Good afternoon and welcome to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors Social Services Committee meeting for Monday, April the 27th, 2026.

May I have broke call, please?

Supervisor Fortunatar Boss.

Present.

Supervisor Tim.

Present.

We have a core.

Thank you.

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Thank you.

Thank you very much.

We will start with our first informational item, which is the CalFresh program update.

Yes, I'll like to invite Roland Shell and Jaime and Desco to the podium.

Um next month is CalFresh Awareness Month.

So we typically try to give you all the CalFresh update in preparation for Calfresh Awareness Month.

And what you'll hear is a little bit about HR1, but the focus really is just about the CalFresh program.

So Jaime.

Good afternoon.

Okay, sorry about that.

Um good afternoon, Supervisor Tam, Supervisor Fortunato uh Bass, Director Ford.

My name is Jaime N Domesco.

I am an associate program specialist at Alameda County Social Services Workforce and Benefit Administration.

I am joined by my colleague Roland Shaw, who's a program specialist.

We're here today to provide an update on the CalFresh program.

Uh thank you for having us today.

Next slide, please.

Thank you.

Next, I'll go through the agenda.

We'll start with a brief overview of the CalFresh program, followed by CalFresh Awareness Month activities.

Then we'll cover Sunbugs, the Calfresh Fruits and Vegetable EBT Pilot Program and EBT theft.

We will also go over recent non-citizen eligibility changes and updates to the able-bodied adults without dependence under HR1.

We'll close with a snapshot of current Calfresh program data.

Next slide, please.

Thank you.

To provide a brief overview of the CalFresh program, CalFresh is federally known as SNAP.

It's one of the largest food assistance program, actually the largest food assistance program in California.

It serves as a critical safety net for low-income individuals and families.

The program provides monthly benefits on an EBT card, which is which functions similar to an uh a debit card to purchase food at grocery stores or farmers markets.

People can apply for CalFresh through multiple channels, including in-person at any of our social services agency offices, uh, by phone, mail, fax, and online at benefitscal.com.

Next slide, please.

Thank you.

Calfresh Awareness Month.

As Director Ford mentioned, May is CalFresh Awareness Month, and our focus is on making sure people understand that the CalFresh program exists and understand how to access it.

That includes increasing awareness, addressing myths and misconception about the CalFresh program, and continuing to support uh families and individuals with the application and the renewal process.

The image that you see on the right with the young girl and the mother uh says CalFresh Work is one of our posters for this year's CalFresh Awareness Month.

Next slide, please.

Thank you.

This year's theme is CalFresh Works.

It speaks directly to the common misconception that CalFresh is only for people who are not working.

In reality, though, a large portion of our CalFresh recipients are working families and individuals who still struggle to make um in meet uh and afford food due to high cost of living.

So the CalFresh program assists households to ensure that they consistently have access to nutritious food during times of high cost of living.

That's CalFresh Works.

So both our participants and the program also works.

Alameda County Social Services Agency has partnered with Alameda County Food Community Food Bank and their wide network of community partners to expand our outreach efforts, provide program information and assist with the application process.

This year's campaign will begin on April 29th with a presentation on the CalFresh program.

It will be hosted by Alameda County Social.

I'm sorry, Alameda County Community Food Bank, and about 20 CBOs will be attending this event.

Next slide, thank you.

To get into Sun Bucks, SunBucks is a federally funded food assistance program.

It's designed to support families with children during the summer month when school mills are not available for children.

It's separate from CalFresh, but it closely aligns in its effort in reducing food insecurity.

In 2025, eligible children receive 40 a month or 120 in total over the summer.

Sunbucks is issued on a separate card.

It's called SunBucks card, similar to an EBT card.

For 2026, uh participation estimate as well as funding are pending state guidelines.

Eligibility, as you can see, the chart on the right for Sunbucks is tied to the same income guidelines used for free or reduced price school mills.

That means children who already receive free or reduced lunch or meals at their school qualify.

Or if they live in a household where they are receiving CalFresh, Medi-Cal or CalWorks, they automatically qualify for Sun Bucks.

Next slide, please.

And some data on Sunbucks.

All 2025 Sunbucks cars have been issued.

And what makes Sunbucks distinct, a bit different from CalFresh, is that Sunbux cars expire 122 days after the date of issuance.

So it has to be used within a given time frame.

As of February 28, 2026, a total of 3.3 million cars have been pinned statewide, representing an 80% pin rate.

Over 405.2 million dollars in benefits, including replacement benefits were issued statewide.

Approximately 90 95.2% or 388.2 million dollars have been spent on food.

Unlike CalFresh, families do not have the option to purchase hot meals with the Sun Bucks card.

Approximately 101.6 million dollars or 80% of the total value loaded on mail cards has been expunged because it was not used in the allowable time frame.

And we also have Alameda County specific data.

We didn't include it in our presentation because we received it after we submitted the presentation, but for Alameda County, as of April 5, 2026, 111,926 cars were issued, which is $13.4 million in benefits.

Of those $55,267 or 67.2% have been pinned.

The total benefit value, as I mentioned, is $13.4 million, while the total benefit value pinned is 9 million.

I do not have the exact figure of that.

CDSS did not provide that to us, but we could do a bit of calculation and come up with that answer.

Next slide.

Thank you.

To get into CalFresh Fruit and Vegetable EBT pilot program.

The CalFresh Fruit and Vegetable EBT pilot program helps households stretch their food dollars while encouraging them to choose healthier purchases.

Participants can receive a dollar for dollar match up to $60 per month when buying fresh fruits or vegetables at participating stores or markets.

In Alameda County, the participating store is Santa Fe Food and New York.

They are open from 8 a.m.

to 8 p.m.

It's on 7356 Thorrington Avenue.

And the staff there is trained and prepared to assist CalFresh participants at point of purchase if they have any questions about this program.

Next slide, please.

Thank you.

EBT electronic theft remains an important issue affecting CalFresh households.

Under federal policy, households may receive up to two replacements within a federal fiscal year to request replacement benefits.

Households have to submit form EBT 2259 within 90 calendar days from the date of theft.

We also encourage the use of EBT Edge mobile app or web portal, which is the only CDS's approved mobile app or web portal to manage EBT transaction.

And we do not encourage the use of third party apps.

Next slide, please.

Thank you.

This slide highlights the strong progress Alameda County has made in reducing EBT theft.

Since February 2024, CalFresh EBT theft has declined by approximately 92%.

As reflected in the chart, theft levels were significantly higher in early 2024 and have steadily declined over time.

And the success of this result is a strong collaboration across states and county partners.

We have also deployed, or the state has deployed chip and tab EBT cards, and we have implemented EBT8 Edge application and web portal.

And there's also PIN reset for compromise cards that provide clients notifications.

Next slide, please.

Thank you.

So there are some significant changes under HR1 or House Representative One, better known as the Big Beautiful Bill.

Since April 1st, under HR1, CalFresh eligibility is restricted to the following groups.

That includes US citizens, including those born in the United States, individuals born in US territories, such as Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, or Guam, naturalized citizens.

Non-citizens, US nationals, including people born in American Samoa or Swains Island after December 21st, 1952, residents of the Northern Mariana Islands, lawful permanent residents or LPRs, these are individuals who have a green card, individuals with a compact of free association or COFA agreement, including lawfully present citizens of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau, Cuban and Haitian entrants, individuals granted parole, not subject to final removal order or have a pending asylum application.

Thank you.

Unfortunately, under HR1, a long list of non-citizens are no longer eligible for federal Calfresh unless they later adjust their immigration status to LPR.

So if they give their green card, they can qualify for CalFresh again.

Those are refugees, asylumes, parolees, with the exception of Cuban and Haitian entrants, individuals with deportation or removal withheld, conditional entrance, victims of trafficking, bad or non-citizens, certain Afghan nationals, including parole those parole between July 31st, 2021 and September 30th, 2023.

Certain Ukrainian nationals who were granted parole between February 24, 2022 to September 30th, 2024.

And those with the asterisk, they uh may potentially be eligible for CFAP, which is the California Food Assistance Program.

I'll get into that on the next slide.

Thank you.

California Food Assistance Program or CFAP is a state-funded uh food benefit that is similar to the CalFresh program for certain legally present non-citizens who do not qualify for CalFresh due to their immigration status.

It is important to note though that CFAB eligibility is limited and it applies to individuals who are ineligible for federal CalFresh, specifically because of a long-standing federal policy restriction under the personal responsibility work opportunity reconciliation act of 1996.

Because the HR1 changes fall outside of the personal responsibility.

Those who would lose CalFresh as a result of HR1 will now qualify for CFAP, with the exception of a few non-citizens.

That includes some lawful permanent residents who do not meet the five-year waiting period or an exemption.

The five-year waiting period is a five-year waiting time for non-citizens before they could qualify for public assistance, such as CalFresh, or if they meet an exemption.

Bad or non-citizens, regardless of meeting the five-year waiting period or an exemption.

These are individuals who have experienced severe serious violence, such as domestic violence by a U.S.

citizen or a green card holder in the United States.

Parolees who do not meet the five-year waiting period again or an exemption.

For parole effective June 1st, 2026, they will qualify for CFAP immediately once they are paroled into the United States.

Previously, they would have to be in the United States as parolees for at least one year before they could qualify for CFAP.

That is no longer that that would be that would no longer be uh applicable after June 1st, 2026.

T visa holders, these are survivors of trafficking, preparing to apply for T Visa with a pending T visa and granted T visa without an office of refugee resettlement certificates, U visa holders, individuals with a pending or granted U visas.

These are also individuals who have experienced or are victims of serious violence, such as domestic violence or assault of any kind.

Conditional entrants who do not meet the five-year waiting period or an exemption.

So anyone on this list on these categories may qualify for CFAP.

Next slide, please.

Next, uh, to highlight our coordinated response to the food access gap that will obviously be created by the changes due to HR1.

In Alameda County, we estimate approximately 5,400 individuals will lose uh CalFresh benefits as a result of these federal uh changes to respond proactively.

Alameda County Social Services Agency has partnered with East Bay Refugee Immigration Forum, which is a coalition of 32 organizations that serve refugee and immigrant communities in the East Bay to support impacted residents.

Uh we are in the planning and discussion stage of coordinating food distribution for those who are impacted in Alameda County.

In addition, our agency is developing a plan to be available to use available refugee support service funding to provide short-term food assistance for individuals who qualify through the Office of Refugee Resettlement Program.

Thank you.

That will wrap up my section of the presentation.

We can take questions at the end of our presentation.

Thank you for listening to Roland.

The mic is yours.

Good afternoon, Vice President Tam, Supervisor Fortineta Bass.

My name is Roland Show.

I am a program specialist with the Department of Workforce and Benefits Administration.

