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.

Do you have instructions for online participation?

Detailed instructions are provided in the teleconferencing guidelines.

A link to the document is included in today's agenda.

If you're joining the meeting using a computer, use the button at the bottom of your screen to raise your hand to request a speak.

When called to speak, please unmute your microphone and state your name.

If you're calling in dial star nine to raise your hand to speak, when you are called to speak, the host will enable you to speak.

You may always just observe the meeting without participating by clicking on the view now link on the county's webpage at ACGov.org.

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.

And you can see from the others that they were around housing and family relationships.

And 80% and more said that most of them, more than 80% said that they think about it often.

In terms of access and awareness, we asked about if they knew how to find culturally relevant care.

And the younger population of survey participants were least aware or equipped to find some community insights from that.

Of course, our wellness is connected, and our wellness is linked to connection, purpose, and belonging, and that there's a strong interest in peer-led and community-based supports, and there's a preference for healing over clinical settings, which is in line with our culture as a people, some other findings that you know, holistic health looking at the intersection and the interconnection between mental health, physical, spiritual, and emotional, that social determinants of health, both you know, all of those including poverty, food access, housing, and systemic racism really drive mental health outcomes, and then from the youth insights that they were most concerned about racism, violence, and stress, and also that they seek peer-led and culturally rooted care versus some of the other things that are available in their communities.

Some gaps that we were able to identify through those sources of data is that, you know, of course, there's fragmented data and lack of aggregate resources, measures for African American folks and populations.

Also unsustained funding for culturally rooted programs, and then there is silo, siloed and limited coordination, which has existed for quite some time.

The representation in the the outreach and the data that we found, and also there was a need for long-term community-driven research and policy.

So I want to talk about some of the drivers of wellness and disparities in Alameda County, and I'm gonna talk about it in the context of of course the big beautiful bill that will have significant impacts on our community.

Of course, there's rising there will be rising health inequities through some of the legislation that came down through that bill, also undermining any economic supports that African Americans have been able to gain, eroding educational access, rolling back environmental justice, removing civil rights protections, just to name a few.

Speakers, but also areas that we have great disparities, existing current past, currently, and we're concerned about the future.

So just some data, and some data you probably have heard before, but I'm just gonna briefly go through it, and then I'd like to bring up some speakers who can speak more specific to some of these areas.

Of course, there's the economic equity, which black residents here are experience poverty at a rate of two times more than white residents, and the exclusion from ownership and management limits generational wealth.

Also, community and housing, less than 30% of black residents are homeowners, environmental uh areas, west and east Oakland, we're really uh familiar with that they're they have historically faced pollution, poor air quality, and scarce green space, uh, education, of course, chronic absenteism, punitive punishment tied to instability, um, and also in the public health uh front, there's many areas that we can highlight, but I just want to highlight a few of them around asthma, uh, hypertension, maternal mortality, and of course, HIV rates are three times higher.

Um, of course, on the criminal justice front, which we all know so well, black residents are four times more likely to be arrested and make up nearly half of your jail population, our jail population, and we represent less than 10% of the population here in the county.

And of course, there's a civic power and underrepresentation and county leadership, the need for participation and sustained community research and accountability.

So I'd like to ask for a couple of our three of our speakers, four of our speakers to speak to some areas of that.

Um I'd like to introduce them in order and uh have them come to the podium and speak.

Um the first is the ED of Healthy Black Families, uh Willamina Wilson.

Um then we'll be followed by uh Robert Phillips, who is the CEO of Baywell, followed by Daris Young from Bar High, and then followed by Paul Breley from Legal Services for Children of Prisoners.

Good morning.

My name is Wilhelmina Wilson.

As Carol said, I'm the executive director at Healthy Black Families.

Um Healthy Black Families is a nonprofit public health organization based in Berkeley, California.

Our work is to advance social equity and justice with a focus on black individuals and families.

Um we have a mission to provide knowledge, skills, and strategies that'll help make social systems and policies more equitable for black people and communities.

We accomplish this by working to organize individuals and families and the organizations that serve them into communities empowered with skills to advance social equity and justice.

HBF operates through the lens of the social determinants of health.

We have our roots in maternal child and adolescent health, founded by Dr.

Vicky Alexander, who documented a four-to-one disparity in the birth outcomes of black women in Berkeley, representing almost that of a third world country.

We center our work on people, programs and policy.

Through this intersectional lens, we support people providing programs to deepen their capacity for individual and family resilience and work collectively to align organizations to develop and implement policy to support stopping harm and repairing harm to black people created by systemic racism.

Why is this work with black families so vital?

Due to systemic racism, there has never been a time in history that our nation, in our nation, in our state or in the county where black people have been provided an equitable landscape upon which to live, breathe, work, invest, or provide for their families, be it general socioeconomics, cultural and environmental conditions, social and community networks, or individual factors.

After centuries of resistance, we persist in our quest for human dignity.

