Neighborhood Services and Education Committee (nse) - Regular Meeting

All right. Hello everyone. Welcome. Before we begin, I want to remind the committee members and members of the public to follow our code of conduct at meetings. This includes only commenting on the specific agenda item and addressing the entire body.

Public speakers will not engage in a conversation with the chair, council members, or staff. All members of the committee, staff, and the public are expected to refrain from abuse of language. Failure to comply with the code of conduct which will disturb, disrupt or impede the orderly conduct of this meeting will result in removal from the meeting. Please note that members of the public can comment on agendized items, but given that this is a special meeting, there will be no open forum. This joint meeting in the neighborhood services and education committee and the County of Santa Clara Children's Seniors and Families Committee will now come to order. Can the clerk please call the roll?

Campos?

Present.

Candelas?

Here.

Cohen?

Here.

Vice chair Duan?

Here.

And chair Ortiz?

Present.

You have a quorum for the city.

Thank you so much. Now I'm going to pass it to my colleague, Sylvia Arenas from the county.

Wonderful. Good morning, everyone. I'm Sylvia Arenas, chair of CSFC on the county side, and so I'm gonna ask our clerk to please call roles so that we can, meet court. Vice chairperson Young? Here. And chairperson Arenas. And I'm here too. Thank you. Have a quorum. It.

Great. Thank you so much. Coordination between the city of San Jose and the County Of Santa Clara on the city of San Jose Children and Youth Master Plan, and the County Of Santa Clara County's Latino Health Assessment and Gun Violence Prevention efforts are very important to the discussion. It impacts all of us together. I'm really grateful to have the opportunity to work with my colleagues from the county.

You know, at the end of the day, we all serve our residents here at the City of San Jose. We have shared constituency. Most of our residents don't differentiate between whether the services are coming from the city or the county, and so I just really want to value this opportunity. You know, I think that by investing in our youth, focusing our concentrations on both our children and our adolescents go a long way. And really, for every dollar that we invest in the youth, we get twice the amount of productivity at the end of the day.

And just one more house rule. We will be doing, all the presentation items, and then there will be opportunities at the end to provide public comment, for everyone. I'm gonna pass it over to, supervisor Arenas, for opening comments.

Great. Thank you. It's also an honor for me to be back here, at the city of San Jose after serving, one and a half terms, in which we spent a really good amount of time. I look at Angel Rios and some of the former and our city attorneys, some of the work that we've done to bring forward children and children, youth, and families to the forefront. And we we did it in a number of ways.

Even before we named the child and youth master plan, master plan, we reminded that the housing department needed to count families in order to make sure that we recognize them within the network and that we eventually serve them. Right? And we also did a lot of really wonderful things during the pandemic, and that is to share with the county at that time resources so that children and our youth could be connected in their homes. And so we share cost by we we covered the hotspots. The county covered the devices, and and a lot of our children got connected so that they could attend school and continue to be fruitful.

That continued that kind of partnership extended to child care, and for the very first time, the city of San Jose invested in child care by providing a $10,000 stipend to all of our child care providers that applied. And I safely say that all of them utilized the funds. And we continued that partnership and that investment with child care by investing in our after school programs as well as some of our community center programming, and really grew our rock program throughout our throughout our city of San Jose. And so with that journey, we we ended with the child and youth master plan because we recognized that we wanted something that was organized, something that had a continuum of care for our children and our youth. We realized that having one time programming sometimes doesn't make the mark.

It is wonderful for us to invest in our youth, but we have to do it in a way that is comprehensive, the one that has a continuum of care so that we can provide the steps that are necessary for our children and our youth to be able to have a successful and vibrant career and future. And so I'm really proud to say that one of the last things that we did was allot $10,000 for our child and youth master plan as a council member, and I'm really proud of the work that my colleagues now in in place of of me and, of course, Angel Rios leading that charge from administration. And Laura Abusa, who's no longer here but but still was a part of this, did a lot of wonderful work to move this plan forward. And while they were doing that, I was over at the county connecting the dots, and this is another effort to connect those dots and continue to have a continuum of care that is comprehensive because as we know, the city of San Jose is limited in terms of what they offer in services because mainly the city is is focused on development, infrastructure for the city Of San Jose, parks, our streets, all of those things that make our lives a lot easier.

And then on top of that, they also focus on social services because everybody in our local government needs to step up and invest in our community. But the truth is that the county has a lot of what we call our safety net services, and those are the the services that our families rely on to continue on if they somehow maybe have a hard time in their lives. And so the county is here to support in that way, and this is a tradition that former supervisor Cindy Chavez and myself started, and we did it with gender based violence. We did this with our youth, surrounding our youth, and during the pandemic, and now I'm really glad that we continue with supervisor Young. And so with that, I will just ask everybody to take a look at our systems as one.

And in that spirit, I'll hand this over to our chair, Council Member Ortiz.

Thank you, supervisor. Next, I'm going to introduce Angel Rios, to discuss, our first item on the agenda. Thank you.

Alright. Thank thank you, chair Ortiz, and thank you, Aranes. One minor detail, you and your colleagues were also responsible for securing $10,300,000 right after the pandemic that went out into the community post pandemic. And that was was no small task, and and it had a significant impact at the right time. It it's really great to see so many, of our partners and so many champions for children, youth, and and families here in the chambers.

I I think just the the showing today just shows how important this issue is, not only to those up here, those of us up here, but to to those of us in this entire room. As we kick off our presentation on the children youth master plan, kinda wanted to frame a couple of, of things. You know, when we launched the development of children youth master plan, we knew right from the get go that if we're really gonna get to the root cause of issues, we were gonna have to deal with cause and effect. Right? The the you know, if we were gonna just add three or four more programs, yeah, we were gonna have short term impact, but it wasn't gonna be enough to really change and and really disrupt the cycle of poverty that we that we that we we know many of our children, youth, and families found themselves entangled in.

And at the end of the day, we we knew that in order to disrupt poverty, which is a hard thing to do as everybody in this room knows, it was gonna be kind of a long game. Right? There was things we were gonna have to do short term, but things that we're gonna have to do long term more systemically. And we also knew that the greatest antidote to breaking that cycle of poverty is really creating more access to opportunity. Right?

And so that's really what the Children Youth Master Plan kind of North Star ended up being. We also knew that in order for us to do that, the city and the county along with our partners in the nonprofit sector, faith community, business community, we're gonna have to unify our vision around children and youth. Right? The days of just having siloed visions was kinda it was really distracting the work and and and making us more inefficient. And so with that in mind, the the the children youth master plan kinda like started from day one with county as a partner.

And so we we really have been joined at the hip with response to this. We do there's a lot of criticism oftentimes that, you know, about the, you know, about the city and the county and do they work well together, do they not work well together? Well, I could tell you that in regards to the children and youth, the city and county are working really well together. The plan that we developed was also community informed. Right? We also made sure that as we kick this off, this wasn't about the city or the county saying, here's what the community needs. We had to invert that. This had to be, let's go out, hear from the community, and let the community tell us what the community needs, and then we build our systems around that. So this work is predicated on that on that approach, a community informed approach. It also presents a shared framework.

Right? There are seven priority areas in the the children youth master plan, and it provides a clear structure for organizing programs and investments across early learning, safety, health, youth intervention, and pathways to meaningful work. A lot of the key areas that that we need to focus on. And lastly, we we've launched we know that, you know, taking this framework and scaling it citywide was gonna be a big effort. So we started with two pilot sites.

You see some of our pilot partners in in the box there today. We've identified Mayfair And Polka Way as one pilot site and then the Santee And 7 Trees as another pilot site. And this illustrates how this alignment shows up on the ground, creating a true no wrong door approach and experience for children, youth, and families. And with that, I'll turn it over to our team in the box who will go over our children youth master plan framework.

Thank you, Angel. Good morning, chair Ortiz and council member and council members, chair Arenas and supervisor Dawn. I'm Israel Kanjura, the recreation superintendent who's leading the implementation efforts for the Children Youth Services master plan. Today's update will include both a city and county overview as well as a direct implementation update from our community partners. Help.

There you go. So I would like to begin by sending in our conversation on our shared vision. Our vision is a is to foster a future where every child and youth in San Jose blossoms into healthy, resilient, thriving adults enriched with equitable opportunities to live, work, play, dream, and prosper within the vibrant landscape of Silicon Valley. This is an ambitious, and inspiring goal as it should be, and one that truly reflects the kind of future we are collectively working to build for our children and youth and families. With that, the following outlines the seven areas, early learning and childcare, health and mental wellness, housing, access and security, learning and empowerment, meaningful sustaining jobs, safe, clean, centered communities, system transformation, which is one of the things that Angel just spoke about.

These areas anchor our vision and serve as the framework for guiding how we align programs, funding, and partnerships. At the city level, the San Jose Public Library, through its array of services, advances the priority areas under meaningful and sustaining jobs, learning and empowerment, and early learning. Their services form a cradle to career continuum. The San Jose Youth Empowerment Alliance and Beautify SJ advanced priorities areas of safe, clean, and connected communities through coordinated violence prevention efforts, graffiti removal, litter pickups, and neighborhood beautification projects, creating safer and more vibrant public spaces for families. The recreation department, through a broad network of neighborhood services, advances several priority areas which include early learning, health and mental wellness, youth development, connected communities.

Together, this creates inclusive age appropriate pathways that support children and youth from early learning through adolescence, strengthening community connections while advancing the core priorities of the Children and Youth Services Master Plan. And this is where the fun begins. Right? Where our demonstration sites are where our shared priorities move from planning into practice, becoming an integrated neigh neighborhood system of care. These sites are led by trusted anchor partners with deep roots in their communities, proving system level capacity.

