends on how soon we can get the printing and then putting those posters on those buses. Thank you. That's terrific. Thank you. Thank you. I just have a quick question in the interest of time. So in one year from 2024 to 2025 There was a total 397 million dollars in cash-benefits that were issued in the county Is this the largest program in your department? I know. In terms of recipients, that would probably be our Medi-Cal program has the largest number of recipients, but we are the second largest. So for some reason I thought Medi-Cal was through healthcare, but it's through your. Yeah, social services does Medi-Cal enrollment. Okay, appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Very thorough and informative. Are there any public comments on this item? There are no speakers. Okay. Last but not least are social service agency draft strategic plan. I'm just going to ask Hanna if she can present us quickly as possible in the interest of time. Sure thing. All right, good afternoon. Good evening, Chair Tim and supervisor for Chinato Bas. My name is Hana Hamilton. I'm the Policy Director with Alameda County Social Services Agency and I'm excited to present to you a progress update on our efforts to reimagine and shape the future of the social services agency over the next five years through what will become the 2025 2030 strategic plan. I just want to kind of make a note that the timing of this process is really, really pivotal across the country. Major decisions are being made that are going to deeply affect the lives of the people we serve. And I just want to speak to the cuts of TANEP snaps and such just came up as well as the cuts to Medi-Cal, Medicaid is the federal program. So you all, I think through the Palfa-Mini are familiar with those cuts as well as SNAP. And so it's between, there's a range of between zero and 230 billion that are being targeted right now through the Reconciliation Bill, as long as as well as potential cuts to TANF. So what we do now through the strategic plan to really adapt to the threats at hand and become more responsive, more innovative and more powerful is really important. Okay, so I'll just go through this agenda and I'll try to make it quick. I'll speak to just a quick intro, mission vision and values. Talk about the prior strategic plan 2019 through 2024. Our approach that we're taking through the strategic planning process for the next five years and then talk about two events that we've had so far, our stakeholder engagement session and all day planning retreat and then next steps. So I think I'm going to skip this side. I'll just say this is my team. And we are the Office of Policy Strategy and Innovation. We provide legislative and budget analysis and decision-making support resources for the agency. Our mission, vision and core values have not changed with our strategic plan. We are continuing with these same mission, vision and core values in the interest of time. I'll let you read that on your own. So our work to craft the 2025 2030 strategic plan builds off of the prior strategic priorities document of 2019 to 2024. This document identified eight strategic goals to strengthen safety net services and also aligned with Alameda County's vision 2026 at the time. A few notable accomplishments. See, I'm not gonna read this whole list, but we expanded medical eligibility, regardless of immigration status to 25,000 eligible Alameda County residents. We transitioned to CalSaws and we expanded outreach and recruitment for children in the foster care system through multiple media campaigns and the hiring of a full-time resource parent recruiter. And we are looking forward to building on these accomplishments in the upcoming strategic plan. So now to touch on our approach. This approach is grounded in a participatory process, one that values every voice, builds on our strengths and invites bold forward thinking ideas. But it's also deeply introspective because bold thinking isn't just about what's visible from the outside or launching something new. So it's often about looking inward. And although our process is still underway, we are seeing kind of this natural shift towards strengthening internal systems, fostering meaningful collaboration, and making smarter, more efficient use of what we already have. Okay, so now to talk about our very first kickoff event, that was our stakeholder engagement session. On March 19th, 2025, we brought together a diverse group of 40 state holders at the California Endowment and Downtown Oakland to launch the planning process. Participants included staff from every department and classification level, from line staff to senior managers as well as clients and CBO partners. So very diverse group of folks here aligned with our participatory process. Let's see, we... We had a series of conversations with this group on six key topic areas that aligned with the prior strategic plan, just to maintain that continuity with the updated one. And we asked them two questions. What is the agency currently doing well? And what would we do if we were 10 times bolder? We think it's important to really think big even in this time of scary time. And through a structured facilitated process, the group surfaced meaningful insights and bold ideas that are now shaping the development of the new strategic plan. So several key themes emerged from consistency, consistently across those stakeholder groups, whether they were client staff or CBO partners. The first theme was on communication and transparency. So folks expressed a desire for greater transparency around how decisions are made after feedback is collected. And they understood that not all suggestions could be acted on immediately immediately but they wanted to see a clear roadmap that explains what feedback was implemented, what wasn't, and why. They also identified a priority being stronger partnerships with external stakeholders and CBOs. They really wanted to have an intentional space for mutual learning and idea exchange between staff and community-based organizations, particularly around available resources and services so that they could better refer clients that came through our doors. And then they also identified staff training and capacity as an issue that they wanted to address, supporting professional development, expanding expertise, and addressing our vacancy rates. Finally, well, two more things. So integrated service delivery, the stakeholders highlighted the need for coordination of programs to improve the overall customer experience and to meet clients more holistically. So not just piece mail one program here, one program there, but looking at the overall needs of our families and individuals. So two specific bold ideas that gain traction were an eligible service guide to help clients navigate available offerings and a basic needs hub or one stop shop where clients can easily access multiple supports in one place. And then commitment to implementation. They