And I'm going to guide us through the latter half of our presentation.

So starting with our first slide here, this is again on our able-bodied adults without dependents, also known as ABODS.

And this is kind of just a refresher just to going over this.

There are some minor changes that I will note on the next slide.

But just going over ABOD, an ABOD is defined as an individual between the ages of 18 to 64.

They are able-bodied or able to work, and they do not qualify for an exemption.

An ABOD who does not meet the work requirement or an exemption is going to be limited to three full months of CalFresh within a fixed 36 month period.

The ABOD time limits, they will take effect for our new CalFresh applications that are received and dated on or after June 1st, 2026.

For our current receiving, currently recipient of CalFresh, their ABOD implementation will begin with their next recertification that is due in or after June 2026.

If they do not meet an exemption or meet the work requirement, that 36 month is fixed.

And so the 36 month period began this year, January 1st, 2026, and it will conclude on December 31st, 2028.

A new 36 month clock will then begin January 1st of 2029, and they will end on December 31st, 2031.

As I mentioned before, ABODs are required to meet the work requirement or an exemption.

Otherwise, there'll be time limited to three full months of CalFresh benefits.

In order to meet the work requirement, an ABOD is required to work an average of 20 hours per week or 80 hours per month, or they can also participate in qualifying work activities such as our CalFresh and Employment Training, also known as CalFresh ENT, a program under Section 236 of the Trade Act of 1974, a program under a workforce innovation and opportunities act, also known as WIOA, as well as participating in community service or volunteer work.

An ABOD can mix and match their work hours between standard employment and with work participation activities.

Those hours are not able to be averaged or mixed and matched with other activities.

If someone wants to meet the work requirement through workfare, they would have to complete all of the hours that are assigned in workfare.

Workfare hours are determined based on the benefit amount the household receives divided by the highest uh local minimum wage uh in which they reside.

And that number rounded down to the nearest whole number is the total number of hours that that household has to meet uh for the month.

So typically that household, depending on their household size, but if we take, for example, a household of one, um, per month, and the uh where they work, their minimum wage is for instance 20 an hour.

We take the 200 benefit amount that they are issued each month divided by the highest minimum wage, that 20 where they live.

Um, that comes out to 10.

That means that individual has to complete 10 hours of workfare activities for the entire month to meet this requirement.

Uh, in addition, or as an alternative to the work requirement, individuals can also qualify to be exempt from the work requirement.

Um, one of the, or there's a total of seven exemptions, and they an individual only has to meet one.

Uh, these exemptions are an individual that's under the age of 18 or over the age of 64, uh, individual who's pregnant at any stage, an individual who is medically certified as physically or mentally unfit to work, an individual who is an Indian, urban Indian or Californian Indian Indian as defined under the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act, a uh an individual residing in a CalFresh household with a CalFresh household number under the age of 14, an individual who is exempt from CalFresh work registration requirements except due to their age because work registration um ends at age 59, but ABOD extends to up to age 64.

Uh the last exemption is for an individual that's participating in an office of refugee resettlement ORR training program, at least on a halftime basis.

That fourth bullet or fifth billet with the asterisk, that one has changed since our last presentation to you all in February.

Previously, the interpretation that the state had provided for us was an individual could be exempt from ABOD if they were the parent of or responsible for an individual under the age of 14, and they did not have to be residing in the same home as that individual.

But the Fed has clarified that exemption for us, and now it has been defined as an individual that is part of the same CalFresh household as an ABOD, and they're under the age of 14.

That household member under the age of 14 does not have to be receiving CalFresh.

They could be, for instance, an undocumented minor that does not qualify for Calfresh, but otherwise is part of that CalFresh household that would exempt the ABOD.

Next, I also wanted to stay on the topic of ABOS, just give you some data updates from our last presentation in February of this year.

As of our March 31st data, we have identified approximately 26,000 non-exempt ABODs.

These again are the individuals that currently in our system do not meet an exemption and would be subject to the work requirement.

And if they do not meet the work requirement, they would be time limited to three full months of CalFresh benefits within that fixed 36 month time period.

This is a decrease of about a thousand compared to our estimate that we provided in January or that we provided in February, which was pulled from our January caseload data, which was 27,000.

We now also have approximately 11,600 exempt ABODs.

These are the individuals that are not at risk of losing CalFresh benefits because they meet an exemption.

This has also decreased by roughly 1,900 or 900 to be precise from our February update.

That estimate has also decreased by approximately 100 down to 6,300.

And then for our unhoused population that are non-exempt, again, that are subject to the work requirement, that has also decreased by approximately 200 down to 5,000 individuals.

The change or the cause for this most likely is due to the decreasing number of CalFresh recipients here in Alameda County.

As of March 31st, our estimated CalFresh population here was approximately 167,900 individuals.

When we reported this in February, using our January data, that was at 169,900.

So it's approximately 2,000 decrease in those two months.

The total number of individuals receiving Calfresh in March of 2025 was almost 179,000.

Currently, we are at uh just a little under 168,000 individuals.

The number of Calfresh applications that we receive has also decreased from a monthly average of 6,000 CalFresh applications a month back in March of 2025 to approximately 4200 in March of 2026.

The average household benefit has not decreased as noticeably.

The total amount of benefits that we issued in Alameda County for the month of March 2025 was 34.4 million.

For March of 2026, that decreased down to 32.8 million.

So on that first chart on our left, this is our breakdown of CalFresh households by supervisor district.

For district one, approximately 10% of our CalFresh households are residing district one, 17% in District 2, 25% in District 3, 23%, district 4, and 20% in District 5.

For our CalFresh recipients by gender, we have approximately 56% of our CalFresh recipients who identify as female, and 44% identify as male.

And on the far right, we have our breakdown of CalFresh recipients by age range.

So that first lighter green, that is our zero to uh apologies, that should be zero to five, uh not zero to 15, but that's approximately 9% of our CalFresh population are between the ages of zero to five.

10% are between six to 12 years of age, 7% between 13 to 17, and then 49%, almost half our population is 18 to 64, which is our key ABOD age range.

And then we have approximately 25% who are 65 and older.

This next uh these next two charts show um our breakdown.

The top one is our CalFresh recipients by ethnicity.

So we have approximately 28.7 percent, where the ethnicity is listed as other, or they did not provide the ethnicity on their application.

23.3 percent identify as Hispanic, 19.8 identify as black or African American, 19.7 percent identify as Asian or Pacific Islander, 7.8% identify as white, 0.4% identify as multiracial, and 0.3% identifies Native American.

For our language preferences, uh the most common uh age or sorry, the most common language preference is English at 72.9%, followed by Spanish at 11.4%, Cantonese at 7.1%, other non-English languages at 2.6%, Vietnamese at 2.1%, Mandarin at 1.6%, 1% for Farsi, and 0.7% for Arabic.

And then for this last uh chart here, this is our um overall Calfresh household uh overall Calfresh individual population by unhoused individuals.

So approximately 20% uh or one in five of our CalFresh uh recipients identify as being unhoused.

And we'll be happy to take any questions.

Thank you.

Very uh rich data and very important data.

Uh Supervisor Fortunatabash questions or comments.

Yes, I do have a few questions.

Um firstly, thank you so much for all of this work.

I definitely appreciate the programmatic work as well as the data.

Um I remember last year there was a whole campaign around uh May being CalFresh month, and I'm curious if there's similarly a communications campaign.

Yes, uh so we we do have our um efforts this year as well.

We do have um social media uh as well as well, just digital and print um campaigns in coordination with the Alameda County Community Food Bank.

We also have our um posters on storefronts this year as well, along with our bus and transit shelter posters.

Um, the counties updating um all of our social media accounts to also promote CalFresh Awareness Month during the month of May.

Um, we'll be updating our um our public-facing website as well as um we have we just received posters, uh printed posters uh for Calfresh Awareness Month that we are going to be displaying at all of our agency office locations.

Thank you.

And I know that uh through the Measure W Essential Services Fund, there was some funding dedicated to community-based organizations around um both Medi-Cal and CalFresh retention.

Um are those CBOs also working on this sort of broader uh communications and outreach as well, or I think they are sort of working with us ongoing.

Is that correct?

Correct.

Uh are you talking about in general or also with just mainly to CalFresh Awareness Month?

Because we do work with them in general throughout the course of the year, but for our CalFresh Awareness Month, we have also looped them in.

Um I think a couple of them will also be joining us next month for the proclamation as well.

Um so for clarification, Roland, she's speaking about measure W funds.

And then a portion was allocated to workforce and benefits administration.

And a lot of the outreach materials are on healthyac.org.

So if you can speak to that.

Yes, so we do have a lot of our, as uh Director Ford mentioned, um, one of our colleagues also with program planning and support.

Um, we have updated all of our AC Healthy AC Gov materials online.

Um they are also again distributed to all of our partners, um, our CBO partners that we're working with as well.

Okay, thank you.

And um, in terms of the data uh towards the end of the presentation, I am curious to hear what some of the reasons are for the decline in CalFresh enrollees.

I am you know just wondering if it's similar to what we're seeing with Medi-Cal in terms of changes to automatic enrollment or what the what members of the public might be hearing about about eligibility or even you know some of the fears in our immigrant community.

Uh yes, so I would say um what we're we're examining the data closely still.

Um we don't have an exact cause uh for why the number of um applications has decreased.

Our overall um caseload has relatively is still um pretty stable.

Um but I will say that the trends that we are seeing in the decreased number of applications, these are experienced uh statewide.

So every county is experiencing this.

This is not novel to Alameda County.

Um in terms of some of the possible causes for this.

Um I will say that in terms of our application volume just at a state and county level, have been on the decline since October of 2024, um, just before the presidential elections.

Um I would say that there are um there's a greater sense of fear and uncertainty within the community, especially our immigrant and non-citizen community, uh, many of who are still potentially eligible for CalFresh, but due to certain fears of immigration enforcement and and just kind of rumors that are going around that um the surround the program that it's um that CalFresh is a public charge, which it is not.

That's one of our our strong um kind of talking points when we when we go out to the community to to kind of massage that that messaging that CalFresh is not a public charge.

Um this is a service that if you are eligible for it, you will qualify, you will receive the benefits.

You're not taking benefits away from anyone.

Uh in terms of other possible causes, um we did have a very strong uh enrollment push during the pandemic.

Uh there were a lot of policies enacted during the COVID pandemic era, a lot of which um came to an end in 2023, and as a result, we've kind of been seeing decreased volume in terms of um retention not being there because some folks may not want to go through that uh recertification process.

Uh a lot of the processes, again, that were designed to make the application and renewal of CalFresh during the pandemic a little bit easier.

They all expired.

Um, and so we've kind of have seen that just across the state and also in Alameda County.

Thank you.