For Mayfair and Poco Way, implementations led through the collective who bring decades of experience in youth leadership development, family stabilization, early learning, and system navigation. For Santee and Seven Trees, implementation is led by Catholic charities through the Franklin McKinley Children's Initiative, providing comprehensive wraparound services, including housing stability, economic mobility, behavioral health, and school based family supports. These partners were intentionally selected for their neighborhood trust, cross sector relationships, and the ability to deliver culture responsive integrated care at scale. So how does this funding take place, right, for this initiative, for the pilots? So the county and the city both provided a million dollars to begin this project.

Providing this in addition to that, the public funding that our community partners are bringing in as well as the leveraging grants and philanthropic resources to enhance the services and expand capacity. The funding is up to from, December 2026. With funding secured, we now shift to how services will function on the ground. So it's taken us a while to get to this phase. We're in phase three right now.

And at this phase, full coordination is intentionally tested only within the demonstration sites so that city and county can evaluate, refine, and strengthen the model before broader expansion. Families will enter through trusted neighborhood based access points and receive coordinated navigation referrals and case management. City departments, county systems, and nonprofits will actively support this pilot through aligned services, referral pathways, and shared workflows. This test phase allows us to identify barriers in real time, strengthen coordination, and build an evidence informed foundation for future citywide implementation. This model is supported by a formal city county system alignment.

So this work has to be aligned with everyone here. I'm glad to see so many folks here because they're the ones that are really having to change the system that we currently are trying to, like, shift. So slide seven outlines the core priority areas where the county and city are intentionally aligning to create more connected family center systems. The shared priorities center around integrated care through an all around door service delivery model, family centered and strength based care, integrated data and shared outcomes, and shared neighborhood priorities. So why does this matter?

By aligning these common priorities, the city and county move together with clarity, consistency, and accountability. This shared framework reduces duplication, strengthens coordination across systems, and ensures that families experiences seamless, high quality services regardless of where they entered. Most importantly, it allows us to measure impact collectively and continuously improve outcomes for children, youth, and families. Thank you for your time, and this concludes my part of the presentation. And now I'll turn it over to the Cisapuede Collective.

Good afternoon, and thank you to the members of the city council and the county board of supervisors for the opportunity to share our collective progress of the implementation of the children youth and youth services master plan. My name is Veronica Goe. I'm the executive director at Guerrero Family Services. Sitting right next to me is my colleague, Saul Ramos, co executive director of Somos Mayfair. We both represent the CCEP Puede Collective, a collaboration of five community based organizations all rooted in the Mayfair community.

Together, we are honored to lead the Mayfair and Poco Way demonstration site, a pilot effort bringing the city's master plan to life in East San Jose. We want to thank our partners at Park Recreation and Neighborhood Services, the San Jose Public Library, and the County Social Services Agency for their partnership and shared leadership. Today, we'll walk you through how our implementation begun, how it's structured, and how we are advancing a truly community centered system of care that reflects learning, empowerment, and belonging. Next slide please. Before we dive into where we are today, I want to ground us in how this work begun.

The Children and Youth Services Master Plan, led by the city, laid the groundwork for a shared vision of what our community wants for its children and families, it created a framework. And our collective work builds from that foundation, transforming vision into practice. Through the visioning process, we added a guided pillar rooted in community, centering families not as recipient of services, but as co creators of solutions. This approach drives our work, ensuring that every program reflects dignity, empathy, and equity. Next slide, please.

Our process began with brainstorming, design, and partner alignment, and has been guided every step of the way by shared values of empathy, cultural sensitivity, and equity. Staff, leadership, and evaluation partners collaborated closely to align goals, refine design, and integrate ongoing community feedback. What begun as an internal planning has become a shared roadmap built with, not for the community. Next slide. We understand that this work is only possible through strong partnerships.

We are grateful to the city of San Jose, the County Of Santa Clara, our central partners, alongside Parks and Recreation and Neighborhood Services, San Jose Public Library, and the city office of economic development, and the county social services agency. We also collaborate closely with First Five Santa Clara County school districts, neighborhood associations, and other local organizations deeply rooted in Mayfair and Poco Way. This work builds on the foundation of the CCEP weathered collective, five community based organizations whose established infrastructure and trust make this collaboration possible. Together, we form the fabric of the neighborhood, offering a wide range of services that meet families where they are. And most importantly, our key partners are families themselves.

Through their feedback, we strengthen systems to reflect the changes they need, creating a system that works with families, not against them. Next slide, please. The Mayfair And Pokal Way demonstration site is designed around the implementation of the no wrong door approach, and is an integrated practice into accessing a single system of care. The visionary goal of this effort is the creation of the infrastructure in an effort to eliminate fragmentation and will provide a strong foundation for the implementation of this initiative. This mean this means that no matter where a family enters, whether it's through Grail Family Services, Somos Mayfair, a local library, or another community partner, they find a coordinated and connected system of support.

Our pilot focuses on children, youth, and families aiming to reach a 100 families during this first phase. Because integrating multiple systems is complex, the pilot allows us to test, learn, and strengthen alignment before scaling citywide. We're now a fully staffed team with navigators, parent services coordinators, and caseworkers, And we are working with the county to collocate caseworkers at the site to ensure seamless coordination. Beyond using the system, we are building capacity across agencies so that every partner can serve as an effective frontline to families. We want to strengthen systems, not create new hurdles, and ensure that support is consistent, compassionate, and efficient.

Through shared tools like Salesforce and the city's referral platform, we're unifying processes for tracking outcomes, identifying barriers, and ensuring accountability. While our contract with the city and county has implementation beginning in January, our demonstration site has already accepted a few referrals into this work in order for our teams to iron out any issues that should be addressed through continuous improvement and training. Next slide, please. This visual shows how families move through the demonstration site's coordinated system of care. You'll see our two lead organizations, Grail Family Services and Somos Mayfair, alongside with key partners from the city, county, and community based providers.

Families can enter through multiple doors, family resource centers, childcare centers, schools, or neighborhood events. But regardless of where they start, they enter one coordinated pathway. This mapping represents our commitment to accessibility, alignment, and shared accountability, ensuring that no family is left to navigate systems alone. Next, please. Important to us was to define roles for the lead agencies, and Grail Family Services focuses on families with children ages zero to eight, anchoring the system of care and also leading the evaluations for this initiative.

We are especially focused on early learning, recognizing that a strong foundation in these early years sets the trajectory for lifelong success. Somos Mayfair leads work with youth and family, family centering empowerment, leadership, and engagement. This work builds on the established CCEP Weather Collective, whose five partner agencies form the backbone of service delivery in Mayfair. As the demonstration expands, the three additional CSIPPweather Collective agencies will take on more active roles, strengthening the community's capacity and reach. This infrastructure is why the city and county chose the CSIP weather collective, because a trusted established network already existed to build upon.

In short, every role contributes to a balanced, effective, and community centered system. Now I'm gonna turn it to my colleague Saul Ramos for the next slide.

Council members, supervisors, staff, county and city. Again, Saul Ramos. And first of all, would like to thank Grail Family Services for leading us up to this point in their leadership and the development of this plan. But I also want to thank my colleagues who are here. Thank you for being here.

And the reason I want to name them is because they also enter our organization as young adults, not in their best moment of their lives. They were participants, promotoras, and how they manage and direct core elements of the organization including the Children and Youth Master Plan. So as we think about the work ahead and the intentionality that you just saw behind it, I think that eventually what we want to do is codify a model that's been well and alive in May of Pompoko Way for so many generations. And what I wanna see is what I see over there. So our work, when we think about Vesinos Activo, it also began as an organic project.

The sons and daughters of our promotoras, their children were tired of the childcare space. They refused to go in. So they demanded their own space. And what we'd responded was leadership development, civic activities, arts, different programs. And we walked with them the way that their parents had walked with us.

So it is going to be through Vesinos and our that are we are going to be conducting this vessel for the children and youth master plan. It is going to be through that we are going to be able to capture the youth's attention and not only provide them the wraparound services that they need, but also also think about the different and many leadership pipeline opportunities, including exploring economic pathways. It is our intention not only to provide wraparound services, but to ensure that our youth voice is at the very center of policy, practice, and system decision making. So they are really being impacted and are impacting everything that touches their daily lives. At the very end, our organization and personally, what we would like to see is more presence in these spaces speaking about our youth lived experience and how we are in service of their own purpose and we can bear witnesses to their power.

Thank you.

Next slide. Thank you, Saul. Another area of strength of our demonstration site is that we will operate out of a city owned facility. As the mayor announced during our launch press conference, the Capital Park Neighborhood Center will serve as the physical home for our demonstration site. This site will host staff working on the children youth master plan, after school enrichment programs, and pending contract negotiation, county social services agency caseworkers, creating a shared environment where families can access services, case management, and early learning programs all in one at one place.

Contract negotiations are underway, and we expect to move in early March. This colocation model brings our no wrong door philosophy to life where families no longer have to navigate multiple agencies, instead agencies come together to serve them. Next. An important part of our work is to understand the impact that we're having. So evaluation is key to this project.

And why is it important? It's important not just to know what works, but why it works and for whom it works. Our evaluation approach centers on shared accountability. Together, we're asking one question. Our families experience a more coordinated, dignified, and trustworthy system of care.