By human dignity, I mean just the consciousness and active support of the basic right of every human being to have respect and have their basic needs met so that they have the opportunity to develop their full potential.

This requires policies and exhibits behaviors that demonstrate a value for all human beings.

As Healthy Black Families has been in service of Berkeley's Black community, we have touched and talked to hundreds of community members, hosted years of people's assemblies, collected and coalesced their voices and input as data, and use that to represent the interests of our community.

This work has resulted in the passage of the Affordable Housing Preference Policy, which is seeking to bring black people back into Berkeley.

As in many communities, there's been a mass displacement of black people from the historical places they call home.

We're down from 30% to like 6.9% black population in Berkeley.

We've also been leading an initiative called Equity for Black Berkeley.

It's a partnership between the city of Berkeley, BART.

Many of the plagues in black communities have happened in the systems of transit-oriented harm.

The work was funded by the San Francisco Foundation, and we've worked to repair harm to the Black community.

Through this work, and I'm sure the work of many in the room, we've come to understand that wisdom lives closest to the experience.

So it's imperative that we engage Black people and understand their stories, and fold that lived experience back into the decisions made by leadership.

That's how we'll understand how racism impacts the people in the community and how to shape fund and implement repair that effectively meets their needs.

Out of the work in Equitable for Black Berkeley, we came up with nine priorities.

Not surprisingly, housing, health, community, finance, a call for reparations, education, youth, public safety, and infrastructure.

There's been a great call for affordable housing in Berkeley and in the state, but what we found from the data is affordable housing is not the number one priority.

It's affordable home ownership.

Black communities are keenly interested in ownership strategies that allow them to recover the approximately 3.2 billion dollars in lost generational wealth from redlining and other policies in the city of Berkeley.

Under the education priority, K-12 education fell sixth in order of priority.

57% of those surveyed responded, placed self-help education, cultural self-knowledge, education and academic support, and sociopolitical education at the top of their priorities.

Another surprising outcome, as we think about infrastructure, we might think about streets and water systems, bike lanes, the voices of black people said they want access to food and the ability to grow food.

Culture and community are central to the wellness of black families.

From the time we were enslaved on the plantation to now, our cultural roots, beloved community and family have provided resilience, cultural continuity, and spiritual fortitude, supporting black people to endure through the host of atrocities targeting us, from social policies that resulted in mass incarceration of black men, women, and children, to the school to prison pipeline and disinvestment in black communities.

Disparities exist, persist, and will deepen without intentional family-centered investments.

An intentional investment in the Alameda County by Alameda County in the programs designed to strengthen family bonds, support caregivers, and uplift intergenerational connections, will strengthen our entire social ecosystem.

Today we call on you to partner in harm repair by investing in resilience, healing, and cultural continuity for black families in Alameda County and healthy black families stands ready to support that effort.

Thank you so much.

Good morning.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak.

So a little over a year ago today, we had a treatment of the status of the health of the black community in Alameda County.

So I won't go through the litany of health statistics as you have directors and staff who are far more articulate than I on that.

So I'll just leave you with a couple anecdotes.

So one is, you know, the unfortunate fact in Alameda County, and this was not the case about a decade ago, is that a black child born in West or East Oakland can still expect to live almost 15 years less than a child born in the hills.

And that black neighbors still carry the heaviest disease burden.

That whether it be heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, asthma, exposure to violence, overdose, HIV, a black baby and a black mother here are three to four more times likely to die in childbirth and then their first year than anyone else.

And that is a life course question that stacks.

Because that's pain that shows up in our mental health, that's pain that shows up in our bodies and our spirits together.

And so we can't treat one without the other.

And so the other thing I want to point out is when we say the black community in Alameda County, that's quickly changing too.

Those who identify as Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latino.

And so while they're not the largest part of the black community, they're the fastest growing part.

So when we say that, that's also changing.

I say all that to say because those statistics still exist and have existed for decades.

And then we have something coming in 2026 that will exacerbate those.

And so we've had these policy changes.

Those policy changes will hit parts of the black community.

And it's the reason why I raise the fastest growing parts of the black community when we talk about those with unsatisfactory and undocumented status or immigration status that will hit the community as well.

And then there is a part of the Affordable Care Act, in terms of the coverage expansions, but the expansions to those who are largely African-American males and women who are largely childless, that this will also hit.

All that's set to end.

And so it's not just the premiums jumping, it's also the eligibility coverage changes that will come that's going to hit the community really, really hard.

And so we have these new kind of Medicaid rules.

We have these work reporting rules, and we have this frequent paperwork requirement that's going to exacerbate the um impact on the community that we already know about and have already kind of well documented over the years.

And so it's going to put not just millions of low-income folks, but many of black families, not just in this country but in this county, at real, real risk, not just of losing coverage, but of exposing their health to things that are actually preventable.

And so I don't say all this to call this kind of a story of weakness.

The reason why the council's presenting today is it's more of a story of resilience.