And I guess this underscores why um drawing attention to CalFresh is so important this month and ongoing.

Um I do have just a few more questions.

Um in terms of the 4200 active CalFresh applications, uh, will those be processed by the end of May?

Uh so yes, so our policy is to process them within uh 30 days.

That's the state um requirement or the federal requirement to pub to process all applications.

Um I will say that here in Alameda County, we do try to uh process our applications much faster than that.

Um, in terms of, I believe the state as a gener in general processes approximately 97 to 98% of applications within the 30-day period uh in Alameda County, we're actually a little bit better than that.

We're at 98 to 99% of applications processed within the 30-day time limit.

That's great, thank you.

Um, and then what's the current estimated gap um among our our supervisor districts of people who were likely eligible for CalFresh, but who were not yet enrolled?

I I don't have that exact data.

Um the state does release that data from time to time, but the last report I believe was 2024.

So I don't think the state has released uh a data on that, and we haven't complete completed our initial assessment.

Okay.

And then I have a few questions around on citizens.

Is there zip code level data on non-citizens who are losing CalFresh?

Yes, we do have it.

The vast majority will be around zip code 94601.

Followed by 94621, 94603.

The primarily we the majority of those who will be impacted are in East Oakland, the Footville area, as well as San Leandro, some in Alameda, Oakland, and then Chinatown area.

We have a complete list.

I can read it off if you like, or by um zip code.

Perhaps it's something you can share with all of the supervisors so we know how to work with our constituents.

Of course, yeah, we have the data available.

But the top five are 94601, 94621, 94603, 94544, and 94605.

Thank you.

Um and once certain non-citizens are unenrolled, what resources are offered to them?

Um, how are they getting that information and is it multilingual?

Uh we are have been conducting uh outreach uh since um March to non-citizens who will be impacted by HR1.

We make direct costs to them.

We have two interns who have been making costs, and we provide Alameda County Community Food Bank as a resource uh for them to uh receive food.

But we are also, as I mentioned, working with e-brief to potentially hold food distribution site specifically in these impacted areas, but that's still in the beginning stages.

Okay, thank you.

And my last question, um, how soon can we expect the plan that is being worked on to use ref uh refugee support services funding to help some of the non-citizens being impacted by HR1?

Um that is still in the planning section, uh set uh stages of um the the plan, but I would we would expect the next two months or so we should have something, but we just to clarify that folks will be losing CalFresh benefits as a result of HR1 incrementally, so on a monthly basis.

Um we are working as quickly as possible to provide resources to our community.

So in the next month or two, we should have uh exact um uh uh resources available.

Okay, my name is Antoinette Burns.

I'm the Division of Operations Services Manager for the Department of Workforce and Benefits Administration.

So we'll be working with three of our current um contractors for the refugee resorted refugee supportive services plan, um, currently IRC, uh refugee intermittent IRT, refugee intermittent transitions, and um Lao family.

So we will have to uh amend their current contracts.

So we're currently working with them to get scope of works, and depending on we get the scope of works, we'll determine when we come before the board.

We're hoping before the fiscal year ends, but it all depends on when we get those scopes of work and how fast we can get on the agenda.

Terrific.

I really appreciate this presentation and um answers to those questions.

Food security is so important to our residents, and I really appreciate the partnership and the work that you all do.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I also appreciate the presentation.

I just had um maybe three questions.

The first is on the Sunbox program.

Um so when you presented the data from the state, uh so 80% of the cards got pinned, but then about 80% of the total value um were not used or they were expunged.

And in Alameda County, you said about 67% was pinned.

I mean, I'm I'm just gonna assume that's gonna be similar to the state, maybe in terms of the nine million dollars.

Um could potentially be similar to the state, yes.

Okay.

Um so this is like a 40 dollar per month card that the students get.

We we have some community organizations that have come to us and wanted to provide like uh school lunch programs in the summer.

So uh but this 40 dollars can be used anywhere, right?

It can be used at a grocery store, it can be used at a cafe to buy a sandwich and things.

How would community groups participate in something like that if if there's already an existing program that provides school lunch or basically school food programs in the summer?

It would be a separate benefit from what community-based organizations would like to do versus what the state is doing with sunbugs.

Okay.

Um so that um youth can qualify for both.

They will automatically get the Sunbucks card just for being either low income or household being a CalFresh or CalWorks household, but separately, if um the community is doing something different, it doesn't impact Sun Bucks.

Um, I think for the last few years, the city of Oakland has had a summer meals lunch program, and I believe that'll continue this year as well.

Um, but one does not cancel out the other one.

Okay, so they they get Sunbox and the city uh sponsored programs, but like last year, remember through Oakland Thrives, they were worried about that program uh possibly going away.

And then the representative from the city of Oakland came back and said they were working out um an agreement to also have that program this summer.

Okay, so uh um do you have a sense of how many kids benefit from this program from Sunbox?

Yeah, I think the numbers are there.

Um I prov we provided the numbers, so the just give me one second.

Um they they issue one card per child.

Um so the the total that was um issued was 11,000 926 in Alameda County.

Oh, so 11,000 is Alameda County, it's not this that is correct.

Okay, do you have an idea of how much the Oakland School lunch program was?

I don't know.

Okay.

Um my next question is on uh the CalFresh fruit and vegetable pilot program.

Do you I I noticed here that it's being piloted in the city of Newark?

That's correct.

I'm sorry, that is correct.

Do we have a sense of um when it might expand beyond Newark?

Because there's a lot of underserved census tracts, particularly in uh in the unincorporated area, like Hayward Acres, Ashland, Cherryland, and obviously the census tracks that you mentioned or the zip codes you mentioned in Oakland.

Currently, um it is a pilot program.

Uh it could potentially, depending on how effective the pilot is, it could potentially expand to other areas as well.

But no immediate plans that we are aware of.

But hi me, how was that location selected?

I'm sorry, how was the newer location selected?

Uh the state uh selects them based off the pilot.

Um, and it's also funding is dependent on um on the budget on the state budget as well, too.

But how was Newark selected?

Uh I don't know the exact requirements, but the California Department of Social Services, they go through um evaluation of which locations will be accepting um or participating.

Um not all counties actually have a uh a location in their in their county.

So um, for instance, I um I think ours is only one count, only one location.

Um, some counties don't even have a um uh participating vendor, so they actually have to go to another um county to participate in that if they wanted to.

So you need a participating vendor, you said or provider?

They have to be um approved by CDS by the California Department of Social Services, and I don't know what the uh requirements or how they go about determining which location which vendor is awarded um like this contract.

Okay, thank you.

Uh on the um CalFresh program, uh I think supervisor fortunate covered a lot of my questions, but uh I'm just trying to understand uh I know there's been a decline, and uh uh to be honest, I think it's a good thing if you look at the long run, if there's less people that need this program.

But the question I'm trying to formulate is what what is like the normal attrition that you would have if you weren't affected by some of these political issues that we're facing, like with HR1, the public charge, and the fear that people normally would have uh so I don't have that exact data, but I would say looking at our just previous years of of caseload activity, um, it has always been an increase.

We've uh always seen a higher and higher demand year over year.

Um, it really exploded uh during the pandemic era when we went from I believe approximately 60,000 households receiving CalFresh to upwards of now we're at 100 and I think it's 1056,000 um households within that um six, seven year period.

Okay.

Um so we're always experiencing that that increase, but um, but yeah, we don't have the attrition numbers currently.

Yeah, it's just that uh compared to last year, uh the 178,800 recipients.

Uh we went down by down to 167,900.

That's about a 6.3% decline.

So is this the first year you've seen a decline?

Yes, for for us, this is the first year where we've had this this decline.

Typically, month to month there will be declines, but in at the end of each uh federal fiscal year, we're still receiving a higher um number than the previous year, but this year um we probably are gonna be trending downwards because as I mentioned, our application volume has um steadily decreased since approximately October of 2024.

And again, that's um that's statewide as well.

Yeah, I'm I'm obviously wrestling with like how do you address food security in the long run and continuing to have an increase, and then obviously with this decline because of all these requirements that we may have, um, is a little bit troubling, don't you think?

Uh yeah, yes, I will definitely agree with you, Vice President Tam.

Um I would also say that our food prices um are comparing it from last March to this March, they've all they have increased by I believe it was 2.7 percent that USDA reported.

Uh and so um I I think in the long run um our CalFresh caseload likely will will stay stagnant or or decrease due to some of these HR1 changes that are coming, um, coupled with the fact of our decreasing number of applications.

Um yes.

Okay, so when you um help um those that are unhoused to get onto Calfresh, uh do they submit the application separately, or is it something that we go out through our like street health team, the navigation services?

I would say it's a combination of both.

There's there's um different avenues of of ways that they can submit the application.

Of course, um when we go out to meet the client, whether it's um our our county or local teams or with um CBOs, we do meet them where the need is, and at the same time we also have applications that are submitted, whether it's in person, over the phone, um online as well.

Those are probably our three most um common ways of submit of application submission.

Okay, and I'll I'll just add to that supervisor Tam.

Um, our legal advocates, um, homeless action center also assist with application submission for the homeless.

Oh, good.

Okay.

It's just that when you uh you know, because we had a session earlier today with the health committee that looked at um the unhoused population, and it it sounds it seems like at least from your data, you're not seeing a significant increase in uh the unhoused population uh needing Calfresh.

Yeah, uh I would say that you know, this is just our our 20 percent of our current um population that are receiving CalFresh, not necessarily um uh indicative of Alameda County and in general.

Um we do um still try to it's an outreach to them.

Um we do know that there are challenges um with a lot of the unhoused, they may not have a permanent mailing address.

Right.

Um we do offer um mail to be stored, county mail stored at our um agency offices.

Um so that is one way that we try to kind of meet um households and unhoused where they are um to at least have that touch point when they come in to check the mail or if they have questions about their um their ongoing case.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Appreciate that clarification.

Do we have any public comments on our CalFresh program update?

There are no public comments on this item.

Okay, thank you very much for your presentation.

Let's move to the child abuse prevention month.

We have Carlin Stewart and Collect Cajula.

And these are um this is an annual update.

Hi, my name is Colette Katwala.

I'm child welfare supervisor and coordinator of Alameda County's Child Abuse Prevention Council, and I have with me my program manager, Carlin Stewart.

Oh, we can go to the next slide.

Today we'll be going over uh the child abuse prevention services of the county, focusing on the child abuse prevention council and our task force.

I'll go over some of the our um contracts, the CAPET, the child abuse prevention intervention and treatment uh contracts, as well as the community-based child abuse prevention services.

And then I'll cover the uh American Rescue Plan Act or Act or ARPA, which is also uh community-based child abuse prevention supplement contract.

We'll talk about um the mandated reporting and community supporting and the updated laws about mandated reporting and cover some statistics on our trainings.