We've developed logic models defining success for children, youth, and families, drawing from both agency plans, the master plan framework, community priorities, and the Latino health assessment. To measure impact, we are tracking warm hands off to see if referrals lead to timely and successful outcomes, using family defined goals and feedback to understand progress and lived experience, and assessing how quickly barriers are resolved and whether families feel respected and informed. We're implement we're implementing Salesforce to centralize and align data across partners and preparing to integrate with the city system of for consistency, security, and shared learning. Across all efforts, community voice is central. Families tell us what what is working for them and where systems can be improved.

And that feedback flows directly to city and county partners to drive systems change. This structure, from logic models to evaluation framework to shared learning, help us move from program success to system transformation. Next. In closing, I really want to thank the city and the county for your investment in this amazing work. The Mayfair Poco Way demonstration site shows what's possible when government and community work together.

We share purpose and accountability. The CSIPWAVE collective is building a model for equitable, coordinated care, once strengthened during the pandemic and now ready to scale beyond Mayfair and Poco Way to benefit families across San Jose. On behalf of Guerrero Family Services, Somos Mayfair, our partners, and the families we serve, we thank you for your continued commitment and collaboration. Together, we are ensuring that every child, youth, and family in San Jose has the opportunity to thrive. And as we demonstrate outcomes from this pilot, we look forward to working with you towards long term sustainability and growth.

Thank you very much.

Good morning, city council members, supervisors, and colleagues. My name is Carmina Valdivia. I am the senior director of children, youth, and family development at Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County. I'm here on behalf of the Franklin mckinley children's initiative, which is a partnership between Catholic Charities and the Franklin mckinley school district. Next slide, please.

I wanted to center us today to go over the mission of the agency, which is to serve and advocate for individuals and families in need, especially those living in poverty. Rooted in gospel values, we work to create a more just and compassionate community in which people of all culture and beliefs can participate and prosper. We envision a valley where every child has the opportunity to learn from cradle to career. And as you can hear from the presentations today, that mirrors a lot of what the city youth master plan is aiming to come to to do. And and that families live in a neighborhood free from fear, where they where they can afford to live in a safe and decent housing, any nutritious food, where enterprising workers can earn enough to make ends meet and save for future, where immigrants are welcome, and where those who are imprisoned physically and mentally ill, elderly, and vulnerable can find healing and hope.

We commit to act with the spirit of compassion, service, and justice guided by the principles of respect, integrity, teamwork, and excellence. Next slide, please. We do this through our six pillars. This is the approach that we use. We use trauma informed care. We center the community in everything that we do. It is neighborhood focused. We have an element of service guidance, which is which are team members that walk with families through a pathway of self sufficiency. We do this through integrated services with seamless welcome, all towards the goal for community change. Next slide, please.

Here are the three key priority areas for the Franklin McKinley Children's Initiative. These were created with the community, and now this initiative has just celebrated its sixteenth year. And the reason why the initiative even started was because there was a violent act that occurred in the community for child walking home from school, and the community rallied around that. And sixteen years later, that initiative is is still thriving. The three priority areas are community schools, safe and strong neighborhoods, and economic development.

And from what you've heard again, a lot of these mirror the priority areas of the city. For community schools, we build partnerships and maintain relationships with organizations to allow schools to act as community hub, to provide high quality relevant academic, or community resources to support students from cradle to career. Our safe and strong neighborhoods is where we we empower community members and families to know and trust each other. We train leaders who practically advocate for building community assets focused on creating a thriving environment for youth. For economic development, our families in the neighborhood, we want to ensure that they have jobs, income, assets, and access to local resources sufficient to make ends meet housing, food, security, and access to education and learning.

Next slide, please. I won't go over all of the details of this. I'll just go over the high level. From May to September was our planning and ramp up, and we're currently in the initial implementation stage where we've done a review of tools, our assessment frameworks, we've been training staff and building capacity and ensuring that we have family outreach and recruitment and identify any at risk families. We've been monitoring all of this on our data collection and mapping and defining internal tiered services.

From January to March, we will be in the data collection and evaluation where we will be focusing our youth and community through the different services that we offer. We'll also be doing collection of qualitative and quantitative data to ensure that we are meeting the community needs and using our internal awards system as well as the Hassler system. In the spring, we will be doing our service impact sharing. We'll be showing the data and report development at our Franklin McKinley Children's Initiative meetings and sharing their data with city and county partners as well. Next slide, please.

From July to September, we will, that will be our sustainability and continuous improvement stage where we will be doing onboarding of staff and community health workers, exploration of potential funding opportunities, and again, reviewing our data and sharing it with key stakeholders. From October to December will be our sustainability and scaling up, where we will be focusing on ongoing advocacy with local and regional stakeholders, refining our process and deepening our community engagement. Next slide, please. Here are some of the data and evaluation tools that we will be using. Again, I won't be going over all of them, but just very quickly intake and screening.

We have internal universal intake form as well as using different questionnaires such as the ages and stages questionnaires. The different types of assessments that we will be using are risk and candidate assessments as well as the five protective factors and other comprehensive family prevention plans. And the tools and evaluation framework that we will be using are internal and external resource lists and again, our internal data systems. And we really want to ensure that we're understanding and co designing the data system. So we're going to be aligning our data elements with the master plan goals and ensure user friendly, accessible design, again, through internal Catholic Charities agency data platforms, as well as making sure that we're able to track in real time and capture all of

that

reporting. Next slide, please. Really excited to share a lot of the highlights from this year. This was from the trunk or tree that took place at the Seven Trees Community Center, where we had 1,000 community members attend, three fifty adults, 500 youth ages 12 and younger, and then 150 teens and young adults. Next slide, please.

During the summer we also offer pop up parks and summer programming to really ensure that our youth stay engaged in our community stay connected. So from July through August at the at the FMCI community center, we had three thirty three unduplicated adults and four fifty three unduplicated youth attend. Our youth drop in numbers were 44 unduplicated youth and 133 unduplicated adults for our summer meals and 162 unduplicated youth. Next slide, please. The partnership with Franklin McKinley School District, these are our community schools, George Shikawa Elementary, Captain Jason Dahl Elementary, Meadows Elementary, Bridges, Hellier, and Kennedy Elementary.

And the types of services that we offer are referrals, parent engagement nights, staff engagement, wellness center activities, school outreach, murals, Cal Kids outreach and registration support. We've already had 19 referrals and we've had 51 wellness center activities, three parent engagement sessions and so far 12 outreach events. Next slide, please. Our pathway for college and career. One of the really exciting things that we're doing in collaboration with the Excite Credit Union is our CalKids.

So, so far, we've had nine thirty three scholarships that have been claimed as of June, and by September, that number jumped to fourteen oh two. For College and My Future, we've had almost 3,000 students with almost $200,000 on deposit. For the Step Up Savings Program and the different zip codes, We've had 30 accounts in the 95111 zip code, 28 accounts in the 95122 zip code, and 12 accounts in the 95121 zip code. We've also developed a children's savings advisory committee, includes a lot of the promotoras that we work with. And we've also offer English as a second language, where we've had 15 unduplicated participants.

And our Family, Friends and Neighbor program in the Santee has grown to fifteen and twenty four for Seven Trees. So wanted to highlight the importance of the FFN work. We know that around eighty percent of our children under the age of three are taking care in an unlicensed facility. And so how important it is to ensure that our unlicensed providers taking care of our little ones also are exposed to high quality care. Next slide, please.

We've gathered already from the community a survey, and as you can tell, on average, averages on to about 80%. If families would recommend this event to a neighbor, they reported 86% reported that they would. How likely they are to volunteer in the community, we had 73% of families report that they would want to volunteer, participate in any future community activities. Eighty three percent report a crime to the police. 82% really working hard with the San Jose Police Department to really change the narrative and the relationship that the community has with law enforcement, so that's a very promising result there.

Go to family or community center, 84%, and ask a neighbor for help, 79%. Next slide, please. We've also gathered what the community's most helpful resources are, and you can tell from this graph here that safety, food nutrition, mental and health and housing continue to be the top priorities for the community. Next slide, please. And we could not do this work alone, and many of you that are sitting in the audience probably see your name up here, and we're just really thankful for all of the work that we've done to really help sustain this initiative, and we're looking forward to seeing how this initiative grows.

Thank you. I'll turn it over to Olympia.

Thank you, and thank you to our demonstration sites for highlighting and illustrating all of the great work that they've been doing. I'm Olympia Williams, deputy director for the Parks, Recreation, Neighborhood Services Department's Community Services Division. This is the division that is leading and coordinating the implementation efforts of the master plan. As part of this work, our county partners as part of this work with our county partners, we have found that there are three joint areas of alignment. Our efforts around ensuring access to quality childcare, disrupting the school to prison pipeline through both prevention and intervention efforts, and supporting and aligning with the county on the implementation of a Latino health assessment action plan that will be developed.

Next slide. Moving forward, we will be focused on aligning internal and external resources focusing on three key priority areas, early learning and childcare, safe, clean, and connected communities, and meaningful and sustainable jobs. We are currently finalizing the evaluation plan so we can report on outcomes of this work as this will be essential as we look at future opportunities to scale and expand. Additionally, we are working closely with a philanthropic partner to secure funding to support this evaluation work that will need to be completed. I would also like to take a moment to recognize Laura Buzzo who is here and thank her for everything that she did to not only lead the efforts, the community effort efforts, the engagement efforts, and actually getting the plan developed.

She has passed the baton to us and put us on a solid foundation. Laura, if you could just stand for a moment, I think that's important. Both the city and county will continue to support our partners as the sites go live in January 2026. With that, I would like to pass it to Sarah Duffy, director of our social services agency at the County of Santa Clara.