Because as I said, these have been conditions for decades that the community has found itself, kind of finding strategies with the support of the county making its way through.

And so for over 60 years, Bay Well Health, formerly West Oakland Health, we've walked in our community on these questions, keeping health and heart and soul of the community at the center of our work, as we call ourselves a BQ organization.

We're black led, black focused, black serving.

And so in our exam rooms and the healing circles that we run, we treat mind, body, emotion, and spirit as one because that's how our community understands health and wellness.

And so we are here for a conversation that's aligned with the priorities of the county that already exists, as well as you know the supervisors, Supervisor Miley's work on the repair for Russell City, as well as his work on the Reparations Committee, and his focus on housing and safety and older adults say clearly that people who are pushed out or left out should be brought back in with dignity.

You, Supervisor Tam, your work on supporting African American mental health, supporting groups like Hunter Black Men, showing that black health and wellness and leadership actually matter, not just to the county but to this board.

And Supervisor Bass, whose district our home office is in, you know, has continued supervisors, Supervisor Carson's champion of black wellness, particularly of the African American Wellness Hub and the Holistic Resource Center.

So you all have maintained this.

And so what we're here to do, particularly Bay Well Health is ready to do is support the African American Health and Wellness Council's ability to serve as a clinical and community backbone.

A backbone that allows us to actually have a shared health agenda, but then partner in a real way with the county.

That through the outside fillings work, we already saw and we heard that most black residents think about their mental health, but fewer think about where they actually can or even know where they can actually find the type of care that is culturally consistent and rooted in the way that they actually feel that they can trust and that they feel safe going to.

And so they're asking us, they're really asking you to help us build a bridge, which is why we're here today.

And we actually know what works.

So we're not here today asking or talking about new solutions.

We know that care starts in neighborhoods, we know it starts in spaces where folks trust and feel seen and not judged.

And we also know that when, for instance, a black therapist and a pastor and a primary care team puts their arms around a mother with high blood pressure and postpartum depression.

We do more than just kind of stop a health crisis or that moment of acuity.

We change the path for at least two or three generations.

Which is why you know the county's affirmation and commitment to perinatal equity through the Department of Public Health, its commitment to primary-based uh health care through ourselves like uh Baywell Health and Roots.

It's investing in abundant birth, which is housed at Alameda Health System, are critical.

Or when a young man survives trauma, some form of trauma.

It doesn't matter what it is, and they can sit with a counselor or a job coach and a doctor who listens to them and looks them in the eye.

We turn that trauma into a turning point instead of another statistic or an obituary, which is why the investment that you all have already made in the Office of Violence Prevention and using it to have an equity lens is critical.

Or the support for the trauma recovery centers that exist in Alameda County, like the ones that Boss runs are critical.

So the ask of us from us of you today is really simple and shared.

It's to continue to support making this life course community oriented health model the norm for the black community in Alameda County, and continuing to invest in it and making it the rule rather than the exception in the way that the county partners with the community.

So this means looking at the African American Health and Wellness Council, Black FQHCs, the African American Wellness hubs, as permanent and wild resource partners and investments, and targeting county health and housing and re-entry dollars, so that black Alameda County can get the care and food and stable homes and um support that they need as we see things like 2026 rolling in and 2027 rolling in that can actually assault those things.

Good morning, Supervisor Cam and rest of everybody who is here today.

Um my name is Darish Young, and I am the director of community engagement and organizing for black health for Bar High, and that stands for the Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative, and we are we represent the nine, we are the membership body of the nine Bay Area Health Departments, and we were founded to focus on those social determinants of health.

One of the founders was a former city member, sitting member of the Alameda County's health health department, um, Dr.

Arnold Perkins.

And in that study, we were looking for the social, what are the health impacts, what are the drivers?

And it was found that housing was the number one driver of health disparities throughout California, but especially here in the Bay Area, which was our focus, and African Americans were the most impacted by that, and so what we have sought to do at Bar High in the last five years now was to come up with a black housing agenda, and in 2020, one, we made an ask for the Bay Area and exclusively for Oakland and Alameda County for Black Housing Fund at the state level.

While we did not get that fund, which was a $500 million ass, we did finish as a top five Bay Area priority for the um legislatures, assembly, and Senate, and we're also a top priority of the legislative black caucus.

Now, I mention all that to say because housing is a driver right now, and our housing inequities, they're long standing here in Alameda County and throughout the nation as well, and I would say to fully understand our regions or even our states or our nations in struggles for housing, you know, it it goes back to how history has shaped it for us.

And as we look here in the Bay Area, especially in Alameda County, looking at Oakland, Oakland residents, black Oakland Rebbe, comprise of 70% of the city's unhoused population, 70%, and that really really is telling right there, and these numbers they do matter, however, without the proper context on their route, such as government disinvestment, discrimination in mortgage lending, targeted speculation in black neighborhoods, and income disparity.

Now, there was a book, Joan John Rothenstein, groundbreaking work.

