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I just found out this afternoon.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Life Enrichment Committee.

For today's date, January 27, 2026.

The time is now 4.05 p.m. and this meeting has come to order.

Before taking roll, I will provide instructions on how to submit a speaker's card for items on this agenda.

If you're here with us in chambers and you would like to submit a speaker's card, please fill one out and turn it to a clerk representative.

Before the item is read into record, speaker requests were due 24 hours prior to this meeting.

This meeting came to order at 4.05 p.m.

Speaker cards will no longer be accepted 10 minutes after a meeting has began, making that time 4.15 p.m.

With that, we would now begin to take roll.

Council Member Gayo is excused.

Council Member Houston.

Present.

Councilmember Wong present and chair five present thank you we have three members present one excuse

Gallo and before you begin chair five do you have any announcements I do not have any announcements

and I think this should be a very straightforward meeting we have one action item on the agenda so

let's go ahead and get into it thank you moving to our first item of the day which is item one

approval of the draft minutes from the committee meeting on January 13th 2026.

are there speakers there are no speakers for this item I'll entertain a motion

I'll second

we have a motion made by council member one seconded by chair fife to accept the approval of the draft

minutes from the committee meeting held on january 13 2026 as is on roll council member gaio is

excused council member houston thank you councilman wong aye and chair fife this motion passes with

three eyes one excuse gaio moving to to accept the approval of the draft minutes of the committee

meeting on january 13 2026 as is moving to item two determination schedule outstanding committee

items this is also known as your pending list so to the administration do you have any proposed changes

do the chair we do not

did you want thank you thank you uh any uh amendments or updates changes from

the body seeing none uh i will entertain a motion

we have a motion made by council member houston seconded by council member

wong to accept the termination schedule outstanding committee items as is on roll

council member gallio is excused council member houston council member wong

aye and chair fife aye this motion passes with three eyes one excuse gallio to accept the

termination schedule outstanding committee items as is moving to item three

Adopt the resolution one awarding grant agreements using substance abuse and mental health services

administration funds to three agencies in a total amount not to exceed 437,000 to provide trauma and

informed behavior services to the high-risk youth from October 1st 2025 to December 31st 2026 and to

waiving the local and small local and requests for proposal requirements and awarding professional

service agreement in the amount not to exceed $200,000 in SAMHSA funding for October 1st, 25

through December 31st, 26, and three authorizing the city administrator to amend grant agreements

and professional services and the set amount of agreements using the carryover and relocated

reallocated grant funding in accordance to the SAMHSA authority and you do have two speakers for

this item. Thank you Madam City Clerk you are handling it today. I do want to offer five minutes

is five minutes. Sure yeah that'd be great. Do you want more time less time? Thank you. Okay if you

could introduce yourself and you have five minutes on the clock for your presentation. Thank you so

much. Good afternoon to the chair and to counsel. My name is Desirelyn Cole and I am the ReCAST

program manager housed in the Human Services Department for the city of Oakland. I am so

excited to present to you all today and just share a brief synopsis of the work that we get to do in

community. Oakland ReCAST is our city's trauma-informed community mental health initiative

focused on healing from stress, violence, and chronic trauma.

We do this through training, direct mental health services,

workforce development, and partnerships, as well as public awareness.

You'll see in the report from years three to four,

the program has showed significant growth in every major category

that we are required to fund it to as a part of our federal funding.

I want to highlight a few things in terms of the mental health training

that we've been able to provide both internally and externally in the community.

We have a track that trains city staff, and we've been able to train 58 city staff across 17 departments,

including police, fire, library, park and rec, public works, and transportation,

as well as the city attorney's office, in mental health first aid.

Mental health first aid is a critical tool used to support community members

when they're experiencing a mental health crisis.

City staff is trained to be able to recognize what that is,

to assess the situation, and to provide resources.

We've also trained 200 community members in mental health first aid as well,

ensuring that we are able to have a shared language and understanding

of what mental health is and how to assess it in community.