This is where we fill in the the time with with chitchat. Hopefully, everyone's having a wonderful Wednesday. I'm

glad dancing.

I am glad I got

the day right.

At least, right?

Alright.

Yeah. I mean, I can get us started just maybe Okay. With some opening Well, thank you, Olympia. And while we wait for Israel to pull up the slides, I just wanna make a reflect really briefly on the fact that the presentations we've heard so far really highlight many years of very conscientious collaboration between a lot of different city and county departments, representatives, community based organizations, youth and family members that have spent many, many hours in meetings talking about what they need and how do we codesign programming and services to meet those needs. So Laura Buzzo, I'm so glad she was recognized.

I also really want to recognize from the county Patty Ramirez and Wendy Kinnear Rausch as the two leads from the Department of Children, and Family Services that really promoted this work across SSA, across the county, and were very much leaders in this space. So they're here, and they can speak and answer any questions and discussion. I'm representing the social services agency today but also the county as a whole. So I'm kicking off kind of the county piece of this presentation. You'll hear from public health and others.

But I'm going to focus in today on the family first community pathway work. And this is really the work that led to the funding on the slide you saw earlier around the no wrong door model and is the work that while we're focusing on two demonstration sites and pilots today, it actually is incredibly important kind of system wide work that we see throughout the city of San Jose where we are able to coordinate the many, many county and city services to prioritize the needs of community. Right now this is especially important as we face some challenging budget times in the county and some real changes to our community in terms of some of the new legislation and laws and how that's impacting our community. So the need to coordinate, really effectively listen to community is more important, I think, than ever. And so I'm really grateful to all of the partnership with the city and county.

So I'm gonna go over what is a somewhat complex no wrong door service delivery model in terms of the funding from social services and the community pathway, but I think you'll see a lot of alignment between the city of San Jose's master plan and how we've designed the implementation of this. So the no wrong door service delivery model is a unique initiative that was designed to provide services to children and families in a way that ensures access to seamless integration of supports from multiple systems with the intention that children and family are not turned away or redirected and receive the appropriate services that they need. And this means families can access all the supports they need ideally from a single interaction, for example, connections to health services, housing assistance, education supports. All of the relevant services are streamlined, which minimizes burden on individuals to obtain services from different systems. Components of the no wrong door model include effective service coordination and navigation, streamlined intake screening and assessment processes.

We heard a little bit about that from the provider presentations, coordinated care plan development, and case management. And through this process, individuals are connected not only to the right supports but ideally very quickly to these supports. So you heard throughout the presentation so far from the CISA Puente Collective and Catholic Charities examples of how we provide this coordinated service, and I'll go through a few more slides to unpack that. So next slide, please. Okay.

So components of the county's Family First Community Pathway include Title IV E agency candidacy determination through the county's Department of Family and Children Services, connecting individuals to the right services regardless of the entry point, personalizing services based on an individual's unique needs and sharing flexibility and adaptability in how those services are provided, ensuring communication and collaboration across systems to deliver comprehensive ranges of services. Again, health, housing, employment, education, these are what we hear from community as being top priorities, and this is what we aim to help navigate. Facilitating smooth transition of handoffs when additional services are required, as they often are, ensuring continuity of care through coordinated efforts so individuals receive uninterrupted support even when multiple agencies and organizations are involved, and tracking the individual's progress and making necessary adjustments to their prevention plan. Next slide, please. In order to leverage the Family First Prevention Services funding, the county went through a very rigorous process I see a lot of faces of people that were involved in many of the meetings to land on four priority populations that we aim to prioritize in the children and youth system of care.

The basis of participation is children at imminent risk of harm or neglect, and the four populations are families or youth struggling with substance abuse, pregnant or parenting foster youth, homeless youth and families, and families struggling with domestic violence. Next slide, please. And on this slide, you can see a visual, and it looks a little bit similar to the one that Veronica presented, which is how the community pathway is intended to flow. So in the first circle you'll see identification of a family in need of supports and services who will participate in the self referral or a referral from a community location. The second step is an intake process where a service provider completes an assessment and makes recommendations for candidacy determination.

And when the family shares that they are a member of an indigenous tribe, the provider will adhere to additional requirements. The candidacy determination is made by the Title IV E agency, and following determination, a prevention plan is completed by the provider. Families in a tribe, if involved, are engaged in developing the family prevention plan and choosing services that are most useful to them. The service provider then becomes the case manager for the family, and if a tribe is involved, the service provider works closely with the tribe on service delivery coordination. The service provider will then ensure that services are delivered with model fidelity and in collaboration with the tribe if involved.

In the last circle, number seven, you'll see the safety monitoring and planning, which is a critical part of the service provider's case management responsibilities. Mandated reporter protocols are implemented when interventions are not sufficient to mitigate potential safety threats. The county is very grateful for the partnership with the city and the two pilot collaboratives in not only facilitating the service model but also providing a pilot opportunity that allows all of us to understand the needs of the two communities, the successes and opportunities that we can apply not only within refining those two pilot programs, but also that we can real time as a system, the city and county and our partners can work together to make improvements and recognize opportunities citywide in different neighborhoods. So I will end there, and thank you very much for the opportunity to present.

This concludes our update for the Children and Youth Services Master Plan report. So we'll now transition to our Latino health assessment and cost of gun violence study presentation.

Good morning. Thank you for assisting with the slides, and thank you so much for the honor of being here, Chair Ortiz, Chair Adonis, and our council members and supervisors. I'm Doctor. Sarah Redman. I have the honor of serving as the health officer and public health director for the County Of Santa Clara.

And because our cities do not have their own public health units, I am your health officer, this is your public health department. And so this is such a wonderful opportunity to bring one of the key roles that we serve for you here in health, which is to be able to capture at a population, at a community level, the kinds of data, community input, community voices and information that help us understand what it takes to have a healthy community, to have an equitable opportunity for everyone to thrive and have well-being. And so today I'll have the opportunity to share two key studies that the public health department facilitated, but which was really conducted by not only my colleagues with deep data expertise and community connections in the Public Health Department, but a huge array of partner organizations, many of whom are represented in this room. And that's part of why I am joined, by Doctor. Annelia Garcia, our Chief Equity Officer for the County Of Santa Clara, by Angelica Diaz, who is the Director of our Healthy Communities Branch here in the Public Health Department, and online by Rhonda McClinton Brown who is our Deputy Director for Policy Strategy and Planning and who played a key role in coordinating, both of the studies I'll share with you today.

But these two studies together total about 400 pages of documents, all of which is available online to you. We are just gonna scratch the surface of what we learned from these important deep dives into what our Latino community members across the county and here in San Jose, have taught us, are experiencing and therefore, demonstrate are necessary for these community members to reach the full extent of their health opportunities, as well as for when it comes to the cost of gun violence here in our county, what we've learned and where it means we may need to go. So first to describe the Latino health assessment to you. The goals oh, next slide. I've got it here.

Hey, all right. New system for me today. Thanks for your patience. We're working to provide historical context and offer a truly comprehensive overview of Latino health throughout the entire 2,000,000 folks in our county. But you can imagine, given the diversity of our Latino community, of our county geographically and socioeconomically, is an incredibly complex task and one where we invariably missed things.

And so we've already, in addition to those 300 pages, begun to add issue addendums and in crafting the work, most importantly, that will come out of these findings, learned new lessons, heard from new voices, and have new understanding of how we can best create a San Jose and a Santa Clara County that, serves our Latino communities. And most importantly then, guide strategic action planning, which is why we're here today, to understand the connection between what you just learned about the Child and Youth Master Plan as well as other elements that keep our neighborhoods and communities safe and healthy. The data that went into the Latino Health Assessment started with data we often use in public health, quantitative surveillance data, the information that often reduces people to numbers but gives us key insights to help us know that that story we just learned is not a one off or that story we just learned is not the full story of what most of our community members are experiencing. We also, for the first time in the public health department's, performance of a community health assessment, added utilization data of the services the county provides to understand the county's specific role in providing safety net services and creating healthy environments for our Latino communities.

And then we married these more quantitative assessments with the community voices to help us understand what's behind the numbers, what are the experiences, and therefore what are going to be the interventions that will be most meaningful to change where we notice disparities in these data. But what we found needed to be looked at through complex lenses. And to do that well, we engaged a broad steering committee of community leaders that helped us make sure that in every circumstance where we were looking across demographics and key sectors like housing, neighborhood conditions, education, family health and access to care and mental health care, That we were doing so through the lens of the historical racism and discrimination that we know has set us up for the current environment in which the disparities we'll start to highlight in a moment have evolved. Because one of the most important findings that I think rises to the surface over and over again as we understand the data and the findings of the Latino health assessment is that our Latino community members have the wisdom, the strength, the brilliance, the willpower, the knowledge to be healthy if the systems that interrupted their ability to do so were dismantled.