It's called The Color of Law.

And ironically, when he started talking about housing in that book and all the disparities, the book started off right here in the Bay Area, and it focused on Alameda County and other counties as well.

And so, what do we looking at here, right?

The practices that are the drivers.

One thing I wanted to point out is this: there was a man, one of the first African American legislatures in California.

And his name is Byron Rumford, Alameda County resident.

He was a pharmacist, and he authored the Fair Housing Act.

Now that's ironic because the Fair Housing Act, that law was designed for us.

But now that same law that was designed for us is being used against us to create policies that could close these gaps in our housing.

Bar high, we are working on a, we are now a state coalition, and we focus on housing and community investments throughout the state, and we also have what is called a health, wealth, and repair agenda, which includes state reparations, local reparations, and also national reparations as well.

Now I say all this to say that the Bay Area was once known for its diversity, but there's been an exodus of the African American population, especially here in Oakland and across the Bay.

And what we're seeing is that the region because of it is because of limited housing options, and what that means is that you're losing people who bring diverse perspectives to our community, and it's what makes the Bay Area special, and it's not it's it's it's really being lost, and what's happening here, right here in Alameda County, is that we are creating a community, a region, where we're going to have fewer and fewer black people in this beloved community, and so what is it?

You know, that lack of diversity makes for poor learning environments, it makes for all of those things that we read about and see in our daily news broadcast, what you see in our daily news broadcast, and sometimes it's unfairly portrayed as just black people, but you see young black men, black women, being housed off to jails and prisons.

What you see are the numbers and violent crime and all these things, but I want to make something plain.

I think it was in 1967, and it was the Federal Civil Rights Commission, and they focused on law enforcement act, and here's what they said, we shall not have effectively dealt with crime until we have effectively dealt with the conditions that cause it.

And if you look across the board for housing, the unhoused here, you can go to any pathway and by way, you can move a commute community from one place to the other, and it shows up again somewhere else.

When we talk about housing and communities, it's not just putting people in boxes, but it's about vibrant, healthy communities.

And let me point out that a person's income should not determine the level of dignity that a person's neighborhood is.

Everybody should have the right to live in dignity.

But when you have an equity across the board and where dumpsters are, trash pickups are made, it seems as though it's in our communities and communities of color.

And it shouldn't be that way.

And these are the health disparities.

And these are some of the things that are driving right now.

The disparities in our mental health issues as well.

When you're couch surfing, when you're sleeping in your cars, when you're sleeping in tents, and you have to have the ability to go to work the next day, but you're so tired, and then you're sleeping out unopened, unprotected, right?

And I think that right now we're in a time of reckoning where we should be reckoning with these issues.

And I would say that during the pandemic, we saw a glimpse of it.

But since the pandemic, things have changed.

You don't hear the same things anymore.

It's almost back to business as usual.

Let's talk about gentrification.

One of the things in our preliminary studies that has shown us on gentrification, we are part of nature, which is the city and county, um, officials for health.

And it was two years ago, and they started showing, I was in a particular meeting, and we were showing the disparities in housing in the homeless population.

And what's ironic about that, that I noticed something that was very telling.

As we started to empty our prisons because they were draining state and local governments' budgets, people started coming out.

But at the same time, homelessness started to go up as well.

There is a correlation between that.

So when you look at the unhoused, when you look at gentrification and how we got to gentrification, unfair appraisals, that appraise our communities or our homes unfairly, then we sell them at low market rate.

Other people come in and they take that up as well.

And so I say that we're in a telling sign right now.

And I do think that community and what you all are doing, Supervisor Keith Carson, you all bring that lens.

And I'm encourage you all to expand it.

Expand it beyond just conversations.

Let's expand it beyond to like taking bold steps and to do making more things available to the most neediest people, starting from the bottom up, because we can never have equity the way I see it.

Because when I see that fence all the time, right, you know that fence in equity that shows people standing on a box here and here and here, and you try to make it down the line.

But I ask myself if if I started off in this race way behind, does the way we look at equity help me catch up?

Or is this still something we talk about and we never get to the point to where we solve the problems that are dealing with us?

And lastly, I would say this.

Last week I was in Washington, D.C.

for a conference, a housing conference, and I had the first opportunity to go to the African American Museum.

And you know, you start off at the bottom, you start off at 1619, and you work your way up to the top.

And what was telling about that?

We are still dealing with the same things today that we were dealing with the day they emancipated us.

So that tells me there's something wrong somewhere.

And if we're going to get to better, it has to make commitments from all of us, community, government, all coming together and say it's time.

Past time.

I know that Alameda County has taken a step towards reparations, imperative justice, and I commend you for that.

I commend you for that.

But we could also need a voices from the counties, Alameda County to help move the state reparations packages as well.

So I would say to the community, people who are here and the board of supervisors who are not here, thank you for the work that you're doing and continue to do it.

