Recording in progress.

Good morning and welcome to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors Health Committee meeting.

Supervisor Miley is going to be participating online from out of state.

But because of the rules in which the committee meetings are structured, he will be providing comments as a member of the public at the moment.

So may I have roll call for this committee meeting?

Supervisor Tam.

Present.

Supervisor Miley, excused.

Thank you.

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Thank you.

Thank you very much.

We will start with the informational item, which is the African-American Health and Wellness Council building and culture of Black Wellness.

May I have the staff report, please?

Thanks.

Good morning, Supervisor.

So this is going to be a joint report that's going to be led by Carol Burton, and I will turn it over to her and the team to share.

Good morning, supervisors.

I am Carol Burton.

I'm the CEO of Jewel Consulting, and I am the convener and coordinator for the council.

I want to first say, which I haven't had a chance to say publicly, thank you for the proclamation, acknowledging a Milestone Birthday, but also the work that our company has been doing in this comp in this community on behalf of all of our citizens.

So I want to thank you for that publicly.

Today we're going to talk about some work that we've been doing over the last year to build a council that will be responsible for leading a lot of the efforts around building a culture for black wellness.

I want to start with history.

One of the things that he was most passionate about was mental health.

And in October of last year, he approached our company and asked if we would be willing to serve as conveners of a group who he hoped that would move on to develop an overall structure that we'll tell you more about what that structure looks like in just a few minutes.

But his long stern standing commitment was to the inequities in the African American community.

So our purpose, the council was established, and I want to say established loosely because what we've been working on for the last year was moving towards the establishment of a formal formal council.

But it was established to advance holistic wellness in the African American community by promoting policies and funding and innovations that view mental health and emotional health, physical health, and spiritual health, all as interconnected and inseparable, inseparable aspects of health and well-being.

So who we are, we're a diverse group of advocates, nonprofits, and you'll see folks who are meeting with us virtually, and also the attendees here in the board chambers.

We're nonprofit organizations and leaders and folks from the community, faith communities, department heads, residents, and champions for well-being across the county for African Americans.

So what is our relationship to the community?

We receive, this is a question that we often are asked, particularly most folks are familiar with the African American Wellness Hub.

But this um design is really an attempt to talk about that relationship.

We see that the African American community in the center of all of what we're doing and what we're trying to do, and our goal is to wrap around the work that the council will be doing in collaboration with all of the partners who are in the outer circle to look at all of those items like advocacy resources and data and monitoring.

So you do see that the wellness hub is there, our state and local and legislative partners, community-based organizations, of course, our government partners, and then our cities and the county governments.

So I want to talk a bit about where we've been, all of our work up until this at this point has been in the design of the design of creating this formalized council.

And so to do so, we look we went and conducted what we're calling a rapid landscape analysis.

It wasn't by no means um a comprehensive analysis, but over the past year we have been working with, and I'll just go to the next slide, we've met and talked to about 30 organizations, and through that process, we've also interviewed stakeholders, several stakeholders from across the county, and including folks of the African American Wellness Hub, folks who are in this room today, but also some of your county leaders to help the divine define a vision for the council.

We also went to uh two community uh focused groups to understand their perspective around what was needed at this moment, and again, that was that's over the last year, and this moment keeps changing in terms of the environment.

And so most of this work was done the earlier part of this year.

We also received community input from a few surveys, we interviewed some subject matter experts to help us really define what African American wellness meant.

I should say that we started out very narrowly thinking about mental health, and over time we understood that we had to look at all of the things that make up uh an individual, but also the social determinants of health and those things that impact not just our mental health but our physical health and our ability to live uh independently and make free choices.

And lastly, we launched a uh outside fillings campaign, which it is at outsidefillings.com, and it is a community-rooted culturally affirming mental health platform, and it's an initiative uh for the residents of African Americans in this county launched by this this planning council.

So this is the outside fillings campaign.

Um, we are really proud of the work that we've been able to do so far.

But the campaign has been uh is designed to uh help African Americans and blacks in the Alameda County access culturally affirming uh care uh to share authentic uh stories and to heal collectively.

It's really grounded in the belief that mental health thrives in communities.

Uh, the platform has uh resources and relatable narratives and trusted practitioners there, but it's shifting from self-the focus from self-care to us care.

So what we know, uh, we've gathered several points of data.

Again, I want to say that that it is a snapshot.

Uh, but what we know so far.

So I'm going to share some fillings campaign.

When we ask about the top stressors that people were experiencing, work in financial stress was high, was number one, should I say, racism and discrimination was number two, and of course, social isolation, isolation was three.