And so making sure we were looking at these data through those lenses is something that our community guided us in doing in every element. But what we found, and part of the reason it's so important for us to bring it to you here in San Jose, is that much of the story has to do with place, has to do with location. Both the beautiful sides of the story, the resilience, what our Latino community members bring to Santa Clara County, but also where there are opportunities or opportunities where we are failing to create healthy neighborhoods communities for folks. We see, especially in East San Jose as well as in Southern parts of the county, both places where our Latino community members are concentrated geographically and where we see higher toll of health disparities, lower life expectancy, less healthy neighborhood conditions, more housing challenges, more housing instability, and

some of

the more detailed information we'll get into today around higher rates of firearm violence and injuries and youth involvement in some of the systems that are there to catch, our our youth especially, when we fail to serve them and set them up for good health earlier on. Again, just a very few, data items I'll share today to scratch the surface of what we've learned about our Latino community members, especially in San Jose and especially our youth, because we learned generally our San Jose excuse me, our Latino community members are a younger community, than other races and ethnicities here in Santa Clara County, such that across the county as a whole, Latinos make up 34% of, children and youth 25. And when you look in East San Jose, that's especially true, that this is a young community, which both gives great opportunity for hope and wellness and the ability to thrive and contribute to the future, but also a necessity to make sure we are serving those youth. One important element that rose even actually after the Latino Health Assessment was published and our disability community gave important critical feedback, that the intersection between disability and Latino identity was far underplayed in the data, was the way in which children living with disability intersects with the outcomes our children experience.

And I think when looked at through the lens of disparity and racial discrimination really comes to help us look at why neurodiversity may be misunderstood as antisocial behavior or why trauma may be misread as delinquency and feeds into some of the school to prison pipeline that I know this body cares deeply about disrupting. And so while the data in the assessment said that less than four percent of our Latino children experience disabilities, and these come from census data, we actually have better data now that say that, in one case, ten percent and in one case as high as seventeen percent of our Latino youth actually have an IEP, which suggests that they must have a disability diagnosis impacting their schooling. And so that difference between young Latino children being recognized as having a disability and needing certain kinds of supports and accommodations versus actually receiving those supports may be a key place that we can intervene and that you'll see echoed in the findings ultimately of the report. Another similar element where we focus on our youth and see a disparity where there's an opportunity to intervene is when it comes to chronic absenteeism. We see our Latino youth, similar to our native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander youth, being more likely to demonstrate chronic absenteeism.

And that rate varies dramatically by school district, district, but we identify some unique opportunities in San Jose and East And South County. Similarly, as we look through the entire young and early adulthood period of our Latino youth, we see those disparities in academic outcomes worsen, such that while there was a smaller disparity between Latinos and other youth of other races when it came to absenteeism, it came to kindergarten readiness, We're seeing that even more striking when it comes to high school dropout rate and that geographic distribution even more striking when it focuses on San Jose. We also see impacts to our youth disproportionately affecting our behavioral health outcomes, such that thirty seven percent of our Latino high school students reported feeling depressed in the past twelve months, more than any other racial or ethnic group we can break out and more than the county overall. And we see that these early indicators of struggles that we are failing to meet or dismantle, play out in our juvenile justice system so that Latino children represented seventy percent of the juvenile justice cases in the county and the highest number being in our South County area, but, additional higher rates in East San Jose as well.

Finally, I'll touch on, a few neighborhood safety and violence elements that are not just specific to youth but also felt by adults that our in East San Jose, our percent of adults who felt safe were, lower than we found across the county overall. We also recognize that in East San Jose, we saw almost double the density of tobacco retailers and a huge increase in alcohol retailers compared to other areas in the county and compared to even the rest of San Jose. And one of the things I think is most powerful and striking about these data is that the city of San Jose did not wait. Council member Ortiz did not wait for this presentation to act on this as soon as you became aware of this striking disparity. Our leadership here took action to say we need to focus on healthier ways for our communities to support small businesses and thrive other than selling tobacco, and moved immediately to update your tobacco ordinances to, reduce the density of tobacco retailers in these areas.

Finally, I will touch again on violence, both self inflicted. We do see, while suicide deaths overall are lower for Latino residents, they have been rising and rising drastically in recent years. And such that and then we also, I know has been key to this body's discussion, see among adults higher rates of homicide death among Latinos than in the county overall. We see suggestions of similar increases among youth, although fortunately the absolute number of homicide deaths is low enough that we can't give you a number to hang our hats on. But it does certainly look highly concerning when we look at the data we do have.

So with that, I'm going to put up in front of you and encourage folks to read not only the executive summary or the whole 300 pages, but I'll encourage you to circle back to these slides to see just how many recommendations came from them. They were in the areas of dismantling historical discrimination and marginalization, prioritizing mental health and well-being, focusing on opportunities for children and youth to succeed, increasing access to quality care and improving health outcomes, and improving data collection to make sure we can continue to tell this story and understand if we are prioritizing putting our resources in the right places. And then on top of those broad recommendations that also run deep into how explicitly we need to act in many areas. Supervisor Arenas led additional recommendations from the board that we also increase access to quality care and improved health outcomes, and additional opportunities for children and youth to succeed with further focus on housing and homelessness and violence prevention. And then there were additional that I'm not going to share today recommendations specific to county agencies, which we've already hit the ground running to work on.

So when you see how broad, how much work just this one document has led us to say we must do for the service, for the well-being of our Latino community members, that's why it's going to take all of us, all of the partner agencies represented here today, both elected bodies represented here today and so many more, to make a meaningful movement on these recommendations. Now I'll add a bit more about an additional study that was published back in August 2022 around the cost of gun violence, although much of the data collection actually predates the Covid pandemic. And so we have early findings in the Latino health assessment that would suggest these numbers would be worse today. The goal of this study was to understand both the direct costs associated with firearm injury and death across public and private sectors, as well as the indirect costs. What do we lose financially as a community when we lose community members or when they're injured?

And then really inform policy options and strategies to advance violence prevention to respond to this massive cost. And so just a few items I'll highlight, and then I'll close for your questions, will be that we found, again, dramatic disparities disproportionately harming our Latino community members compared to other races and ethnicities in the county. We found that neighborhood safety and violence highlighted several areas, geographically, especially in San Jose and South County, where we found disparate harms and disparate harms that impacted our Latino residents. We also found that firearm deaths and injuries disproportionately harm our male residents, and that, many of the interventions needed need to be placed based and focused and unique to these geographic locations highlighted in the report. And we found overall the cost is rising.

And again, these data were collected ending in 2020 before we know further, rising rates have happened to our community. And part of why these are so important to share with you here in San Jose is that this cost is disproportionately, hitting you here in San Jose, such that the cost per capita of these harms is almost double for a San Jose resident compared to the county in general and totals over a billion dollars of negative impact of cost to our San Jose community as well as almost 1,200,000,000.0 to our entire Santa Clara County community when we look at not just what we spend to treat people and to save or help families who have suffered loss from gun violence, but the loss of those contribution those community members would have made. And so the findings and the recommendations that came out of this study, again, highlight these extensive costs, highlight again that they're increasing, that most of the costs come from assaults and homicides, and that there are even further intangible costs that this study couldn't capture. The recommendations will look very reminiscent of what you also saw from the Latino Health Assessment, in that we need to focus on breaking the racial barriers that lead to these costs of gun violence.

And you found the findings from both the cost of gun violence and Latino Health Assessment identify needs to uplift youth, needs to have a community centered approach, and need to foster partnerships with community, to have place based approaches, to have interagency collaboration, to continue to engage our community in what solutions will work and how we'll achieve those solutions, and again to support our youth. And so while major strides have been taken just in the months since the Latino Health Assessment, was published, The County of San Jose declared Latino health a public health crisis and gave just yesterday our first quarterly report back to the board on the huge swaths of work that has already begun at the county level to respond to the findings.

There we go.

And then in September, a Latino Health Summit that was held, involved many of you again in these chambers, to talk about four key areas to share new data focused on, Latinos with disabilities and to come to key findings that were again shared just yesterday about how we need to proceed as a community to respond to the findings of Latino health assessment. Likewise, we've continued to act in the intervening years, in response to the findings of the cost of gun violence study, including a relaunch just this year of our We All Play a Role campaign to focus on primary prevention and community based intervention around violence. And you may recognize some of the faces, in fact some of them may be in this chamber, featured in our community based, display here. So a thank you to all those who've already contributed to this important body of work, but I think more importantly, a thank you to all of you who are here today to commit to continuing the work that these, reports drive us to know we must make. And my colleagues and I will be very happy to take any questions.

Thank you.

Great. Thank you so much. I want to thank both city and county staff for their excellent work. And just this work moving it forward, as well as all the analysis and the presentation presented to us today. I also want to thank our non profit and community based partners, the CICE Puede Collective, Catholic Charities, who will be on the ground breathing life into these numbers and into this strategy. We are going to move forward with public comments. Each speaker will have two minutes to give a public comment. There are cards in front of the room. If you would like to make a public comment, please fill that out. Yeah, we will start and pass it off to the clerk.

We have six speaker cards in no particular order. Can the following speakers please line up on the steps in front of the speaker podium? We have Carla Torres, Lillian Koenig, Blair Beekman, Laura Ambuso, Nina Pradeep Kumar, and Lori Catcher. Thank you.

Good morning. My name is Carla Torres, and I'm representing the NAACP and Larasa Roundtable. Thank you so much for holding this important meeting with the city and county collaborative in this critical time. I'm here to express continued support for youth programs and services that our community needs. We need these services for our school aged children and youth and our vulnerable families to disrupt the school to prison pipeline as has been stated that affects all people of color.

And the Latino health assessment should be our driving force in our template. We do not need to further criminalize our youth. Also, as a side note, I hope that you could speak to the mayor about his recent article and comments regarding our youth and how the intent to further criminalize them and educate him about the school to prison pipeline. I know about these services firsthand and the importance of these programs. As a teen myself in my hometown, I personally benefited from employment programs and other counseling services.