And I will tell you that Bar High and our Black Housing Coalition, which includes two of our speakers, you know, we'll be working with you.

Thank you.

Good morning.

My name is Paul Briley.

I'm the executive director of legal services for prisoners with children.

Our office is located in Oakland, District 5 of Alameda County.

Oakland was once a thriving working class community populated by predominantly African Americans.

After the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and the continued practice of the criminalization of poverty, black communities changed, leaving many formerly employed residents unemployed, and our communities evolved into neighborhoods plagued by generational poverty and crime with some of the worst social, economic and health indicators in California.

One of the many reasons our system is flawed is because it attempts to identify individuals as the problem in our black community rather than focusing on the problems that individuals are facing.

Increased arrests and police oftentimes leads to conditions that create displacement through incarceration, over policing and mass incarceration is another tactic of gentrification, leading to the removal of longtime residents through our criminal justice system.

When we remove people through arrests, it makes it less likely for them to be able to afford to return to the community because of the cost of living is rapidly increasing.

This creates opening for new residents and investors, oftentimes leaving former residents with no option.

And to be clear, crime is not a first choice, it is the last option.

The mandatory minimum we should be doing is providing housing, employment, and health care.

Surely we've made some progress by banning the box on housing, but there is a difference between mere intervention and primarily focusing on prevention.

Otherwise, these inequities will deepen, fueling recidivism, poverty, and declining wellness for families.

Thank you.

Thank you to all of our speakers.

So I'd like to share where we're going.

I want to acknowledge the all of the folks who have community members and county employees and CBO leaders who are listening with us to us virtually, participating virtually, and those who are in the board chambers.

We have collectively came up with a vision that we want to share with you, and also our mission, and also to end with a call to action, which we hope will be the beginning.

So where we're going.

I'm sorry, I missed one.

We want to build sustainability for sustainability by commitment to building long-lasting infrastructure, policies, and practices that will continue to advance equity long after the initial phases of this work.

Lastly, we want to celebrate and honor the strengths and the culture and the resiliency and the achievements of the African American community throughout this work, recognizing that our approach is asset-based and not deficit-based.

So our call to action is to ask this board of supervisors to commit resources, political will, institutional support for this work.

We believe that equity must move from aspiration to action with concrete commitment and accountability.

So with that, we invite the Board of Supervisors to partner with us to achieve the following: to institutionalize a permanent African American Health and Wellness Council infrastructure to serve as advisors to community leaders to drive policy resources and outcomes that address wellness and disparities, to launch to launch a countywide community engagement process for needs assessment of the African American community through the expansion of the outside fillings campaign to capture continuous input from the African American Alameda County residents.

And lastly, to ensure that African American residents have essential have equal access to essential services such as food, housing, and health care.

So with that, I am going to pause and want to thank you for this time and to see if there are any questions for myself or any of the speakers or any of the folks in the audience.

Thank you very much for that great presentation.

I wanted to acknowledge the fact that Supervisor Carson had initiated much of this work, and during the time I served with him on the health committee, he had each of the affinity groups come and inform us about what's going on in the communities, especially on the disparity side, and uh what you have shown today is that a lot of the statistics that we had heard there's varying degrees of it.

They've been confirmed through the work that you have put forth.

What I would like to better understand is what we have been able to do in terms of bridging some of the silos and the gaps that you've identified because there's uh obviously close to 30 different um nonprofits that you had mentioned in your presentation, and I didn't quite understand whether some of them are duplicative or they are they working in silos, or is the council the mechanism that would bring all of them together on a regular basis so they're more informed of what's being done to move us forward, and then um obviously uh what we're dealing with with HR1 will exacerbate the disparities that we're seeing.

So, one of the questions uh I had is I I don't know offhand uh other than the Alliance for Health statistics that show the various health disparities among the different ethnicities of the Medi-Cal recipients in the county, of which there's close to 400,000.

What percentage of them are African American?

And similarly, for those that receive uh the SNAP program, which I think there's about 176,000 residents, and how much of that is um people from the African American community.

Um, there are things that I know that the county um has been working towards to try to address the disparity long before I got on the board of supervisors.

There's been work to make sure that we have adequate funding and adequate resources for the African American Wellness Center, as Dr.

Triple has given us a number of updates.

Had informed us of the birthing programs that have actually helped reverse the trend in high infant mortality among black women, and the housing issue that that's a major disparity that we're seeing in the county, and one of the reasons among the many reasons we moved the the affordable housing programs into Alameda County Health is because it is a major social determinant of health, along with um the resources that will go into that through Measure W.

And I think Ms.

Supervisor Miley, I hope he's on, has repeatedly said that um part of the main issue with communities and neighborhoods is resiliency, having access to clean parks, programs for youth, health and wellness programs, and hubs, and those are things that you each one of you have identified today, and and we we at the county share your vision to make sure that all these resources are available.

Um, so I wanted to also open it up for public comment because I think Supervisor Miley is supposed to be participating somewhat as a public member, but I'll give him extra time since he's a member of this committee and he actually chairs the committee.