I'll talk a little bit about our uh counting prevention plans and how we're bringing stakeholders together to uh enhance and focus on uh broader prevention efforts and covering our community pathways of how to support families so that uh before they reach or prior to a suspected child abuse report.

Okay, so our task force, our child abuse prevention uh council, we have a task force that uh includes myself and Carlin Stewart.

We also have a parent advocate from uh a better way, a youth advocate from West Coast Children's Clinics, uh retired social workers and uh child welfare supervisors, another child welfare supervisor who oversees our um parent advocate and youth parent youth advocate programs, and also uh retire our retired SIDS coordinator.

The purpose of the task force is to review and recommend uh to the Board of Supervisors how we use our child abuse prevention funds, which includes um conducting community needs assessments and sites monitoring, really talk about the priorities for funding and makes recommendations to the Board of Supervisors about those priorities.

For our CAPEC contracts, we have uh currently 12 organizations that provide services uh throughout the county, uh free services that really focus on prevention or primary prevention services.

So those are services available to all families in Alameda County, as well as secondary prevention services, and those are families who have uh identified risk factors who are not involved in um child welfare services.

These services, which I'll go over in a minute, include um housing referrals, parent education and case management services.

In 2020, uh the Strong Families Alliance of Alameda County.

Oh, sorry, go back.

Uh the Strong Families Alliance of Alameda County came together to have a stronger network of providers that really support the coordination of uh our child safety efforts.

So we have a lot of within those 12 organizations uh referrals to each other.

If one organization is working with the family and they they see that that family needs another service outside of them, then they would do a referral within the strong families alliance.

Um our CBCAP funding is uh a county allocation from the state of 94,000, about 94,000.

This particular contract is used for public awareness and education campaigns.

And every every month uh the organizations within the strong families alliance um has various um campaigns that promote child safety and family support that we list on our website and our social media.

Okay, next slide.

So our CAPIT or our child abuse prevention and intervention and treatment contracts or funding provides state and local funding that funds prevention, intervention, and treatment programs.

We do utilize a multi-disciplinary approach.

These funds are pair of last resorts, so these are able to address the community's unmet needs through other areas.

And again, I said these services are free to all county residents with children.

The community-based child abuse prevention or CBCAP provides a community-based efforts and awareness to prevent child abuse.

So there are 12 service providers that have about uh nine different service categories.

Um there's uh behavioral health, uh case management, information and referral, uh legal services to provide um forensic interviewers interviewing for children who have been impacted by uh sexual abuse or severe violence in their home, um, like seven organizations that provide parenting support, uh peer support in various languages, include including Spanish and youth programming.

A little bit more about the Strong Families Alliance of Alameda County.

Uh, like I said, it's a network of connecting providers to families and youth.

Um, it provides those services uh to the community.

Uh the goal is, as I mentioned, to provide uh a cross-referral process.

Um, every quarter we meet as providers and we just share information of how services are working, where there are any gaps, and how us as a network or even outside of our network can um support that fill those gaps.

And we yeah, we work on focusing all of the organizations use something called the Protective Factors Survey, and this is a um uh um an empirically based uh survey that really looks at um uh increasing the protective factors, and we also measure other goals that clients um identify for goal attainment.

You can find our information of the Strong Families Alliance on our website, Alameda County CapC.com.

We're also on Facebook and Instagram.

So there's a lot of activities that happen in April for Child Abuse Prevention Month.

Uh we have the Wear Blue for Kids Day, a pinwell garden for people to display at their businesses.

We had an unpeeled um family event this past Saturday at Children's Fairyland and in Oakland.

We have an annual story time at Newark Library, and we recently had um children's memorial day flag raising um right here at the courthouse on Fallon last Friday.

The backslide.

Um so the the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act was a one-time supplemental grant that was uh given that was uh given through the state for counties who opted in to for this um really beneficial contract.

Those contractors um included East Bay Agency for Children, Bananas, Fesco La Familia, Family Support Services, and uh Safe Passages.

We were allocated in Alameda County um uh $811,000 that we needed to spend that we spent mostly from January of 2025 to December of 2025.

Um we opted in to really focus on basic needs and concrete supports because uh when we did our community needs assessment, that was something that um was resoundingly loud that family needed more supportive concrete supports.

The task force selected those five organizations, the Board of Supervisor approved them.

Excuse me, the contract was from December 2024 to December 2025.

And we served the funds were distributed across 2,0148 families throughout our county.

Next slide.

So some of the updates with the state mandated reporting to community supporting.

There's been a paradigm shift from over surveillance of families, especially families living in poverty, to more supportive services when mandated reporters come across these families.

And we're really focusing on making sure our mandated reporters know and are aware of assembly bill 2085, which was passed in 2022, which updated our the state's definition of general neglect to really clarify that poverty is not neglect and to um spell out that a parent's economic disadvantage is not a reason for mandated report to CPS.

In 20 um one go back, please.

And generally these organizations request several in one year or have me come back year over year.

The county comprehensive prevention plan is something that we created to support and empower families to prior to them coming into the purview of child welfare and the juvenile justice system.

It really built on our previous work from the Title IVe waiver, which really increased our own prevention efforts within our department and to decrease the number of children in foster care and to increase children remaining in their homes safely.

We're really generally engaged with people who have lived expertise like our parent advocates and our youth advocates to really support our work in that collaboration.

Our county prevention plan actively involves both behavioral health, public health, and probation.

And our stakeholders regularly come together to talk about ways to think innovatively to support our families and then make concrete plans for next steps.

We also look at ways to challenge the systems to and really look at how our consumers experience our work and our processes.

This really has increased our networking and build really better relationships between providers and really exemplifies our commitment to share resources and identify these concrete steps throughout the county.

Community pathways, this uh was uh uh something that expanded from the work that we're already doing for another road to safety uh previous to May or excuse me, March of 2025.

Uh another road to safety was is um a supportive services that families received only after a call to the hotline or after an investigation, but we expanded that to a community pathway where you don't need to have families do not need to have a call to the hotline or an investigation to access these um these services.

Umganizations can refer, provide a war handoff to families, or families can call and refer themselves.

And this is six months of voluntary services to children and families where the organization a better way creates with the family a family plan where they address some of the issues and possible risk factors that that the family identifies.

And those are that's our contact information, and I think I'll take any questions.

Thank you for that presentation.

Um supervisor portion advanced questions or comments.

Thank you so much for your work in this report.

Um, you know, clearly there's a whole ecosystem to support our families, and as was mentioned, making sure that families have the basics in terms of um, you know, food, secure housing, uh, health care, et cetera, is so important.

is so important.

So the stronger this part of the system is, then less kids will be in foster care or go into other parts of our system that are more intensive.

So um I am wondering what type of support is provided for families.

Say once a referral is made to the DCFS.

Um, do the same organizations reach out to those families, and if they um are already working with a particular family, are they able to continue?

Uh uh so yes, the families can uh access these services.

For instance, um, one of the organizations is uh a better uh excuse me, family paths.

Family Pass has a parental stress helpline that's available to um families that are not in the child welfare system, but they're also available to families um like relative caregivers and resource parents.

So that's uh within the child welfare system.

Um I mean, so much of this, as the name of your department says is preventative.

I'm curious um about some of the organizations that were funded through ARPA.

Um are all of them still part of the network or not?

And you know, does that impact the quality of service?

Well, though they may not be, um, but that ARPA was a one-time uh contract.

So the well, though some of those organizations are part of the CAPET program, and even if they're not um receiving um child abuse prevention funding, they they stay part of our our network and we still provide referrals, um not just to our 12 organizations, but all the organizations we have uh um an Alameda County um network uh online called CalProvince, where a lot of organizations can be a part of, and we also share resources there for like for schools and other organizations that may not be receiving our funding.

Um and I am also curious what is the um what's the budget for the department, if you happen to know for child abuse prevention, yes.

Um so each organization, the 12 organizations uh receive about 80,000 a year.

Um, and then we have the 94,000 for CBCAP.

Okay, in addition, and that's annual, so I don't have a calculator, but that's fine.

Yeah, um that's what I heard.

I mean, it just it's sounds like this is just such a core part of our system, you know, it sort of prevents um more crisis or what have you, and so I'm I'm just curious to hear whether we feel like this is supported enough.

The providers are always saying that they could use more money, they like uh the cap it um funding stream because we're really flexible with how they spend it, how they can spend it.

Um other funding streams are very um narrow, um, but we have a very broad definition of supportive services, so they're always saying that they could use more money.

Okay.

Um gosh, I had one more question, but I forgot it.

Thank you.

I'm sure you'll remember.

Um, just uh to tag off with what you just talked about.

So you said that um each organization gets about 90,000 for cap it.

About 84 84,000 uh fiscal year, and CBCap gets 94,000 of fiscal year.

Do you know just total how many how many?

Well, you said uh we had 12 contracts or 12 organizations.

Do you know total the contract costs that we spend minus the 811,000 for our ARPA?

Well, the 800,000 eleven hundred for ARPA was in addition to what we're already receiving.

Okay, so how much are we already receiving?

Thank you.

Supervisor Tam, we can get that information for you.

We do we do get an allocation from the state, and our department contributes above the allocation to support these contracts.

So we'll get that um information to you today.

So it's not 12 times the 80,000 plus 90,000 per organization.

That's including our state and local funding.

It includes both.

Okay.

Carlin, can you do the math real quick then?

Okay.

The other question I had is uh I I know you talked about the flexibility with these contracts, but do we have like metrics to figure out um I know we have results-based accounting in all of our contracts, but uh uh how do we tell whether or not our contracts are effective and these organizations are helping us meet some of our goals when it comes to preventing child abuse and obviously making the referrals because right now we're not we're kind of at a kind of a situation where even if they make the referrals sometimes like who does the investigation is it on our part or their part?

So I think it's important to think of this as before our system starts.

So referrals is once calls have been made to the child abuse hotline.

Our child abuse prevention work is further upstream.

So these are the families where no one is called in yet to the child abuse hotline, and they're just supporting the community.

So these are in advance of the work that you see in ER that I'll be talking about later.

So the state, the community supporting and the federal um the federal government looks at how do we support families so that they don't need to come to the child abuse system.

So the work that Colette does with um the alliance is how do we support the families in our community?

And there are a lot of families as part of our CalPrevents and our prevention work that aren't even part of our 12 contractors that are providing support to the community right now to prevent child abuse and to sustain families.

So this is the work that's further upstream for us.

The community pathways part is um part of the federal legislation, the families first prevention services act that started at the end of the Title 4E waiver that looked at how do, since we know that there are families being supported in the community, and that there is a negative ramification in consequence, sometimes for being involved in the child welfare system.