I know that if it wasn't for these programs, my life would be so much different. And my mom always reminds me I was on thin ice, but that's another story. As a social worker over twenty four with over twenty four years of experience, I've seen the importance of critical services for our most vulnerable families. I've seen how when we help someone and give them hope, it helps them. And we need to change the narrative that people who use drugs and are in the system or in gangs are bad people and not worth helping.

Many are good people and just made bad choices. Many have been through trauma, as has been stated, and don't have the coping skills, and maybe grew up in these neighborhoods with family and neighborhood violence. And when we help them, empower them, listen, provide culturally responsive services, it can turn someone's life around. We've seen it. Everyone here has talked about it. Isn't this what we want for our families, helping the most vulnerable? And I've heard supervisor Arenas say this many times, and I think it was referenced earlier. The Latino health assessment talks about our Latino population being a young demographic. This is important. We should

Thank you. That's your time. Next speaker.

Honorable, committee commission, all all of you gentlemen and women on on this important day. I believe that having been a substitute teacher in San Jose Unified School District and living in East San Jose on the border of the 4th And 5th Districts oh, okay. Thank you. I'm really impacted with seeing students who are being bused in and having lack of transportation because of school closures, and their classrooms are being, like, doubled almost. And I'm concerned that when you are, transporting students from different communities that you are also impacting the cultural aspect of that also.

The disintegration of the school districts, especially here's one in particular, Alum Rock that closed, I think, six six schools. So now we're looking at students that are not only the percentage of youth in East San Jose is very, very high, but now we are looking at families that are struggling with transportation. And you talk about absenteeism. Well, there there is a a concern for absenteeism. But, I believe that, we have some hope in the fact that we do have resilience in young people, but, basically, how much can they can they tolerate?

How much can they take? The BART system was going and the and the VTA was going to give free transportation to students so that they could get to the different schools that they needed to, but they said that they didn't have the money, that, you know, the grants didn't come through. So we can look at various options for how we can get students to get to schools now that schools are closed, the impact on schools, and the cultural component when you break up a small school district and you transport students to other schools and how that impacts them. Because like I said, I work in the school district, I work in San Jose Unified, and I've seen quite a bit, and it's somewhat distressing. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker, we have two more cards, Jennifer Cloud and John Horner. Please make your way down. Thank you.

Good morning, city council and county board of supervisors. My name is Laura Buzzo. I'm a longtime resident of San Jose and a former employee of the city. Under the leadership of deputy city manager Angel Rios, I served as a project lead and principal writer for the children services master plan and led the establishment of First Five Family Resource Centers with a number of organizations over the past fifteen years over fifteen years ago. I grew up and worked for many years in East San Jose and saw firsthand the intergenerational, social, economic, educational health disparities that many families experience.

Unfortunately, the findings of the 2025 Santa Clara County Latino health assessment, like the master plan, shows that despite years of investment and well intentioned efforts, challenges facing low income immigrant and Latino families persist. In developing the children's services master plan, we engaged more than 3,000 residents in over a 150 organizations. The community told us clearly that investing in services alone are not effectively dismantling inequitable systems, policy silos, and long standing barriers. Therefore, we aligned the master plan's strategic direction with the county's children and youth system of care community pathways. To do this effectively, in April 2024, we recommended and the city council approved the master plan in the creation of a city of San Jose system of care into demonstration site communities.

We knew this was ambitious, and it would require time and trust and collaboration. We are facing a federal administration whose rhetoric and policies are further marginalizing low income families, immigrants, and communities of color. Children, youth, and our families are in crisis now and need us more than ever. We must continue to engage and center children and youth voice and together ensure that we're creating opportunities for continued allowing children to thrive in our community for the all these

Thank you. That's your time. Next speaker.

Okay. Good morning, council members and county supervisors. My name is Neha Pradeep Kumar, and I'm the vice chair of the San Jose Youth Commission representing District 2 Of San Jose. I wanted to thank all of you for the presentations we had today. The memorandums presented, the Latino health assessment, and the Families First Community Pathway don't just represent numbers.

They describe the lived reality of many young people in San Jose. Higher rates of depression, chronic absenteeism, housing instability, and neighborhood violence show up across the city, and those patterns are especially visible in places like South County and East San Jose. Students feel these disparities in their stress levels are a sense of safety and in how supported we feel in school and at home. During the youth commission's annual youth participatory budget priority survey last year, violence and safety ranked as the number one concern for youth across the city followed closely by poverty, housing, and homelessness. This shows that these issues aren't just abstract, they're urgent lived experiences that directly affect young people every single day.

So as you look for ways to align these efforts, I want to emphasize that young people aren't just represented in the data. We are actually living it. We see these gaps first, and we know what support actually reaches students and what never makes it past a flyer or a link on a website. If the goal is to build systems that are accessible, culturally responsive, and generally supportive, then youth voices need to stay at the center of that work. The San Jose Youth Commission is ready to support this collaboration and help make sure these plans translate into real impact in the communities that most need it. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. Next speaker, we also have two more cards for Maria Fuentes and Olivia Navarro. Thank you.

How about now? Awesome. Okay. Hi. Thank you for restarting the clock. Blair Beakman. Thank you for this item. I got the feeling from this item, Things are not on a massive urgent scale, but just preventative to to prepare ourselves. We can have good things ready to be considering, and that's what we're doing. Thank you.

For myself, what to me is important working on for the next few years here in the county level and in the city of San Jose, I've been working for the past ten years on tech accountability items and that how it can be a a responsible, more shared process, a public participation and community to decide our our tech needs, our surveillance, our data collection, and that it's not just simply dictates handed down by our city government. It's quite a process to learn and understand and what's possible with it. It was created to basically leave the era of nine eleven and war. And notice we don't talk about in terms of being secretive, and we have to keep things hidden from the public anymore, not as much. We're making a real concerted effort how things can be open and public and shared.

And that's really important. And I think sharing that with our youth, for for people who are working with gun violence issues, them understanding those concepts of what we're trying to work towards and build towards is important. I think we've all noted that, you know, when national events happen that are violent, it tends to affect our local communities, and and there's more gun violence. So, sharing that we're working in positive good terms with our youth is really important and that accountable good practices are available. We can be reducing a lot of the tech that is placed in San Jose and still creating the same amount of public safety.

Sharing that with with young people gives them hope and understanding of a better future, I think. Good luck in those efforts. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker, we have one more card for Adam Ibarra.

Hi. Good morning. Thank you to everyone who's here, supervisors, city council members, and, all of our staff, and all the community based organizations who are doing this amazing work. My name is Lori Catcher. I am a twenty three three year resident of San Jose.

I'm a member of showing up for racial justice Santa Clara County, and I'm here representing surge. We are a group of South Bay people who organize and mobilize white people and folks with privilege for racial justice and to dismantle white supremacy. I really appreciate the work that you all are doing. And I'm here to support the memos from Campos and Arenas as well to continue this work. Regarding creating equitable opportunities for our children and families, Latino and other families of color, one of the things that we've noticed at surge in our solidarity work with some of our neighbors and families who are unsheltered and who are living in their vehicles, whether it be cars or RVs.

The recent policies that San Jose City Council passed in the spring and are implementing seem to us to be counter to the goals of of this work. For a family who may be struggling to pay for groceries, they may not have been able to pay to update the registration of their car. And now those families' cars are getting towed, they're being pushed further into debt, and maybe losing their only form of shelter. So I wanted to bring this point up, and I hope that this is something that can be considered when we look at our families who are in greatest need and our children to make sure that we are not criminalizing them, that we are giving them the supports that they need to thrive so that we create a city and a county where everyone truly belongs. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Good morning. Oh, yep. Am I on? There we go. Good morning. Yes. Hi. I'm Jennifer Keller Herkloid. I am the executive director of First Five Santa Clara County, and prior to that served as the chief program officer at the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, implementing our legal advocates for children and youth program. On behalf of First Five, we stand here as a partner really in all three of the efforts you heard about today.

The square that you saw that showed the funding 1000000 county, 1000000 city, that circle in the middle, actually a lot of it is First Five. First Five is the backbone funder for all of the family resource centers, that you heard about today and have been supporting all those agencies for many, many years. I wanna just add that we invested so much time, money, and resources in the development of this master plan. And the demonstration sites are a critical piece, but only one piece of a very large plan. And I really hope the city and county, alongside First Five, with with the revenue that we have remaining with our declining proposition $10 that come from tobacco tax, really invest the same amount of resources in implementation of the plan as we did in the development.

And we can only do that if large jurisdictions like yourselves really put our money where our mouth is in terms of creating those services. I wanna add my support to the memorandums provided by councilwoman Campos as well as supervisor Arenas to really start to look at some of the other aspects of the plan and really how they overlap with some of the concerning findings that unfortunately aren't surprising that we learned, through the Latino Health Assessment. First five stands ready to partner with you all in all of these efforts. We certainly are experts in the early childhood space, but want to support families with children of all ages and are ready to stand by you in that effort. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Go ahead. Welcome.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to work. My name is John Horner. I'm the board president of the Morgan Hill Unified School District. The issues you're talking about are ones I think about every day. We have approximately 8,000 students, about 5,000 families, 14 school sites, two in San Jose, the rest south of there, Over 40% free and reduced lunch, over 40% Latino, over 11% students on IEPs, you know, our our word for disabilities.

And yet, last year, we achieved a graduation rate of ninety seven percent. So I'm proud of that, but I'm heartbroken about the other three percent. The spirit of collaboration and coordination that you're talking about is essential, but I think we all know we're not at scale yet On this, I was very encouraged to hear Catholic Charities specifically calling out their work with Franklin McKinley School District. A district like ours, mid sized we're already in daily contact with 5,000 families, over 2,000 of which are the kind of families you're talking about serving. So always think about not everything can be done in partnership with schools and at school sites, but much can.