His hand is raised.

Supervisor Miley.

I will give you five minutes.

Oh, great.

Thank you.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Oh, great.

Thank you.

So, first of all, apologize for not being there in person, but I'm out of town and uh according to the Supervisor Tam pointed out a committee of two.

If one member is not there, then uh that member can't participate as a member of the committee.

So I'm participating in member of the public.

So I appreciate the five minutes, uh Supervisor Tam.

Um, yeah, I really enjoyed the uh presentation uh that was made today.

Very comprehensive, very thorough.

Um very you know intriguing as well.

I know my staff has been listening.

I think Daryl Stewart is there, and I think uh Bert Jones, he's listening for my office.

Um, and you know, as an African American, I definitely appreciate this focus on African African Americans.

I think um we would be remiss uh as a people if we were not uh demanding a focus on our needs, our issues, our concerns.

Um I very much value what I've heard today from all the speakers.

Uh we might have some disagreements on uh some of the strategies and approaches, but I think collectively um uh we're in unison and lockstep.

I do want to say I would like to work with people on the action agenda uh that Carol uh pointed out.

Uh there's various components of that action agenda, and I'd like to sit down with uh the principals and talk about that um more thoroughly, so I can begin to maybe wrap my arms around it.

Because as some of the speakers pointed out, and Supervisor Tam mentioned as well, the county is doing things on many fronts to support African Americans, but maybe there's no holistic um unified um target targeted comprehensive uh focus uh to ensure that we're moving these agendas um cohesively, and I think that's maybe what people are asking for.

I think in terms of the African American Wellness Hub that the board's approved, that um has been a major undertaking.

I know uh Supervisor Carson led that agenda and has led many uh many of the agendas uh in the county.

Uh I do know someone has mentioned to me we should name the African American Wellness Hub after Supervisor Carson.

So um I'm gonna be exploring that with uh folks to see if there's um support for something to that effect to uh to honor Supervisor Carson for the work that he did to uh ensure that the county moved that agenda around African American wellness.

In addition, um a lot of people speak to Oakland.

Keep in mind the Board of Supervisors, we don't control what happens in Oakland.

We are the safety net for and counties are safety nets, and we provide a lot of resources around the safety net, but we can't control policies and decisions and actions that have taken place in the city of Oakland that I think have been to the detriment of African Americans, nor do we control the schools.

I mean, I only heard one mention of the schools uh when Carol had her action plan put up their education as um something that to achieve for um schools are extremely important as well.

Uh people need to be educated.

Uh that is fundamental.

Um, and as Supervisor Tam pointed out, um, since I've worked on violence prevention, and I know it's important, uh, both when I was on the Oakland City Council and as a county supervisor, uh, and I think Darius pointed it out.

We need resilient communities, communities that are wholesome, where people where all of us want to live and thrive and and be a part of.

And there's reasons, and it's not all based on discrimination that these um uh communities, some of them are not thriving.

Uh, so but that's something we need to really look at and not demand of the county to address issues that we can't address in a jurisdiction uh like Oakland for failure of some of its leadership uh in the past.

Um once again, I was on the Oakland City Council, so I speak from you know, I speak from experience and having lived in the city for 45 years, and I also the schools.

Uh, we have a number of black organizations, you know, Buapa, black women organized for political action, very, very powerful throughout the state, uh, and even potentially throughout the nation.

The higher democratic movement, uh, other black political organizations and nonprofits, uh roots, uh community health center, uh, many organizations that are working, you know, to make the community better.

Uh so I want to align myself with all of you to move this agenda to see where we can have common ground, common thought uh to continue the work on reparations, um, and the other things that we're doing as a member of the metropolitan metropolitan uh and the Bayer Housing Finance Authority.

You know, I'm steadfastly committed on ensuring that there's resources for uh African Americans when it comes to housing and um you know generational wealth.

So thank you, Supervisor Tam for giving me five minutes, and I'm sorry I went over a little bit.

Thank you, Supervisor Miley.

So um we are opening it up for public comment, both online and in person.

Uh next speaker is Professor Amoale Falls.

Good morning, Supervisor Tam and staff.

Uh I'm Omawali Fowles, uh member of the Association of Black Psychologists and a former health commissioner for the city of Berkeley.

I'm coming here to ask that you give perhaps a financial set-aside in the amount of 5.5 percent to 8.5 percent of the mental health budget for the African American hub.

I think it's important for us to be able to place not only an individual institution but also send into satellite mental health offices, people of African ancestry who have an African treatment model, as we do in ABC.

So, in that regard, I wanted to give you a little anecdote of some of my background.

Um, one of my clients, I'm I'm the housing director at Telegraph Community Ministry Center, a roof over their heads, emergency to public to um permanent housing, and one of my clients was a disabled gentleman who had lost a part of his left arm as a result of violence shooting or something of that nature, and anger management was an issue for him.