Another highlight that we want to share is our partnerships have grown.

in the past year. We've been able to work with 65 agencies in year four and we were able to

increase those partnerships to 79, excuse me, in year four. We served 65 in year three, excuse me,

and increased to 79 in year four. This allows us to reach different organizations, different

community members across East and West Oakland to ensure that we are coordinating care around

mental health and wellness. Additionally, we've served over 250 individuals with direct

mental health services. We were able to staff our senior centers with a mental health

advocate supporter to offer one-to-one therapy as well as group therapy for our aging adults.

And in year five, we will be increasing that track to youth.

Another key activity that we were able to launch and have been launching in all four

years of the grant is our Youth to Youth mini grant.

We've given over $50,000 per year to 10 youth-led service projects.

Youth reported increased wellness awareness, creativity, empowerment, and were able to

demonstrate highly centered highly healing centered youth community

activities this is critical because we want to ensure that young people not

only are able to build their own mental health and awareness activities but also

sustain that work and so we are excited to continue the youth mini grant in year

five. And lastly, I want to highlight our mental health awareness campaign that we were able to

partner with the IKE kiosks. You see those kiosks centered around the city. We put together a mental

health wellness campaign and had over a million impressions with individuals in the city. We will

continue this mental health messaging into year four and hoping to increase

our evaluation of this effort to ensure that there are mental health resources

available across the city enterprise I also want to highlight that we have an

independent evaluator that evaluates recast programming along with the spars

data that we collect every year we require our programs to offer to submit

their annual or their I'm sorry their quarterly reports and that fills our

annual report we work with an independent evaluator as well as our

SAMHSA evaluation and those that data is enclosed in the report as well it is

quite lengthy I won't read it all but I do want to make sure we highlight the

different areas in which we have our data I will close with that and take any

questions chair are there any questions from council mayor Houston

through the chair hello I had in my morning huddle this morning we had a few

questions for you just general questions and one what does the city pick the contractors or do the

grantees pick the contractors through the chair so the city would picks the contractors so we

continue to work with the program partners that have been working with the recast grant this grant

has been at the city for going on 10 years and so it is critical that we have a sustainability model

because of the reach and the community members that we've been able to work with we also are very

time sensitive and so we work with we've done our rfq process in the beginning of the grant and we

continue to work with those partners moving forward okay through the chair is there another cycle for

this grant unfortunately through the chair unfortunately not we are in our fifth and final

year and we are waiting to see if there will be funding through SAMHSA for another five-year cycle

okay i got two more and that's it you answered very well through the chair um what are some of

the success stories detailed and impacts this grant has had on um oakland

through the chair.

Just a few stories. Yeah, well, and if you can't have so many, I'm trying to think of which one I will highlight the men's wellness group. I do talk about them quite a bit. That is with our partner, a creative and the men's wellness group has been running for two years and we serve about over 100 men monthly.

mental health activations methodologies things of that nature it's for men only

which I think is so critical to ensure that they have a safe space to be able

to talk through some of the things that men are experiencing around mental

health and it happens actually right down the street at the oh my gosh not at

oak stop take your time I am I'm quite nervous because I don't like public

suit you're doing good you don't know what you're talking about it it is I am

blanking that's okay is it with is it facilitated by any rappers that we might

know no okay because there's there's there there are a couple yes there are

couple but this one is with through ae creative and i will make sure to get you the location

because they do move around quite a bit but i will make sure to get that to you through the chair to

you mr houston through the chair you're doing good i don't know what you're talking about so

let me ask you this last question on what metrics are being used to determine these successes yes

so we use spars spars is the database that the federal government through the chair excuse me

that spars is the database that the federal government uses to track all of our indicators

you'll see here within the report the different goals we have three goals and then they go down

into the different metrics that we are measuring for um let me if you go to past performance

we have training in mental health so training more people in mental health building our mental

health workforce creating community partnerships and providing mental health resources and we do

that through our quarterly reporting forms that we've created so we can funnel that data