We're already there. I want you to really think about that. And on the school to prison pipeline, Supervisor Aranes is particularly very, very aware of and involved in our youth diversion program in South County. It's something we're all very proud of. It's very intentional. It's not county wide yet, but we're taking young people at their first encounter with law enforcement and diverting a majority of them in such a way that effectively they never come in contact again. You know, that's a hard to fund pilot program, but that's something we know is working and can scale. But please, we have to continue working together. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Good morning, everyone. It's good to see you, and it's good to be here. My name is Maria Fuentes, and I'm a lived here in San Jose since '71, but I'm one of the members of the San Jose San Jose Evergreen Community College Board. And, I detest present school to present pipeline because we wanted to be school to college to a better life. And all of us know what it's like to be the first in your family to go to college and and what a change that can make.

The main thing that we need to do is be not work in silos. I mean, I I the all the work that's been done that we're talking about here is outstanding, and our district is in the same high schools that all of you are representing and who we're talking about. But the main thing I wanna say today is let's figure out how to work more closely together. You know, we're there. We don't wanna be working in silos.

We really want we really need to address that pipeline. I mean, working in mental health for over thirty years, this is the same thing we were fighting then and we're continuing to be fighting it. But the one answer we have is education. And community colleges have so many different programs. And San Jose City and Evergreen is right in the middle of the work we're talking about.

So I just wanted to urge us to work together figuring out how we can have a comparable educational strategy that connects with everything that's being talked about today. All of these efforts, all these activities, we have to figure out how do we work together because we should be getting the referrals when families are seen with needs. We should be getting the referrals so that we can make sure that we are educating them and we're reaching out to them and opening the doors for them. Of course, we have a lot of supports. Of course, we have a lot of programs, but the access is the key. So I wanna figure out how we can work better together. So thank you, all of you.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Hello. Hi. My name is Adam Ebarra. I'm with the Tenacious Group executive director, and we we have the privilege of being in in many of the schools here in in East San Jose. And I'm man, I'm I'm very thankful for the master plan and and for all the work that has gone in and with and and from from a community perspective, that is awesome and for for young people.

And one of the things that from an organic level, I speak to teachers and principals almost daily. And and, you know, there there's such a a passion to see their students rise. And one of the things that I I I read this this week was a an article about how rigorous education really brings out the best for, you know, for for low income students. And one of the things that I just wanted to just keep in mind is is that, you know, sometimes people think we need to water down our standards, but I I'm on the on the on the total opposite is that we need as we're doing our our our our or kinda instituting the the master plan, let that be that we it's rigorous. That whatever it is that we're providing for our students, they have the ability to to to bring out their best.

We just have to help them bring out their best and not think that we need to water down. And I'm not saying that that's what we're doing here, but I just wanted to remind us to do that because our students, they really want, and I see it, they really want to be they wanna dominate in life. They wanna maximize. But sometimes, the process, we just think that they don't have the ability, but they do. And I just wanna remind that. And the last thing is this, is that we're just finding, many students here in our schools do not have Internet at home. I So just wanted to to before my my time goes, we need to do better on that. So

Thank you. We have one more speaker card for Gabby Chavez Lopez.

Good afternoon, supervisors, council members, and staff. My name is Olivia Navarro. I'm director of community organizing here at Sonos Mayfair, one of the organizations that is part of the CSA Puella Collective. I'm also a neighborhood leader here in wonderful city of San Jose and mother of three kids, and also a program participant growing up where I saw firsthand how these programs can uplift. And I always say we are the, it takes a village to raise a child.

So I want you guys to really marinate in that when you're thinking about services. Don't exclude yourself. It might be a child, but you guys are the ones that are gonna uplift and develop that child. I wanna especially thank supervisor Sylvia Arenas and her leadership in advancing the Latino health assessment. It really has highlighted what we already knew, but really put the data out there to make sure that we provide supportive services for our Latino and specifically our Latino Latino youth and her.

And I wanna also thank her for her continued support for the children and youth master plan in spite of now her being in county, coming back to the city of San Jose, making sure that this is still a priority, as well as thanking our supervisor, Betty Young, council member Pete Ortiz, and the rest of the council here that have been very supportive of of uplifting our most vulnerable community members. This kind of city county collaboration is critical. And if we're serious about improving outcomes for our children, I wanna also acknowledge that using the this specific data on the Latino health assessment to inform the work in neighborhoods like Mayfair, where families are Latino that are that the data reflects their lived realities from access to services, to youth mental health, to prevention and early intervention. Using the data helps ensure policies are responsive, culturally relevant, and rooted in truth. Again, as a mom and a community organizer, I see how intentional investment in youth changes the trajectory of entire families and neighborhoods.

When we center the youth

That is your time. Thank you. Next speaker.

Good afternoon. I'm Gabby Chavez Lopez, executive director of the Latina Coalition of Silicon Valley, a community based organization that's been serving the community for the last twenty six years, representing a multigenerational group of Latinas, mothers, sisters, Diaz, family members. And as we thank you so much, first off for the the leadership that we're seeing, from our county, both county board of supervisors who are here, Betty Young, and Sylvia Arenas, who have really championed the Latino health needs assessment that has really identified and prioritized some areas where we can really move the needle with Latino health in this county as well as the the memo that was brought forth by council member Pamela Campos who has really centered children, youth, and families since day one in office. I really kinda sitting here and thinking about and letting marinate this kind of comprehensive report, I really just wanted to uplift the role of parents. And as Olivia mentioned prior to me, the role of mothers, in really being able to support the needs of their families and their children.

And so, as much as we talk about children and youth, I think a real strategy that we need to uplift and continue to center is, the role of parents, in making sure that they have a roof over their children's head, they have food on the table, that they have access to economic mobility opportunities, and that we consider to we continue to center that experience of, adults and their ability to be able to provide for their children. And so, I ask that we continue to to think about that as we think about these different strategies and how we're working with caretakers, in particular, and mothers in this county because, you know, ask me, you know, how your children are, then I'll tell you how you are. In many ways, we are impacted by by the plight of our children quite a bit, and so we have to make sure that we are thinking about this as a family unit and this as a multigenerational process that will have generate.

Thank

you. I have called all the speaker cards back to the committee.

Great. Thank you so much to all of our members of the public, who commented. Really appreciate everyone's input. I wanna thank my colleagues here both at the city and the county for continuing this critical joint commitment to both our youth and our families. Today's discussion reflects a truth we all understand.

When government works together, our children are allowed to thrive. And in places like East San Jose, that collaboration is not only helpful, it's essential and it's lifesaving. I strongly support both Council Member Campos's memo and Supervisor Arenessa's memo. Because they move us towards a system where every family, no matter their zip code, can access the services, support and opportunities that they deserve. Both proposals ensure we are not only sustaining the Children and Youth Services Master Plan, but expanding it into neighborhoods that have waited far too long for equitable investment.

In District 5, we are not only talking about theoretical needs. We are talking about urgent immediate realities. Gang violence is happening every day in our neighborhoods. Taking young lives, traumatizing families, and destabilizing entire neighborhoods. These impacts are not abstract to me. I was a gang impacted youth. I joined a gang at the age of 12. And I grew up watching friends and family fall through those cracks. And because intervention, most of the time, came too late or never came at all. It was only because of programs like MOXA, now a good program that does similar work is New Hope for Youth.

And of course the city's gang intervention program that I was able to turn my life around. In fact I am still receiving my treatment from the Clean Slate program. If you don't know about it, definitely recommend learning more. And that is why the focus on the no wrong door approach, on data sharing, and on expanding pilot sites, and on aligning with the Latino health assessment is so important. Intervention cannot depend on luck.

It cannot depend on a young person happening to bump into the right mentor at the right time. It has to be built into our existing systems, predictable, accessible, and be culturally grounded. I appreciate, I especially appreciate the alignment with the Latino Health Assessment because it pushes us to confront the root issues. From youth exposure to violence, to gaps in educational access, to a lack of early childhood support that can change a children's life and their entire trajectory. For too many Latino youth whose systems haven't lived up to their promise, these services are vital.

And while this policy moves forward, I'm also doing everything I can on the ground in my very own district, to change the lives of these youth. We are bringing public murals, art, and community activation into some of the most disinvested and violence impacted corridors in East San Jose. Places where families have endured shooting, assaults, and decades of blight. These cultural investments are not cosmetic. They are a part of this prevention.

They reclaim our spaces, they rebuild our neighborhood pride, and create safe corridors where young people can see possibility instead of danger. But our families need more. We need real investment in gang intervention, real mentorship, and real trauma informed support. And of course, pathways to careers and away from this violence. These memos lay the groundwork for that by expanding pilot locations, strengthening coordination, and aligning city and county systems to reach youth before the streets do.

Our families deserve a future where a child's potential is not determined by their address or by the gangs that recruit in their neighborhoods in absence of opportunity. And so I'm looking forward to continue to secure funding. Let's institutionalize this work, and let's embed the master plan into the core of how the city and the county function and do business. Because our youth deserve a system built to support them, not one held together by a pilot program alone. So I just wanna thank my colleagues for their partnership and their leadership.

I wanna all the community based partners that are here today, the frontline organizations, and community members and youth who have helped create this roadmap for change. We have the vision, we have the data, and we have the urgency. Now it's our responsibility to deliver together and move forward for every child in this county. I now want to pass it off to my counterpart, Chairwoman Supervisor Adonis.