He was not an active client in mental health at the time, and it as such, he was unable to get Berkeley Housing Authority to put him into their housing program because he had not continued his uh clinical participation in treatment.

Uh we went, I took him to the clinic on Derby in Berkeley and asked for uh African-American psychologists.

They didn't have one, and so he fell out of the box, and we had to find other ways to hire him to uh house him through our limited budget at roof over their heads.

Thank you.

There are no more speakers, thank you very much for your comments.

Um Dr.

Treble, would you um mind just giving us an update on where things are at with the African Air Wellness Center?

Because I remember uh four meetings ago, the board had approved the $30 million capital expenditure.

It's a design build, and then prior to that, we also had uh done some expenditures, right?

Yes.

Um thank you, Supervisor Tam uh for the question.

Thank you, Supervisor Uh Molly, for your your words and abstention.

Very much appreciated.

And I can't um answer your question if I can't just take a moment to acknowledge the presentation, the work from Jewel Legacy, uh the speakers.

Personally, it was powerful.

I can't explain it.

Um I can often think of what to say, but just hearing in real time and real talk from the community just makes it even more important to acknowledge uh the feedback.

Um, so relative to your to your question, I think you again for asking, so you're correct, it's been about uh 30 over 30 million dollars thus far that your board has approved.

Um things are moving forward.

An African American Wellness Subadvisory Committee has been formed, and members of the community are now participating.

Their input is actually helping to serve as a conduit to our general services agency.

I think with your direction and your leadership of the board of supervisors, they're moving very quickly and staying on track to uh um evaluate how the building itself can be reconstructed in a way that's culturally affirming, and so that the space will allow for many of the services that you heard today.

Uh, in terms of the county um and the services that are continuing, the virtual wellness hub, which you've already approved, the funding of many different contractors, including ABC and others continue.

Uh, and so at this point, we're pretty excited.

For what we heard, this is essentially the first phase of the community to actually be able to contribute to the design build.

The contractor that your board ultimately we hope will approve to move forward.

Also has a requirement that they will engage the community.

So that is really important.

And so we're trying to stay on course on meshes to make sure that that happens.

We think there'll be several phases.

Um, I'll certainly defer to Director Gassaway to provide an update specifically on the construction, but at every phase, the design build, which is very novel to Alamady County, most often in the Bay Area, to construct a building that's actually coming from the voice of people and community and need based as opposed to constructing something that can serve and people fit themselves into it.

Um but the many other phases will include uh providing input into into literally uh aesthetics, building the needs of the community.

We've already completed a process that your board has approved that talked about different types of services, uh, but we also understand as as many have mentioned that was over a decade ago that we first started this process.

Uh we've um had many different iterations of change, the pandemic hit, and now uh with the looming legislation, our department wanted to commit to making sure we have real-time feedback and input.

So, if in fact there is anything that needs to be communicated directly to our JCI partners, a need or something that we can actually communicate to them.

So, from the services, design, rugs, tapestry to colors to actually how it sits in the community and how it's governed, we're planning to integrate that with the community through the uh committee.

Thank you.

I understand uh you had a listening session in West Oakland that was super well attended.

And so uh from that listening session, did you um like formulate ideas like going forward programmatically, not just the building on what we um we could shape and form?

Yes, and I would say on the last three years, there's been about 25 listening sessions.

And the one that you most recently uh described, from what I understand, there was great excitement in it, but people basically, okay, let's get moving.

They want to actually help co-create.

So there's a mixture between uh wellness, and I think uh the people you heard from the community really speak to that.

It's a biocycle social, spiritual impact.

So it's much more holistic, not just uh pathologizing the African American community and getting services, it's actually preventing linking a place where they can be restored.

They can congregate, uh, people can feel safe and be connected to the community.

So I think what I heard was um let's get it done.

Enough talk.

Let's move, let's put things into place.

Um, but they really did speak to uh plethora, health care, behavioral health care, specific services, training, teaching, engagement, and fair and equitable treatment across the board, including policy.

So again, there's there's a lot to unpack, but our team is there with uh support is to organize it and to make sure that we're relaying that information so in real time we can get those services uh constructed in a way, and as well, despite what's happening at the state, federal level, our department is committed to making sure that uh whether we are my father used to say squeezing blood from return it to make sure that we allocate and continue to support the African American community through service and program funding.

So, thank you very much.

I know it's been very challenging, especially even with proposition one and some of the prevention programs that we are looking at and early intervention.

So I appreciate all your hard work and your integration with the community's input.

Thank you.

Um what I've heard today, I I think uh we will incorporate into uh a lot of our programming and also our funding, particularly when it comes to the measure W Essential Services component.

We at the county have uh been very clear that equity, not equality, equity is a core part of how we address um the allocations.

The recent example was on violence prevention.

We had asked our Alameda County Health Director to basically increase almost double the allocation in measure C for violence prevention.