into spars and then use it in our annual report through the chair you did excellent and

treatment is very important that's one of my main issues treatment first treatment first so thank

you so much and I'll pass it back I agree Desra Lynn is this the first time

you've presented at councilor committee um no I think it's my third I think it

might be my third the first one was virtual okay you're doing a great job

thank you councilmember Wong the chair a few questions just how is this set of

service is going to interact with some of our some of our other infrastructure so I'm talking about

like ceasefire macro and also we have our community ambassadors as well as our violence interrupters

are you all are you working with those programs to make sure that there's some coordination or

clarity around what this program will achieve versus those programs through the chair excellent

question. So ReCAST started in the Human Services Department when the Department of Violence

Prevention was still housed in Human Services. So yes, there was a coordinated effort in the first

cycle of funding. Now in the second cycle of funding, because of funding limitations, we weren't

able to partner in that way. However, ReCAST did provide mental health training and support to some

of the violence disruptors, and I believe our second year of ReCAST to ensure that they had

a baseline and understanding of what services were available for being out in the street in

the middle of a chaotic and traumatic experience. Yeah. Right. And then I find this concept of

training our city staff to, you know, basically support it with mental health challenges. Can

you just speak a little bit more about what that would look like? Are we talking, I assume it's

not like the public works department but which city staff would be trained through this program

through the chair excellent question again we partner with citywide training we have a fantastic

relationship with them so we offer our training in that database for training for city staff we

also will take requests to provide an individualized training through some of our partners our partner

agencies will be able to provide a specialized training for departments that are looking for

something specific for their department. That has happened in years two and three of the grant,

and we can share that information with you in our annual report from year three. Okay, yeah,

it would be great. I think one thing I picked up on is it says that the mental health services will

be delivered at senior centers, but I think it's also like libraries and our rec centers,

these are all also opportunities. Through the chair, yeah. Great, yes, and so when you're speaking

of the senior centers, that's where we do our group therapy and our individual therapy.

Now, we would love to expand to other places like the library, but because of what we're

offering, we need a more centralized space that we can provide therapy in.

Now, when it comes to the training, so like mental health first aid training, that is

something we offer to any city staff member as well as community members.

And so that's a training that anyone can participate in to have that skill.

And in fact, we did train several library members in year three, I'm sorry, library staff, excuse me, in year three on mental health first aid as well as TIS one-on-one because of some of the challenges that they were experiencing.

And we also have a great relationship and partnership with them moving forward and would be able to offer anything that they need.

Okay, awesome.

Yeah, our librarians, our library workers are often frontline workers in many ways.

so thank you and i'll ask just a couple questions i saw that um the grants were i guess were

supposed to begin in october of 2025 so what happens are they backdated what happens with

the allocations to the different organizations that are the recipients of these grant funds

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so we have our program year starts in October.

Several of our organizations continue programming.

They don't stop programming as they wait for contracts to be aligned and able to pay them.

So we continue our services as normal.

We have we I just want to make sure we work really well in making sure that we align with

them and work with them to ensure that programming doesn't it.

Can you am I answering your question correctly?

I want to make sure that I'm able to have they have they been paid.

Yes, some of them have been paid.

Some of them haven't.

No.

Does that impact their service delivery at all?

Absolutely.

It is the hardest part of my job to have owed a significant amount of money to individuals

from the community who look like the community, who are the small POC businesses that the

city requires, encourages us to work with, to not pay them.

It is very difficult to continue this work, but because of the partnerships that we've been able to develop, the relationships that I nurture, they've been able to continue programming.

How do we have a situation like that not be recurring?

Is there something that we can do?

Is there a way that we don't have to put pressure on our service providers in this way?

I know the city of Oakland has a prompt payment policy, and I'm just curious.

Good afternoon.

This is Jason Lester, director of human services.

And this is a reoccurring matter.

And one thing that we are working on, our contract team is severely understaffed.