How do we get these families to those supportive services earlier?

And so um the community pathways program allows for that.

It allows for schools that may already be supporting a family to get a family additional support, law enforcement when they're out, where maybe a child can be safely in their home, but a family needs more support.

Um it allows that family to get additional services.

So it's upstream, but the community pathways part is where we're trying to divert families that may not need to be in the child welfare system at all.

Okay.

Those calls are what kind of backs you up when you get those calls that come to the child welfare system that we investigate.

That's where our system gets a little clogged.

So it's part of how do we support people with the resources that are available to them.

Yeah, I the reason I was asking is because um, you know, obviously you you don't know what you prevent it, right?

In terms of impacts, but you you said that um the Title IV waiver project has been successful uh at reducing the number of children that goes into foster care in the county, and do we just compare um one year to the other?

How how do we know that that's happening?

For the Title IV waiver demonstration project, how do we know that was successful?

Is that so the county's comprehensive prevention plan builds on the Title IV e waiver project?

So the Title IV waiver demonstration project was a federal um it was like a pilot to see if child welfare is funded based on children in care.

And before the waiver, there was no money that was given for prevention.

It was all based on children being in care.

So the waiver demonstration project said if you have fewer kids coming into care, you can spend that money to allocate into your system as a whole.

The Title IV waiver project, it ended in 2019.

And instead of continuing that, the federal government said we're not gonna do that anymore.

We're gonna be very clear, and we're gonna create a system that builds for prevention.

And the state had to develop a prevention plan.

The county we submitted to the state our prevention plan.

So this the FFPSA and the community pathways, it took the place kind of of the 40 waiver demonstration project without all the funding things that were tied to it.

So it is meant to serve to allow child welfare agencies to spend money for prevention.

There's ways the allocation can be done, supporting families that may be at risk of coming in to the child welfare system that previously we weren't able to fiscally support.

Okay.

So on the community pathways program, uh the referrals can be done through the hotline, they can be done through other means as well.

But what once the referrals made to the child welfare office, is it do we rely on any agencies or organizations to help us with the investigations, or is it strictly our staff?

So when referrals are made to community pathways, they go to a better way.

And they serve the families.

If at any time in the course of their work with them, they feel like this family actually there are safety risk.

They'll refer it back to the department for our normal investigation process.

But before then, they're just served by a better way.

That is our contractor that does this work for us.

Do you happen to know how much that contract is?

Correct.

The better way contract.

We can get that to you.

Better way has several contracts for us.

They also have our another road to safety program.

Okay.

Um, which this is funded under.

So I'll get that.

And I have the number for our prevention services is 1,102,000.

1.1 million.

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate it.

Supervisor Prochin out of us.

Oh, I was just um reflecting on the first five commission and the fact that we've got a thousand new vouchers out there for families who need child care.

So I assuming there's a good connection since bananas is one of the partners that there's a good connection for families who need child care.

There's more resources more than ever.

So I hope that if that's a barrier for some of these families, they're accessing those resources.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Are there any public comments on our child abuse prevention month presentation?

There are no.

Oh, would you like to speak?

Alrighty.

Could you just state your name for the record before you good afternoon?

Ms.

Tam and Ms.

Boss.

I'm Dion Earner, and I'm a private citizen here in Alameda County.

Um, I just want to just remembering a little history here, and that the concept of pre-placement right prevention services is not a new one.

It started probably back in the late 1980s with what we called family preservation, and there were federal dollars that paid in the state at that time adopted a family preservation model, and the idea was to keep people out of child welfare and out of foster care.

Okay.

Um, what's interesting about this conversation, and I might be wrong, but and um it'd be interesting to look at because I think what you're getting at is that we're talking about 1.1 million dollars in prevention, and the question is is what's the balance?

How much are you spending at the other end of the system?

And would there be a better expenditure, right?

To put more money into the prevention piece, right?

And less right.

Hopefully, the response being then that there would be less at the other end.

Um, and so that's something I think that we should we should all consider.

Um, there is other money though, we're not just talking about Title IV.

There's a huge chunk of Title IV child welfare dollars, okay.

Those are a capped amount.

This is a federal program that the state gets an allotment for, right?

Um, what's interesting about it is it's much less than what we spend in Title IV, and I think part of what the conversation was around when back in the back in the late in the teens was figuring out a way to reverse, right?

Literally to reverse and port money into more money into child welfare services so that we could prevent people from going into foster care, right?

And so that's kind of what the pilots I'm reading, I'm I'm remembering this correctly.

That's really what the pilots were about, was to figure that out.

It's a sad statement that they terminated those kinds of programs because I think we've never really seen what the results could be if we put it put money up front right um in the system as opposed to always just you know Title 4e is an entitlement right um and as many kids come in that's how much you're going to be paying for but child welfare is a capped amount and I don't know what the I don't know how much Alameda County gets out of Title IV at this point.

So I just wanted to share that with you.

Thank you.

There are no other public comments the staff have any comments uh based on what the speaker mentioned.

No that's all that's all correct that's how the system is about child welfare didn't the concept actually of the Title IV waiver demonstrations LA County and Alameda County who initially went forth and said we believe that we can serve our community better by bringing by keeping children from coming into care.

And so we were the first two counties in the first iteration of the waiver and um additional counties join later but we were that first demonstration pilot and it did give us some incredible opportunities when we had that funding.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Okay.

Any other public comments no other public comment okay let's move to the foster care presentation.

So Supervisor uh Tam and Fortunato Bas introducing program manager Jess Samp, who is over our resource family approvals.

He's given a presentation on our foster care program in advance of next month's foster care appreciation month.

Good afternoon um Vice President Tam and uh board member Fortunato Bas.

I'll launch right into the presentation if you advance the slide uh quick overview of where we're at in terms of our foster care population.

We have around 700 uh children so young people that are between the ages of zero and 17 who are in foster care in Alameda County um as of last month and uh wanted to pair that with um the numbers of children who are involved in the foster care system but are actually at home uh with their their parents or guardians that's uh about 230 um around half of the children that are in foster care are with a uh relative or extended family member uh and that's really where we're trying to focus most of our efforts uh in terms of foster care recruitment and structuring our foster care program at this point the numbers look a little bit different for our non-minor dependents or young adults who are in foster care uh we have about 200 youth uh between the ages of 18 and 21 who are in foster care but the vast majority about 80% of those youth uh are in uh specialized placements that are only available for those young adults that are really meant to transition the young person from the conventional foster care system into a more independent living situation closer to what they'll experience when they are completely beyond uh the foster care options um transitional housing programs are sort of structured and provide lots of opportunities for young people to take care of themselves shop cook um clean do do all their own things for themselves um and supervised independent living placements are even less structured um usually looks like renting a room uh either from a relative or um you know someone out in the community um but it also looks like college dorm rooms or other sorts of uh more developmentally typical young adult living arrangements uh for our uh children who are in foster care zero to 17 um our big focus is around uh approving their relatives or friends of the family as what we call resource parents historically uh were described as foster parents um it's meant to be a more inclusive term to include both traditional foster care people from the community who step up to care for children as well as those um relative and extended family member uh options uh so resource family uh the resource family process was um created in uh or is implemented in uh january 2017 and that's the model we've been using since uh it's a uniform process uh that we use for all um foster homes slash relative homes uh and it's a uh consistent set of um steps and and thresholds uh that all applicants go through uh it starts with um making sure that the home is safe so of course doing um criminal and other sorts of background checks um on any adult associated with the home either that lives there or visits the home frequently um as well as uh

It starts with making sure that the home is safe.

So, of course, doing criminal and other sorts of background checks on any adult associated with the home, either that lives there or visits the home frequently, as well as inspecting the physical home.

And then we provide a lot of training, partially just to orient people to working with a big government organization, and also to acquaint them with the basics of caring for a child who has sustained some form of trauma or maltreatment, as well as CPR first aid training that we provide.

And then we also do a lot of biopsychosocial assessment again of all the adults associated with the household and especially the applicants, soon to be foster parents, and look into character references and synthesize all of that information into a report that holistically describes what this home will look and feel like for any child who goes to live there for whatever period.

Just giving you a sense of the numbers here.

We're very proud of the fact that that number has declined and continues to decline year on year, actually going way back at least 20 years.

25, somewhere around there.

And the orange line shows the total number of approved RFA homes that we have at present.

And that's you know, uh sort of leveled off in recent years, uh, but gives you a sense of how many homes have stepped up in the community to care for children.

Some again, this is a mix.

Some of these are what we think of as uh traditional foster homes that are opening themselves to work with any child.

Um, and many of them are relatives or or friends of the family who are showing up to care for a particular child that they know and love.

The green line shows how many homes were approving each year.

And you'll see despite the fact that they were approving between 200 and 150 homes each year, um, the number of total homes stays about the same.

Because again, many, many of those children uh exit foster care either by being adopted or entering a guardianship with a caregiver who's caring for them, or they may be reunified with their parents so they get to go home.

And maybe that relative no longer wants to provide foster care because they've done the important work that they came to us to do.

We also have foster parents who are just done, they've you know served their community for some time and and they're ready to retire.

Um that gives you uh idea of the numbers over time.

Uh we uh are always looking to bring more resource parents on board.

Um we don't have enough homes to cover every single youth that we work with.

Uh, we have a dedicated full-time uh recruiter who's out at community events uh year-round, um, talking to interested members of the community, describing the process and trying to bring more folks on board.

Um she's um also really involved with community efforts with our sister counties and uh vital link to our Alameda County Foster Parent Association, which is the organization that represents our foster parents.

The other major news uh that we I believe have been sharing and really want to emphasize uh to the board is that our uh transitional shelter care facility, uh, which used to be known as our assessment center.

Um, we've recently uh in the last month been able to reopen uh after a whole lot of effort and wrangling and support from the board uh to make that happen.

Um so we have a new facility, um, like the old facility, it's uh confidential location, um, but it provides the same therapeutic milieu and round-the-clock services uh for young people that are in transition, often coming from uh uh one placement moving to the next, um, and allows everyone to breathe a moment and find the best placement that's gonna match their current needs.

And that particular tool is super valuable and it's within a larger context of efforts that we've made to care for children who are in transition, which starts with the existing resource families that we have, both recruiting ones that have gone in active to provide transitional care and finding home caregivers that are open to the excitement of working with a young person where we may have limited information or they may have really urgent needs.

So we've done a lot of work during the sort of hiatus period when we didn't have an assessment center to build that capacity, which is now augmented by the reopened transitional shelter care facility.

And the last thing we want to uh really focus on for the board is our caregiver appreciation dinner.

It's an annual event that we hold.

The next one scheduled for May 15th, so coming up very soon.