really wanted to see this plan become something that we really worked on and not just a report that gathers dust on a shelf. And so following the session of survey was sent out to participants of 17 stakeholder to respond to 14 expressed interest in joining follow-up work groups. So I was really exciting because people are, you know, volunteering. They want to get involved. They want to see next steps. And they also rated the session a 4.6 out of 5 in terms of overall value. So that brought us to the next, the second event on April 16th. And this is where we gathered approximately 20 staff, senior level staff management and agency leadership to continue the conversation. The day began with a robust discussion on the themes identified in the last slide. And participants were asked to identify insights and strengths that resulted from the previous session. And those insights were then used to ground a facilitated practical vision workshop. So listed on this slide, and I think this is one of my last slides, our seven practical visions that were identified by the end of the leadership planning session. These visions are really kind of the bones or the framework of the strategic plan. And answer the question, what do we want to see in place in the next five years as a result of our actions. These visions are smarter programs through curiosity and data driven insights, a workforce that has heard valued and informed. And so I think this vision is really important because it was responding directly to the feedback from the stakeholder engagement session. And this group recognized the importance of transparency and communication and decision making and envision an agency where staff feel connected, excited and engaged. Shared responsibility for results was another practical vision. An embrace of innovative technology, making efficient use of what we already have, staying on that theme, so making sure everyone in the agency is really taking advantage of all the technology that we currently have at our fingertips, and exploring new technologies that can streamline our business practices. Another practical vision was the positive impact on the community through partnerships. So this again was responding directly to the stakeholder engagement session and envision joining with staff, CBO and clients around a community table for mutual learning and an idea exchange. And then the last two were a community served with compassion and responsive supports. We talked here about a one-stop shop with warm handoffs just like in the stakeholder engagement session. And then a thriving agency through planning and purpose. And this was a lot to address our training and workforce needs. So all in all, this session was successfully built on the insight and momentum of the stakeholder engagement session, resulting in a collective vision for the next five years. Our next steps are two half day sessions on May 20th and 21st to translate these visions into a nimble and actionable strategic plan, including an implementation plan for the first year. So we are really putting this into play and the final strategic plan will be available at the end of June this year. Thank you. We just wanted to give you a sense of what the agency is going through with its next strategic plan. And Honne will take any questions you have right now. Thank you. So, we're fortunate, Abbas. Thank you. Well, just to step back between the budget hearing and today's meeting, there is so much work that happens under the Social Services Agency. so thank you, Director Ford, for your leadership and to all of you who are here today, he shared your work. I know this is just a sort of a portion of everything that happens within the agency and the safety net that you help provide for our county. I'm glad you're going through the strategic plan. you know, in looking at the mission in terms of making sure individuals, families, and communities access services and public benefits that make a difference in their lives. I'm also interested in making sure that we have a holistic approach because, you know, the families, the young people, the seniors that you all serve probably access multiple programs. So, and multiple departments. So, over time, I hope we can also figure out how we have a holistic approach so that we can ensure all of our communities are self-sufficient and thrive. My main question is, how can we is a board, how can I as an individual board member, especially seeing some of the data for District 5, how can we engage and be supportive in this process? I would invite you to, I'll definitely come back and give an update in terms of engagement. I think that depends on your level of interest in the process. We can definitely talk through what that could look like. Thank you again for that presentation. The main question I had is we're building on 2019 to 2024. We had a pandemic during that time, this strategic plan. This time we may not have an pandemic, but we have a federal reduction potentially in and funding and sources. How do we make those adjustments as we strategize forward? Well, it's interesting because I was having a conversation with someone about this two days ago. I think in one sense, there's a real opportunity in a strange way about what's happening here because it's forcing us just like COVID did to innovate and so what we're doing with a strategic plan is again to your point supervisor for to not abass is we're really coming like turning internally and looking at how we can become more resilient, more efficient, just a stronger, more powerful agency just by looking at what we already have. So I think that that's really the approach that's sort of coming out through the strategic plan and after these next next two half day sessions, we'll have some really clear action steps for what we're gonna be doing. And then we'll likely be meeting, breaking off into work groups, meeting quarterly to make sure that we are hitting our goals. And I'll also say in light of what's happening at the federal administration, what the facilitator said is, we're now now looking to implement over the next five years, but one year at a time, based on what's happening in Washington. That's a good point. I just appreciate the fact that part of the resiliency means that we may need to pivot and large agencies have a difficult time pivoting quickly and responding very quickly like we had to do with the refugee funding. So trying to make sure that we built in some sort of funding reserve or cushion to allow for that pivoting is gonna be important. Absolutely, thank you so much. so much. Are there any other questions or speakers on this item? There are no speakers. Okay. Thank you. Are there any public comments on items that are not on today's very comprehensive agenda? As a reminder, there will not be a meeting next month. We're very efficient. We accomplished a lot today. There are no speakers. Thank you very much. This meeting is adjourned.