And because they're severely understaffed, there is oftentimes a backlog.

And this backlog then transcends into what Desmond was just speaking of.

One thing that we have broached is using some of the vacancy savings that are in HSD

and possibly putting them with the finance in an effort to get the contracts done more timely.

So, you know, what we're doing is volunteering FTE so that we can address the backlog.

And that's something that we just came up with today.

But it was approved today.

So we're going to be in the business of fixing this situation.

And I think that that's what you were, I think that was one big solution that we are going to move forward with.

Well, I'm happy that you all are considering these solutions because I witnessed the SAMHSA and the recast grants.

and maybe it was the second year, third year, and I went to Oak Stop and saw the presentations by all

of the different organizations, all the young people, how empowered they felt from being able

to present their information. So I'm happy that I got to experience what these funds look like in

some of the different programs. So I just want to make sure that, you know, a lot of these

organizations that are really doing the work on the ground get the resources that they they need

to continue this work particularly in east and west oakland um so i'm i'm happy that a solution

was found and i look forward to hearing about how that's going um and more about the staffing issues

during the mid-cycle that's not for today's agenda item but i would like to understand what what that

looks like and what you all need to be successful so that our organizations can be successful

and with that if there are thank you for your presentation thank you if there are no further

question did you councilmember Houston yes through the chair just one more question for you of East

Oakland I'm senior center our sports center senior center have you utilized that have you

did anything there because you was talking about the seniors in that area through the chair I am

And off the top of my mind, I don't know where the therapist for the senior centers, how many times she circulates through all the senior centers, but she does go to the East Senior Center.

Okay, so East Oakland, Senior Center on EADS, you know, right over there, okay.

Absolutely.

I didn't direct nobody.

No, you didn't.

So, Matt, if we can hear from our public speakers.

When I call your name, please approach the podium.

David Boatwright and Blair Beekman.

David Boatwright, District 4.

I'd like to start off with a little personal life enrichment,

and that is to make a request that you pass on to the heads of all the committees

that they have the department who's making or has written a report to be presented

in any of the committees ensures that the contact information is operational i'll put it that way

whether it's an email or a phone number that it can be used to contact people and ask questions

before the the committee meeting and this has happened to me a couple times now and i found out

this morning that another staffer for district four was not getting my emails and she never did

find them but now I know they may be in her junk mail so your IT department

needs to know that they may be overdoing the security thing and kicking

out legitimate emails from the person the residents of the city the other

thing is I'd like to thank councilmember Houston for asking my

question and so I don't have to repeat it and that is you advocated madam

chairman before and another committee not this one but another one that would

post appraise all of the grant or whatever the term you used was all the

grants that we issue so we know what kind of beneficial information or gain

has come out of that grant money I think that's absolutely necessary to know

whether that group should continue get money or other grants should should get

new money that's it thanks that concludes your public speakers for item

three. My apologies, David, vote right. Blair Beekman. Sorry about that. Thank you. Hi, Blair

Beekman. Thanks for the previous public comment. I've noticed that city clerk's office used

to be more direct and they could answer myself quickly on public meeting days if things were

happening and then we drifted apart a bit and you know changes have happened

I don't seem to be quite as answering so quickly now as they used to it was

friendly familiar if they're familiar with a person hopefully they can

continue that practice because it was it was helpful and nice thank you a really

nice item here it was nice to hear what this program can be doing I'm very

concerned that California has made a real push in redefining its mental health

and drug addiction items and issues both at the state level and at the local

level and I'm concerned I think it was it was actually a big reason why Pamela

Price, the former Alameda County DA, was elected and brought on. She had a real commitment

to address the people themselves of mental health issues. And so I'm concerned, I'm hopeful

that in the good that this program talks about mental health, that it can, if it's lacking

a bit, it can learn to be more inclusive with working with macro, working with the issues

that happen in real time on our Oakland streets with mental health in our future.

Because the way she's talked about things, it's the exact antidote needed for big new programs of mental health help.