And it's a great opportunity where members of the board and members of our of the community, both community-based organizations and uh dignitaries from our agency and other agencies that we work with come together with the foster parents and really celebrate them and reflect the amazing work that they're doing.

Um we have a nice dinner, we have some music and dancing.

Um folks from the community and from our agency donate um gifts that we give away to the resource parents just as a small token of our thanks.

And these are some photos from last year's event.

Um and that's my presentation today.

Of course, I'm available for any questions you may have.

Thank you for that presentation.

Uh Supervisor Fortunatabas.

Questions or comments.

Thanks so much for the presentation as well as your work.

Um really appreciate actually having three of the four items on this agenda being part of the ecosystem for caring for our kids.

I am interested in the types of homes that we are placing children into.

So, for example, um this is the second and the third slide.

You know, obviously there's the relative resource family, and then there's other types of homes in the community, foster family, short-term residential treatment, et cetera, small family homes.

Um, I am curious in hearing um what are the needs of the children and these different categories of homes?

Um, you know, what kind of care are they given in these homes?

You know, can you talk a little bit more about each of these categories?

Sure.

Um, do you mind bringing up that slide just so I can cue off of the specifics?

Um broadly, what I can say is state law and social work ethics require that we place home children in the least restrictive placement available, um, which is to say the least structured environment and most familiar environment that will meet that child's needs.

Um always, always, always our first intention is to return children to their parents as soon as it is safely possible to do so.

Um, when that's not possible for whatever duration, our next priority is to have children with their family.

That's who knows them, who loves them, who they're connected to, and who they'll have a lifelong relationship with.

Um relatives are not available for whatever reason, we can't identify them.

Maybe the families from out of state and going through the interstate process is an option, but it takes a long time to get an out-of-state home approved.

Um, then we're looking at uh what we call community resource families, which are those traditional foster families.

Um, so local families from the community who can provide uh care for children.

Uh foster family agencies are community-based organizations that are also licensed by the state to approve and support foster homes.

Um they uh often receive more frequent visits uh from the social workers that support those homes.

Um there's a social worker in the home weekly as opposed to monthly for county homes.

And that has to do with resource constraints.

Foster family agency homes are supported by the state at a higher rate of reimbursement.

Legal guardians are usually some form of resource parent, foster parent who has made a permanent legal commitment to the child.

And the legal guardian homes that are described here are ones for whom the court dependency process has not been dismissed.

So there's an open court case.

Typically used to be until age 18, and now it's potentially through age 21.

The short-term residential treatment programs, as the name would indicate, are very much intended to be short term.

The expectation is that children are not placed there longer than six months.

There's round-the-clock staff who are trained to support children with behavioral needs that exceed the capacity of your typical family home.

So these homes are available to our children with serious mental health and behavioral needs, and are meant to support the child to address those needs until they are ready to step down to a family-based environment, ideally their own family or return to their parent.

Part of that regulatory framework is that these facilities have a right of refusal when we reach out to them seeking placement.

And so we do sometimes have young people with really high levels of need and STRTPs, is how we refer to these programs that decline to work with our young person.

Very frequently we are making statewide searches, trying to find any program from the Oregon border down to the Mexico border to work with some of our young people that have really severe needs.

Over the last year or so, maybe two years we have made use of smaller programs that are called small family homes, typically capped at six residents that historically have been used to provide specialized behavior developmental health care needs for children that are also clients of regional center.

But they've adapted to try to meet the needs of our young people with other behavioral needs.

Although my understanding is that we are limiting the use of that home type going forward.

Is there an assessment tool that helps to identify the needs of the children and match them with in a home or an agency that will help to address those needs?

Yes, there are several.

The state has also created a separate tool called the CANS, the child.

I believe it's the child adolescent meets and strains tool.

Which is used again for all children that we work with and similar set of intentions of prioritizing and making consistent across different caseloads of children that we work with.

Ensure a comprehensive, really global assessment of each child to make sure that there's needs that we're not ignoring or missing because we assume they weren't there.

And then for each child who would be placed in an STRTP setting, additionally, we have something called a qualified individual assessment where we bring in a third party from outside of the agency.

Currently, we're contracted with behavioral health care to basically have a clinician, you know, some a licensed clinician come in and also look at that child and their set of needs and to determine whether that level of care is really necessary or if they could be better served in a different placement setting.

So sorry, minimally there's those three.

And then also in order to justify placement in STRTP, we're usually looking at also psychological evaluations performed by a psychologist or psychiatrist, often an IEP assessment that was conducted by the school professionals, including school psychologists.

So we're getting input from a lot of people looking at each individual child that meets that high level of need.

Thank you.

And given the various providers that we're working with, our network of homes for children, are there enough resources out there to meet the higher needs individuals?

I'm going to defer that one to Michelle.

There isn't.

These STRTPs have been brought up to a level that some hospitals use them as well.

So they're really there isn't.

We can no longer place children out of state either.

So we have to keep children in state at one of these types of placements, where this shows up in the audit or overstays at the assessment center.

Those children that were overstaying were the children that no one would take in one of these placements.

And so that's where you can see the overlap of policy and practice and what it looks like.

So for our highest needs youth who may have a host of complicating factors.

And so that's where it becomes an issue.

Thank you.

That seems well, it sounds like a statewide issue as well as something that we need to be paying attention to.

Absolutely.

One final question, and then I'll wrap it up.

So you mentioned the 28 beds that are more for emergencies.

Are those usually filled?

And how long do children usually stay in those beds?

Yeah, so it's it there's a mix uh of uh emergency placement options that are available.

Um we have a contract with a foster family agency that provides 10 beds that are available for 30 days with a possible extension to 60 days under limited circumstances.

Uh we have um contracts with some uh STRTP providers for uh 72 hours days uh for some of the beds and for I believe 30 days for um some of the other beds.

So it's it's a real mix of needs as to whether they're filled, um, you know, that varies day by day.

Uh but yes, we are making um a lot of use of those resources.

Thank you.

And actually, one more question.

Um there particular outcomes for some of the higher needs children that we are able to measure against I think we want our children to be healthy, safe, and well.

So there's no particular outcome that we're looking for for the child.

For the placement, we do look at um their CFTs, and they will have goals that a youth may achieve while they're in placement.

We're looking for stability for them, school attendance, um, going to therapy.

So, in terms of the individual child, there's no particular outcome.

It's based on that particular child and what they need to be healthy, safe and well.

For the provider, we are looking to make sure that you're getting our kids to school, that if there is a therapeutic component that a child needs, you're ensuring that that occurs for STRTPs that you're holding the CFTs and all the discharge planning and all that goes with it.

So at the end of the time in the residential treatment facility, a child can step down or at least step to a wrap type program where we continue intensive levels of support for the young person in their family.

So there isn't sort of like a case manager work plan for some of the higher need kids that we're looking at.

There's not like a, I mean, the the generic goal that we have, of course, is stepping down out of an STRTP.

We don't want you there any longer than you have to be, and placement stability, because unfortunately for some of our young people, they have experienced frequent moves, um, which is deleterious to their ability to receive any services when they can't even have a stable service provider and they're moving around to different parts of the state.

Beyond that, it's extremely tailored to that particular young person and what their their particular needs are.

Thank you.

I think your response touched on uh some of the questions I had, but I know that uh Supervisor Halbert and Supervisor Marquez had put together a forum to try to find ways to increase um community uh participation in the foster resources care parents.

And as you said, there isn't enough.

I know that you talked about a desire to keep families together to uh look at relatives that might be able to help uh provide that care.

Um do we screen like these potential foster parents to see if they are able to adequately take care of children, and then also um in terms of the number of uh categories, I guess you you were saying that there's 708 children that are uh out of home care.

Well, what proportion of that are considered high needs?

And then do we have like situations with runaways and how how do we address all of that in terms of placements?

Sure.

I'll start with your first question about vetting of potential resource parents.

Um it's a lot.

Our resource parents are telling you we we put them through a whole lot because of course that's our first commitment is if you can't be at home with your parents because it's not safe, you need to be somewhere else that is safe, right?

Um, so we do a lot of different background checks.

Um we're working closely with our Department of Justice partners, we do fingerprinting.

Um we have um statewide databases uh that look at have you held a license before, maybe a daycare license, could be a foster parent license, have you worked with elderly individuals and held a license to do that?

Um, and were there any actions against those licensees, licenses?

Um, you know, we're we're trying to make sure that you know folks can be trusted in this position of you know, great authority to care for a foster child.

Um we also do searches within our own databases of child abuse and neglect to see if this person's come into contact with our agency or any of our sister counties and understand what that interaction may have looked like and whether we have concerns around their ability to provide care for another child.

Um that's that's just sort of the background check piece.

Um and and then we move into our interviewing of the family, um, which uh, you know, as social workers are really looking to dig in and understand what was your family history, maybe what's your history as a parent if you've parented other children, um, what are your feelings about you know different ideas of discipline or or care?

What may be a trigger for you or maybe too difficult for you to cope with.

And then when they come into contact with a young person that unfortunately has been subjected to some really rough that may push their buttons in ways that they never anticipated.

And we don't want to set the child or or the applicant up for a negative experience.

So we're really digging in and trying to understand what's going on for this individual and how can we best prepare them if we can to provide this care, which which may be absolutely heartbreaking and really difficult.

So we do all of that vetting, lots of conversations, both with the individual and other members of their network.

We get character references, we talk to other people who live in the home or who frequent the home.

We're trying to get a holistic view of like what, you know, is this the right person for this child.

So that vetting happens before we approve the home, and then it continues beyond that.

Um we're checking in with those caregivers quarterly, um, and then also uh every other year, we re-evaluate the home to sort of reapprove it.

Um in the meanwhile, if we get any calls of concern or or questions about whether someone's doing a good job by the young people that we have in their home, we have a whole separate process for investigating complaints and determining whether these these folks are continuing to abide by the foster care rules that we have in California.

So it's a vetting piece.

Um you would also asked.

It's another question that's completely.

It's okay.

I was looking at the 708 clients that we we try to serve, and like how many of them are like high needs and runaways.

Yeah.

So this this term high needs is actually very nebulous, and different people mean different things by it.

Um way that I can approach that question is that in our our um continuous quality improvement efforts um within the department, uh, we have a group that I'm a part of that's focused specific specifically on care for youth with what we call complex needs.

Um we're borrowing a state definition uh to identify that group.

Um any any child who um changes placement um five times within a year, um, which is you know, obviously just tremendously disruptive for that young person and their ability to benefit um from a stable caregiver or any services that we would bring in to address any of the the various needs that they may have.

Um I'm happy to report that that number is you know much smaller than the the cohort that we're talking about.

Um I think the latest numbers that I was looking at were around 50, maybe below 50 children, 42, I think.

Okay.

Sort of pulling numbers from uh a half remembered PowerPoint I was looking at recently.