Obviously, the areas where it's in most high need will be in the cities of Oakland and Hayward.

Um we work very closely uh with the city of Oakland today.

Um, our public health director will be meeting with uh their council members and their staff on human trafficking, for example, and we understand very clearly that um over policing is not the answer.

We cannot, we don't have the staffing, frankly, to even put uh a sheriff or deputy sheriff or work with Oakland to put police officers at every corner and every site.

But what we can do is deal with what many have described as the root cause of crime and the root cause of community safety, and that is having the kind of programs that um Dr.

Tribble talked about, having family circles, peer counselings at uh different locations throughout the community, having neighborhood cleanup programs uh to address the issues that Supervisor Miley has been working for a long time on uh with respect to resiliency and having safe and clean neighborhoods.

So those are programs, but we continue to um appreciate and will uh seek your input and your guidance as we move forward on many of these programs.

Um I'm sorry, Director Anika Ta.

Uh thank you, Supervisor.

I I just wanted to uh share an answer for you for a question that you asked earlier.

Um, so according to the social services agency's website, there's about 60,000, a little over 59,000 um residents who participate in Medi-Cal and identify as black or African American.

That's about 12% of our overall Medical population.

It's quite significant.

And as Mr.

Roberts mentioned, you know, when the Affordable Care Act expanded, there was a lot of uh men who didn't have uh families or children uh as dependents, and so our our worry is that you know, as those things get rolled back, there would be a significant impact.

Can you also touch on um the Cal Ain aspects and sort of working with uh the formerly incarcerated and how they um could be able to get health care and access to mental health care as well?

Um yes, so as a big part of the uh California advancing and improving Medicaid, this was a big Medicaid transformation initiative that's underway.

There is a component of it that's specific to re-entry supports for people.

So our behavioral health department and the sheriff's office and probation and others in the mix have really been working for the last couple of years to be able to implement the supports that happen inside the jail and transition them to prepare people for connections to services as they exit the jail.

So that's been a big component of it.

And I also just want to reaffirm your comments that you know there's it's always sobering to hear the cumulative impacts of all of the policy failures of our society.

And at the same time, there's some hope that a lot of what we've heard from the council today is aligned with the work that we're doing across the agency in homelessness.

There's a specific race equity lens that we have to ensure that African Americans are not overly represented in that group.

With the measure W investment, there's a for the first time we anticipate having a big investment in prevention.

And that's something that our public health department's gonna work closely on with our housing and homelessness department to sort of think about what are the upstream ways that you know we can stop the trickle into homelessness.

Um so those are big positive things that we can look forward to.

Thank you very much.

Um, supervisor, yes.

You ask a question about those 30 organizations that we had a chance to talk to.

Um it was via survey, and so we were not doing uh an analysis to see what um specifically if there were duplications.

We did not ask number uh questions like how many people do you serve, do you have a wait list?

We were really trying to understand who was serving who, and also to understand whether they were using healing practices.

Uh, those were specifically organizations that we're looking at that were providing some sort of mental health or well-being uh resources.

Uh so we haven't done that work.

I want to say, and in closing, that this work is really around coordination.

It was really around having a body and a single source uh of uh to go to for uh resources, information, but also uh understanding um working with your departments, um both public health and behavioral health uh and social services to understand how we're moving in terms of addressing those stubborn uh disparities, and right now we do not have that.

Um it is an effort to to stand back and to um collectively all acknowledge um agree and prioritize uh areas that uh we believe will have the greatest impact.

Um thank you.

So the as part of the action plan, this um council group, do you envision this being um more organic within the community, or do you expect some sort of um sort of like the behavioral health advisory council that we have at the county that it would be uh supported and staffed by the county staffing structure?

The county um first of all, I want to acknowledge both the behavior health director and uh Dr.

Tribble and the director of public health and also the director of AC Health.

Um they have been partners with us along the way as we've been conceptualizing this.

Uh we do not um see it as um similar to the mental health advisory group at all, or any of your public commissions.

Uh, this is a group that would be driven by your by the African American community.

Uh, and it would cost many of your departments and many of the um the areas where we talk of where we talk about the social determinants of health.

Um, in terms of it being organic, I think that that we're we really are beyond that in terms of this the state that we're in right now and the place that we are.

Um if you if you remember the diagram, we we do see the African American community at the center and the voices of the people who are most impacted.

So I do see us working with any of those commissions and that the idea is to bring all of it together so that you have a comprehensive view of what is happening, whether it's funded by your county agencies or your departments or other sources, and to leverage uh resources from other partners like our philanthropic community and and our businesses.

Um, we don't see this as a purely county led, but we do think it's important to have the county's uh support and sanction uh as we move forward.

Okay, that's very helpful.

I appreciate it.

I appreciate everyone's comments today and the presentation.

Um so at this time uh we will go to public comments on items that are not on today's agenda but are within the purview of the health committee.

There are no speakers.

Thank you, everyone, for your participation.

This meeting's adjourned.