You know, they're good intentions, but I'm just concerned about them.

And these are the sort of programs talked here that back that great, good backing for how to work well in the future.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Just on that topic of mental health, you see me wearing my Samuel Merritt University t-shirt

from the groundbreaking that happened today, the ribbon cutting ceremony.

It's an amazing resource and I hope we can figure out how to partner as the City of Oakland

this university that's just a couple blocks away that does have tracks for

education in the mental health fields I think that will be an amazing resource

for the city of Oakland not just because we'll have more helping professions

that are based right here but just serving the the community and the access

is something that's going to be very very needed as we we know that these

mental health professions are in need and they pay well and we all know we need it in America right

now so if there are no further questions or comments from my colleagues I will entertain a

motion on this item councilmember Wong is part of this work also going to be addressing the

question around drug addiction so would include training on how to like apply

Narcan and things like that through the chair no not this particular program

but SAMHSA does have funding for those needs if that's something that the city

would like to pursue I mean absolutely yeah we need it and I just want to make

a comment too I've noticed through the course of my time as a city counselor

that we really need more mental health resources across the board.

It just is really John George is like there's not enough beds.

It's just we really need more resources on this.

So thank you for your work on this.

Thank you.

Everyone join me in pushing on the county of Alameda.

All right.

That said.

thank you we have a motion made by council member houston seconded by council member wong

to approve the recommendations of staff to afford this item to the february 3rd 2026 city council

agenda and to the body do you wish to put this on consent on consent thank you on roll council

remember gallo is excused council member houston yes council member wong um yes and chair fife

aye this motion passes with three eyes when it skews gallo to improve the recommendations of

staff before deciding to the february 3rd 2026 city council agenda and that is on consent now

moving to open forum when i call your name please approach the podium blair beekman

Hi. This is my last meeting in Oakland. I'm going to be traveling to San Diego and moving

there after this meeting this weekend. So thank you for everything. I will try to speak

at meetings still in the future and report on flock issues as well. San Diego is working

on Flock program, hopefully moving away from it.

Trump's continual war posturing and actions around this world

and in Venezuela are simply exacerbating bad feelings

of both law enforcement and the everyday public

around the country and his currently overly violent plans

of addressing the undocumented in this country.

Thankfully, we seem to be at a time Trump may be beginning a time

of reflection instead of his relentless drive to continually

irritate and exacerbate our deep U.S. wounds about immigration and its ideals.

In the work of SF and SJ mayors this past fall, myself and many other people keep trying

to offer the advice there can be dialogue at this time on many different softer yet very effective

choices like social services to address the reasoning that ICE and National Guard,

to better address the reasoning that currently the Trump administration is using ICE and National Guard

as how to help address current violent crime in local cities.

It also sounds like from this we simply need a larger public conversation on the future

of immigration and documentation and what that means in this country overall.

Oakland has been offering some very good examples in how to share ideas of a full community dedication and effort

to well address issues of community and public safety that simply can give heart and meaning much better than what Trump is currently working on.

And I hope we can really develop that dialogue now with him and he can be clear what best practices are.

Good luck into our future 2026. Thank you.

Thank you for your comment, Blair. That concludes your public speaker's welcome for

us. Blair, you will be missed. Have fun in San Diego. And I want to take the chair's prerogative

just to send love to the family and friends of Bridget Cook, the former staffer for Councilmember

Lynette McElhaney. She recently passed away. We learned that this afternoon. So sending her love

will adjourn in her memory at the next full city council meeting. And yeah, just hold the ones you

love. And shout out, I wanted to tell Director Lester to all of the city staff who worked in our

emergency operations center to support the fire victims in downtown. My hats off to all of you.

You did an amazing job, and I know we recently closed the shelter in the emergency center,

and so I just wanted to send all of the love to the fire department, to the city administrator's office,

to all of the staff and HSD and everybody who stepped up to take care of Oakland residents.

It was a sight, so thank you.

This meeting is adjourned.

Thank you.