Um so uh, you know, the sort of the first need we need to address there is can we get you somewhere that can meet your needs stably enough that we can actually get you working with service providers so that we can better understand what those deeper needs are and we can keep you in one place to help you address those needs, limit them so that you can step down to a more family type setting.

Um that's sort of the place that we start with those with those young people.

Um I think you also asked, do we have runaways?

Yes, we do have young people that have learned that behavior and sometimes run away from placement, and it's it's a real challenge.

Um, and then we're always looking at what's it gonna take to bring that that young person back into a safe environment, or um, you know, in rare circumstances, they may have somewhere that they're running to.

And so then we're looking at what would it take to bring that environment that they want to be in up to the standards where we could partner with them and have that child remain there in a stable way, again, to address the needs and bring them down and ultimately have them reunify with their family.

Okay, that's helpful.

Um this is a hard question to formulate, but let me just ask it.

Uh so in the situation that happened recently with Santa Clara County, uh, where a toddler was replaced with a 17-year-old relative, uh, what's that obviously was not qualified or capable of taking care of the toddler.

Would something like that happen in our system where we if we're vetting the parents or the potential relative so not speaking directly to what happened in Santa Clara because we're not aware of all those details.

Um we assess the adults in the home.

The state doesn't have anything for you to assess the young people in the home.

If there is, if we're aware of any juvenile criminal history of a young person in the home, then we can do some follow-up.

But our written directives are guided towards the adults caring for a child.

Um and then that's where the tragedy, the tragedies lie.

So the our our regular RFA process involves uh both as Michelle was alluding to thorough uh interviews of the adults in the home.

Um, and part of that is understanding what does their care look like for the other minors who are in the home.

So yeah, I mean, at hindsight is 2020, and I can't second guess what happened elsewhere, but what I would say is in the normal process, um, we would be asking a lot of questions of the relationship between the the resource parents' care for that 17-year-old to better understand, you know, what does that look like?

What are the challenges?

Um, do you have any concerns about bringing a toddler into the home and interacting with this other child?

We would also interview the 17-year-old.

Um, we do interview all minors who are in the home that are capable of you know, developmentally of interacting with us.

Um doesn't mean everyone always tells us everything, but um, that's not a uh part that we overlook.

We we would talk to them, we would ask them, you know, what is discipline look like, what does it look like when you're in trouble?

What are your favorite things to do with your parents?

Um, do you have other siblings?

Which relationship with them look like, you know, trying again to get a holistic idea of what is that home look like.

Thank you.

Are there any public comments on this item?

There are no public comments on this item.

Okay.

We're saving the best for last.

Our eighth audit update.

Good afternoon, supervisors.

Um get to the next slide.

So this afternoon, we're going to be reviewing the 2024 um audit timeline, the California Department of Social Services on-site visit, follow-up from the previous task force meeting, and agreed upon deliverables, safety culture survey presentation and focus groups, child welfare staffing, services for foster youth, transitional shelter care facility reopening, the audit dashboard, and the status of implementation of recommendations.

Next slide.

So the next thing on our audit report timeline will be the 12-month progress report, which would be due on September 23rd, 2026.

For your knowledge, anything that's not completed, there will be an annual report out to the audit, the California State Auditors until they are completed.

So on March 26th, the on-site with the California Department of Social Services occurred.

During the on-site, they conducted focus groups with child welfare workers and child welfare supervisors for 16 workers and 10 supervisors.

They conducted 15 individual interviews with child welfare workers, and they conducted an entrance conference with 13 CFS managers.

In addition to the interviews, CDSS conducted a case review on April 21, 2026 of a combination of cases and referrals from July 1st, 2025 through March 13th, 2026.

There are approximately 77 cases selected.

Following the completion of the review, the department will receive a report of findings and recommendations for review and response in 12 weeks.

So updates to information disseminated at the 410 task force meeting.

The department does not have an ombuds person, but handles complaints and concerns in the following manner.

Complaints or concerns that rise to the level of civil rights violation are sent to SSA's human resource resources department for investigation and resolution.

Client concerns are received from several portals.

Phone calls or letters to the agency director, assistant agency director.

Agency wide client concern emails may be directed to our client concern at ACGUB.org email address.

Depending on the nature of the client concern, the issue may be reviewed by the worker of record, supervisors, managers, or the assistant agency director.

CDSS has several ways for clients and staff to file complaints about a worker or an the agency.

Or the AB 1978 Hotline at DSS.california.gov.

Foster youth can also contact the California State, California Office of the Foster Care Ombudsperson at 1877 846 1602, foster youth help at DSS.california.gov.

So we also um provided information about open referrals.

Um this data tracks from April 7th, 2026.

Um there are three referrals from 2021 that are open, and you can see the number.

We are addressing these referrals from 2021.

We have a special group that is working on them.

Um as you can see, the numbers get higher as we get into the current year.

Next slide.

So investigation in progress, first contact pending documented attempted contacts documented.

So a worker went out, they either tried to see someone and were unable, or they did.

There were 15.

An investigation assigned or pending documentation in CWS CMS 292.

Investigation in progress, first contact documented in CWS CMS 165.

Um, and then investigation complete and its pending closure and CWS CMS 141.

This is a just a little asterisk.

This is a point in time count of reverrals and investigations.

The number of referrals included in this point in time cohort is subject to change daily due to newly received and recently reclosed referrals.

Staff survey.

We conducted eight presentations to staff to share department-wide and division specific survey results and to get feedback.

That occurred November through February of this year.

We conducted eight focus groups about physical safety, the domain with case carrying child welfare workers, non-case carrying child welfare workers, and clerical eligibility staff by office location in March 2026.

We have scheduled four additional focus groups about the psychological safety domain with child welfare workers in ERU, all other case carrying child welfare workers and non-case carrying child welfare workers, clerical and eligibility.

Those focus groups will be late this month.

They've already begun in May of 2026.

Plan presentation of all survey-related feedback to the CFS senior management team in May.

And our action plan to address staff feedback should be completed by June 2026.

The annual administration of the team first assessment of the safety culture survey will be reissued again in July of this year.

Next slide, please.

This year we've hired almost the same amount of uh hires, bachelors, and masters, 11 bachelors, and um 13 master's level in 2025.

There's a slight difference in number, only because we had a problem with the exam, and we couldn't um move forward with the hiring in December.

Our upcoming exam dates are May 15th, 2026, July 15th, September 15th, and November 20, uh November 16, 2026.

At the bottom, you can see our attrition for the last three years, with this year being the number nine.

Next slide.

Services for foster youth.

So supervisor fortunative asked, you had asked for some information about how well children are doing.

So we selected one of our programs to talk about where we actually have comments from our young people.

The program we selected was our youth transitions partnership.

Um since 2016 through a contract with first place for youth.

YTP has served foster youth, non-minor dependents, and former foster youth ages 14 to 21 to support positive outcomes in education, employment, housing stability, and permanent connections.

It's an innovative program that pairs an intensive coaching model with dialectical behavioral therapy skills groups established following a two-year federally funded planning process through the Youth at Risk of Homelessness Homelessness Grant in 2012.

Alamina County received the second round of funding to develop the program model in 2015.

Although in 2024, we were given a Visions AC grant, which allowed us to expand to serve former foster youth ages 21 to 24.

Chapin Hall is the contracted evaluation continuous quality improvement partner for this program.

So I feel like coach's name is taken out, is honestly a really safe outlet.

Like I think they really don't really try to do anything.

Someone could maybe be going through something similar.

Like everyone's respectful of everyone, and of course, confidentiality, but it's also a private space.

So these comments were taken from a focus group with our young people last fall.

The provisional license is for three months and can be extended every three months until March 24th, 2029.

The department did a soft opening on March 27th, 2026.

We wanted to ensure that everything was working properly.

And then we did uh opening for law enforcement on April 3rd, 2026.

To date, there have been no youth at the transitional shelter care facility.

Um, and part of this is when children go to the transitional shelter care facility, we have to justify to community care licensing that we've exhausted all other placement options and that they've been explored.

So department, we have a link to the dashboard big enough that I don't forget to say it this time.

So, supervisors, this is our audit dashboard.

You can scroll down.

Um, if people click on the little buttons, you can see I think we can use that one.

You can see the data that's there for people to see how we're doing.

So this one is child welfare investigations.

You can see how the number was about 909 in 2020, how we had our peak of around 3713, and now we're down to 1497.

So for each of the audit areas, we have similar data available.

Can you scroll through so the supervisors can see, please?

Do you want to see a couple more?

We just wanted you to know that this is there for the community and anyone that wants to review it.

All right.

Do you want to go to the next slide?

So the status of implementation.

We have implemented fully for the 15 recommendations 6, 7, 9, and 13.

Pending 9 of 15.

Those are recommendations one, two, three, four, five, eight, ten, fourteen, and fifteen.

One through four, I believe, are all regarding emergency response.

And two, a 15.

They are waiting.

We were waiting for the transitional shelter care facility to open.

So if you'll just scroll through, I can highlight the ones that are fully everything in green has been fully implemented.

The auditor, we did do our six-month audit response update.

They're still reviewing, so we don't know their decisions about the information we have implemented based on our 60-day response.

It took about three months for us to get that information.

So I'm imagining we will hear back from the auditors in the end of June.

Next slide.

So that's what that's waiting for.

Questions.

So in terms of the um budsperson that was asked about at one of the recent task force meetings.

So we do get client concerns from time to time.

Sometimes people have questions about how processes occurred.

Sometimes people are just angry or upset.

Sometimes they need a little extra guidance.

I've been working with the gentleman for two months because he gets a little frustrated, and I meet with him and I gently bought guide him back to the worker for assistance, making sure all of his information is in court reports, but it can vary.

Supervisor Tam, you recall we had someone last year who wasn't upset about her disposition.

We corrected it, but there were some errors.

So the complaint can vary.

Sometimes they really are practice that needs to be approved, and we look at what we can do to improve it.

I think we're obligated, as with the audit, that if we're doing something not right to look at what we've done to evaluate how we can do that process better.

The reality though is we are removing what I like to think of as it's like the most family is like the most important thing to people.

And when you're in the business sometimes of removing children, people are upset by that.

And so sometimes people we look at whether or not people were respectful to the clients that they were dealing with.

Sometimes the concerns are they didn't feel that they were respectfully treated.

Um they didn't like someone leaving a card at their home.

Um, in terms, yeah, does that answer your question fully?

I don't know if it didn't.

Um, sure, that's that's a good start.

Um then what are examples of rising to a civil rights violation where it would be sent to the HR department for or the SSA's HR.

Civil rights would be people feeling like they were treated differently because of their race, their gender, or anything of that nature.

It would be the same as civil rights um for staff.

Um, if people feel like they have been discriminated against because of their race, sex or anything like that, those would go to HR to have an independent investigation.

We wouldn't handle those.

Okay.

Um, I think having the other two previous presentations was really helpful just in terms of getting a fuller picture of what the you know the whole system is or more of the system uh to provide quality care for our children.

I heard that years ago there was a staff person who brought together staff with SSA and our service providers, um, as well as with probation, I believe.

And you know, that seemed to have a good effect in terms of you know, connecting the different parts of the system and really looking at um how to fill in all the gaps, you know, how to do as much as possible.

I'm curious um whether that position still exists.

Um, in terms of with us in probation, you know, I can't remember the name of the person.

I know my chief of staff knows who that person was who was in that who was playing that role of bringing internally um the various staff who worked on this issue from SSA, and I believe also with probation with our service providers, and the idea is you know, it's it's a complex system of care.

There's there's multiple, you know, staff from at least two agencies, maybe three, including behavioral health, as well as a number of service providers, you know, having a table, you know, to really collaborate, um, to brainstorm seems like it could be helpful.

Um, position like that right now.

So before all in, we did have the ICPC, which was the ICPC.

I can't remember what inner interagency children's policy council.

We used to have an interagency children's policy council that involved child welfare, social services, probation, um, behavioral health, a bunch of providers participated.

Um, and we did talk about policies that happened in the county.

That was eventually absorbed by all in ICPC ended.

Um we haven't had IC, I used to participate in ICPC for a number of years.

We haven't had ICPC for a long time.

I think Supervisor Dion Aaron brought that up a couple years ago.

We haven't had it in terms of policy.

I will say things are slightly different though now compared to years ago.

We have a 2083 MOU.

So now we have the agencies meet at my level to discuss policy issues, but at Andrea's the agency director um level, they also meet, and as part of that collaboration, there is a member of the alliance, which represents all of the provider, the provider network.

So that committee is at Andrea's level, ICC.

With yeah, the alliance doesn't participate though.

Who is the provider?

Mart Matthew.

The the behavior health collaborative.

Ah, behavioral health collaborative, sorry.

Participates.

Well, I I would be curious to hear from our larger ecosystem in terms of you know, how could we improve the system?

Um, you know, this is the eighth update.

Um, the dashboard is helpful, you know, it's it's looking at some data points that clearly would be helpful if we could clear the backlog, if we could staff up all of those things that would be helpful, but I do feel like there is something that I'm not getting as a board member, which is you know, just getting more information about the quality of care and how the kids are doing.

I definitely appreciate the examples that you put in this presentation, Director Love.

Um, but I do feel like there's a little bit more that we need um to make sure that we're addressing the concerns that were raised.

And I think when CDSS, who is our oversight at the state is done with their review, you'll get more of that information directly from the people that are responsible for this work and what their recommendations are for improvement.

So I think that's coming soon.

Okay I'll hand it back to our chair.

Thank you.

Just following up on that I I think we talked about it at the last update.

You know, when I look at for example 2026 you had um 11 hires at the batch level 13 at the master's level and you had a nutrition of nine so that's like 38% attrition.

So and so following up on Supervisor Fortinata Bass's question I I know um Director Ford at our prior meeting had talked about um engaging with the behavioral health collaborative and um and there's like regular meetings that happen with the external um round tables and I can't remember the exact name of the group but um I I don't have a good sense of whether we're leveraging those external resources as much as we can given some of the the constraints that we have with staffing and uh and along those lines I know at the last meeting we we looked at the number of cases that um were part of the backlog and what I wasn't clear on is it is it because we don't have enough staff to do like initial assessment on whether they need to move further into the investigation process or it it was just not responded to at all.

Okay I think we need to figure out how to better answer that question for you.

I do want to say with the attrition for bachelor's level I think there's a couple of things we have to keep in mind that also includes retirements.

March is a big retirement for us and also includes probationary leases right now with us everybody passing the test and us hiring just everybody if you pass the test some people aren't able to fully do this work and some people just career change.

Through other agencies um privilege I got to go Andrea let me go to the child welfare league of america conference last week and the opening conference for members was about the scarcity of people willing to do this work.

And for me it was helpful because sometimes it feels like it's just telemedia but to have every agency um in the country and this forerunner of practice also talking about the need and the complexity and people willing to do this work that it was interesting when that paper comes out I'll ask Andre to give it to each board member so that they also have it so that they have that information about what's happening on a national basis.

I think what might be helpful in terms of the ERU numbers because how you splice the data is interesting and what Jennifer our senior management analysis in the department has talked about is because we're not getting the exact question because the work is just different and so you wouldn't know the exact question we're not able to give you the exact answer.

So I think that's one of the things we need to figure out maybe before our next meeting if maybe we can talk to one of the your office aides so that we can really narrow down so that we are answering the question you're asking um from them with a little more conversation to make sure we're fully answering because we have the data we just have to give you the information I'm not we keep trying to splice it differently so to show you and that hasn't been successful.

Yeah I I appreciate that um so at the conference that you talked about and I know um Senator Wahab has had several sessions and I think there's been my staff attends because I have scheduling conflicts but they they mentioned that sometimes there's recommendations that come forward about the staffing issues and today at PAL we talked about trying to secure uh some state support and funding uh to stabilize some of that staffing need what are some of those recommendations that typically come out and are they things that we've already considered and are underway in doing so one of the recommendations she asked us was to pursue retired and new attempts right we had done that before we've done that again and sent um letters to people who had been here the last two years and I reached out to someone who was a little beyond that we got three people no one so far has well one person's been interested in doing investigations will need to train her and two are willing to assist in closing cases and that's it for retired and new attendants the recommendation of one of the I think sources of tension tension

We've done that again and sent um letters to people who have been here the last two years, and I reached out to someone who was a little beyond that.

We got three people.

No one so far has well, one person's been interested in doing investigations, will need to train her.

And two are willing to assist in closing cases.

And that's it for retired and new attents.

The recommendation of one of the I think sources of tension tension is that we bring on students to close investigations and emergency response.

And that opens up the county to significant liability, I think, um, in terms of people skilled at doing this work.

I think in our opening conference with CDSS, they even describe that you should actually have your most skilled staff doing emergency response due to the complexity.

It isn't someone that's learning how to do this work and they're still at the point of earning a degree.

So that is one of her recommendations that we haven't followed.

Um she's mentioned Cal State East Bay.

I sit on their board.

I've had a meeting with them to see Andrea's had an idea of how do we change our bachelor's level position to make sure they're more skilled in terms of advanced coursework to earn their master's degree.

We've had conversations with them about that, and we'll continue having conversations.

How do we partner more with East Bay?

Most of our new hires actually at this point come from Cal State East Bay.

So we consider them a great partner, and so we'll continue to work with them.

So most of the recommendations we have the retired and new attents.

I've gotten nice letters from retirees saying hi, thank you, hope you're well.

Um, some have just offered advice, and I'll meet with them about ideas they have that they think may help us in closing cases, but it hasn't been the um significant bang for our buck in terms of retired new attempts.

We're also we've had uh retired and new attent from another county working with us as a temporary employee, and we're trying to bring him back to continue um to do work.

So are there recommendations coming from for from some of our service providers?

Um I haven't received any recently.

Um the last question I had is in terms of um how on track we are.

You said that our 12th month report is due September 23rd, 2026, and we have um nine out of 15 that are pending, and I assume the the waiting facility uh I mean I I saw that two days before this the site visit, we got the license right.

Yeah.

Uh so hopefully that part will resolve itself.

Once we have children at the facility, there's a couple of pieces that were still needed.

We need to be tracking critical incidents, AWALLs, and restart some meetings.

So that will resolve itself before um the new year.

There were two I submitted in this last uh iteration of the response that should be fully implemented, the um SIP change and the site letters and contract amendments, those are done.

So hopefully they'll approve those in terms of the training.

I let them know that we actually do have it in our evaluation that we evaluate staff training.

We are in the middle of a meet and confer with pace regarding um supervisors and expectations and emergency response that I believe will solve a good chunk of one before.

And then our survey should take care of the survey response.

So we are on track.

Some things just didn't line up with the time frame from the auditor's office, and for some things like the meet and confer.

We're waiting for the resolution of the meet and confer.

And we've had three meetings thus far, and we'll continue to meet until that's resolved.

Um, have you had any feedback from SCIU 10 to 1 about some of the staffing challenges and some of their suggestions?

Um, not recently, we meet with SCIU once a month during the crisis.

We um, because we were meeting with them when this crisis was happening, we took most of their suggestions during the crisis.

I know um I'm aware of some of their suggestions.

I know they're in contract negotiation, so there's that slippery slope.

I I understand.

I'm not asking for specifics about the negotiations.

I'm just trying to figure out some of the um some of their concerns over like staffing at the emergency response unit.

You mentioned you want more senior people instead of bringing in um students, but did they have offer any suggestions on how to get uh adequate staffing?

They haven't.

They were in support of our transferring staff when we did it.

They were support of because you know we've done a couple of rotations of staff into emergency response, and they agreed and supported that work.

They agreed with um our what we called uh dedicated time.

So all the things we've done in ERU the last couple years to bring the number down from over 3700 to 1500.

SCIU was in we were in conversation with SEIU to make that happen.

Okay, thank you.

I just wanted Michelle to address one question, supervisor.

I don't think was fully um answered, and it was the recruitment, and if we are going outside and working with CBOs.

Um so Michelle, if you can just repeat the campaigns that we run.

I mean, there's been a much more concerted effort.

Um that's true.

Um we did a Comcast um recording um in Alamina County uh commercials um in December of last year that were actually really successful, I think, because the number of applications ticked up after that.

We did a social media campaign um that was broadcast pretty heavily, LinkedIn and all the other places.

So we haven't had those kind of resources in the past to recruit applicants before.

Um so we definitely think they made a difference in terms of the number of hits we got um based on those campaigns.

And then I would say the continuous hiring is also new.

Um the schedule that Michelle showed in one on one of her slides.

We hadn't had continuous hiring in the past, but we do now for both bachelor's and master's level um child welfare workers.

So the exact the recruitment opens is it every month or it feels like every two months we open.

Like right now, we have a class that's being released on April May 11th.

We have another class that just started.

So we're constantly hiring.

In the past, we hired one time a year, and then if we really needed to, we hired earlier in the year.

It took a while though to get approval to do continuous hiring, but it's definitely um been helpful with bringing staff on.

Okay, thank you very much.

Um other final comments before I open up our public input.

Do we have any public comments on this item?

There are no public comments on this item.

Okay.

Um do we have any public comments on items that are not on today's agenda that are within the preview of the Social Services Committee?

There are no public comments.

Okay, thank you everyone for your time and presentations.

This meeting's adjourned.