Thank you so much. I appreciate your comments as well as the comments from our public. I think they're very much in, aligned with where we need to go. I spent a lot of time earlier in the meeting talking about the history in terms of how we arrived here and the partnership that we have seen and that we have, really shared and, value between the city and the county. And we're gonna continue to do this because we know how important our youth and our children and our families are for our communities, and you all have expressed that.

What I heard from all of you say was, you want us to continue to focus on partnerships and whether that is school or nonprofits or those agencies that are already working with our kiddos, in our communities, that you want to continue to see the partnership, partnerships come forward as well as the support for our parents. And and maybe going back to some basics. Right? There's a lot of issues that impact our families and our children, our youth. When I first when we first started this joint meetings, former former supervisor Cindy Chavez and I focused on gender based violence because there was an uptick in gender based violence, and that typically impacts a great deal of Latina children.

So children between the ages of eight to 16 are the highest number of survivors. And it's one of the reasons why we now have the child advocacy center, which has everything under one roof here in San Jose, and we're building one in South County. And now my my not because everything is done with gender based violence, but because the the men and the boys deserve equal attention and because they're actually feeding our our systems in a way that I don't you know, I I I wouldn't I wouldn't want them to continue to to do, and this is why it was really important for me to have when we did the Latino youth, health assessment and when I requested this, it hadn't been done for twelve years. I also wanted to see the utilization of the services for the county because I that also tells us a story in terms of what Latinos are doing, how they're utilizing or underutilizing our services. And so all that really told a story about the boys in our community, the men in our community.

And recently, I also read a article that the governor of California also recognizes the despondency, the the loneliness in young men and men, and actually had an executive order, think, July to take a look at the loneliness, the the the increase of suicide rate, and the high rate of unemployment or involvement in school for our young men. And this is between the ages of 16 to 24. We have about 500,000 young men that have no work or school, and we understand that with that, it leads to a lot of social and emotional issues and leads to some involvement in what you discussed earlier, council member Ortiz. I also started my my career in youth intervention, and back then, we had Right Connection. We had which I, I oversell Stand for Men and Stand for Women, which was a curriculum based program.

We also had Clean Slate, which continues to I think this one of the very few programs that continue to exist. And what we have forgotten is that the city of San Jose also has a responsibility as equal to the county to provide the kinds of intervention services that our youth need and that actually work for them. And so I think along with what the governor is recognizing that there's an increase in suicides between men fifteen to forty four. They die at a three to four times the rate of women in California. And I've I've gotta say when the governor is recognizing these things for us, I think we also need to be in line with with what the services and what the resources are going to be that are gonna come through the state pipeline.

But we already know the the cost of gun violence. We talked about it a bit, and and thank you. I wanna say thank you to our county, employees who have come here, and really partners. I shouldn't say employees, but really partners and public servants. And I know there's a lot, of you who are in the the audience, and I just know that my heart is full of gratitude for what we have done so far for our Latino community because we're in desperate need of support.

We're in desperate need of of resources and the attention that we deserve, and not the kind of attention that the admin federal administration is giving us in the kind of narrative that, locally, folks, leaders such as a mayor and others who want to shape who we are. We are much more than a than an incident that involves a gun. We we have a lot of value that we contribute to our community. And with that, with our value and also with the issues that we have, we must form the kind of strategies that are going to really play a part in answering and disrupting the prison, the school to prison pipeline. And it's one of the reasons why in my recommendations, have a school county collaborative that I'm forming and that actually Sarah who's sitting to the right of me is is also also leading because we recognize that partnerships are really important, and we are going to continue to focus on Latinos and Latinas in a way that is going to really come to the core issues of what is happening.

And so I'm really grateful that we are starting with the pilot areas that we have done so far. These are areas that are perpetually touched with crime and poverty and generational trauma, and I'm I'm really grateful to those agencies that are working with those those communities. I'm looking at all of you because you it we're gonna be looking at you to ensure that what we're doing together as two systems are going to really work and are going to prove what we know is that and what we heard audience members say is that the partnerships are key are the part of the key answers. But it's also part of how we carry out the work and speaking up when, others want to create a narrative for us. And so I ask you to continue to pay attention when leaders talk about Latinos in a way that, doesn't really accurately and and comprehensively describe us, that you also use your privilege, your voice, to correct those narratives, because I I will, and I ask you to join me in in that effort.

So lastly, I just want to I don't know if this is the the time that we have in order to move our our memo, so I I'm gonna move make a motion to approve the memo that I put forward, and just quickly, it's to expand the sites to add additional information on gaps in in services of priority areas, to have bimonthly verbal reports at at our committees, to update the work plan, to have follow-up meetings, hopefully next year early on, and then to have an additional report in CSFC, which is our our county, committee, as well as to have a Latino health assessment action plan project list by jurisdiction so that each city, can understand the Latinos in their respective communities. So that is oh, and then, of course, asking our administration to provide those that information through presentations. And so that is my motion, and, hopefully, I'll get a second.

How does it come from the county?

Has it come from the

county? Yeah.

We call them big happy family today. I am happy to second this referral here from CSFC and Chair Arenas if I may Of course. I'd just like to add to the importance of aligning our desired outcomes between the city and the county. I think that there's been a lot of work in development, a lot of partnership engagement with our community partners and our staff. As we and what I've heard today again and again is implementation, right?

What this looks like in this memo go, your refer goes a long way in getting us on the path towards implementation. And what I really would like to see for my my own edification and also to and to support policy making is that how do we align county city outcomes and the path towards those outcomes. So that like what you said earlier chair Ortiz, The when we we we double the outcomes, we double the output and And I think I'm looking at the body that's on this day is here today. This is a body that knows how to turn a dollar into 5. Right? So if that could I don't know if that needs to be an amendment to the referral, a friendly amendment, additional direction.

I think that we're in line with alignment because the first item is is options to prioritize and expand pilot site locations in San Jose and Countywide in alignment with the board's approved child and youth service master plan direction in Latino health assessment, as well as options to develop a sub working group. So this is to to develop standardized applications. So this is in alignment, and my initial recommendation is in alignment with the child and youth master plan. So that means that our systems are always going to work with one another, and that was on our county side. And, hopefully, our city side agrees to do the same, but I'm happy if that if you feel like we need to have additional or stronger language, I'm happy to take a friendly amendment.

Yeah. I I and I'm gonna have to look to the city side too to help me out with this here that with the the working group that'll be developed out of really having one of our next steps or one of our outcomes in the first quarter is a shared set of of outcomes with each other.

I'm happy to to include that in in the motion and and hopefully that will reflect on the city side as well.

In you go.

With that, I second. Do we need a vote? On the CSFC side?

I believe so.

You will

need to vote. Yes.

So if our clerk can call roll so that we can oh, there you are. Vice chairperson Young? Yes. And chairperson Aranes? Yes. Thank you. Thank you.

Alright. Great. Thank you so much for your memo supervisor and for both of your comments and you're you're exactly right. Growing up in East San Jose, I've had to make a dollar out of 15¢ many many times, so definitely agree with that. Next I will pass it off to council member and committee member, Pamela Campos.

Thank you chair. I want to begin with gratitude because I am extremely grateful both to city staff and our county partners for the work in addressing the systemic challenges that are impacting families and youth in our community. Thank you to chair Ortiz, chair Arenas for your leadership in organizing opportunity to learn about the status of this important work and provide direction to continue these collaborative efforts. I'm proud to serve alongside elected leaders on each of these committees. All of you have been effective and passionate champions for our community, and I am also great especially grateful to the essential work of our community based organizations and the nonprofits who have been serving the most vulnerable residents in our community.

I'm also extremely proud that we have our district two youth commissioner participating in this important work and gave public comment this morning. Without all of your support, our work in local government would not be possible and as many of you might know, this work is extremely personal to me. As I was reading through the Latino Health Assessment, there was so much that reflected my upbringing and childhood. This report tells the stories of my loved ones, the people that I grew up with, that I met at school and at work, and became my community. And it's powerful to have the city and the county working in lockstep on the issues that matter so much to me, my colleagues, but especially the youth and the families in our community.

Both of these reports are critical tools in making San Jose and Santa Clara County a better place for all families, and I'm particularly excited when I saw the slide that shows our city and our county are aligned on key issues such as childcare, school to prison pipeline, and the Latino health assessment outcomes. You can make an honest argument that keeping kids in school is grassroots crime prevention. It's not rocket science. It is true criminal justice reform when we invest in early childhood education because we know that children with access to preschool can be up to two years ahead in language development by the first day of kindergarten. And when a fourth grader is behind in grade reading level, they are 13 times more likely to drop out of high school and youth who drop out of high school are 50% more likely to be unemployed than high school graduates and are eight times more likely to be incarcerated.

And you can measure the cost of homelessness, You can measure the cost of crime and gun violence, which is why the fact of the matter is that you won't find a better public return on investment than investing in early childhood education. And so with that, I have a few questions. First, the implementation of the Children and Youth Services Master Plan requires not only cross departmental collaboration, but also a partnership between the city and the county. And so my question is, what is the role of the city manager's office in overseeing the implementation of this work and ensuring that every city department is working together?

So I think that one's for me. So so as as as many know, this work originated out of the city manager's office, and and and this last fiscal year has shifted over to its new home in Parks Recreation Neighborhood Services. From day one, we've involved Parks Recreation Neighborhood Services and our library, are which are our two primary children and youth serving departments. We've also taken that one step further, and if there's any city investment in children, youth, and families, then all that will get filtered. It has been filtered through this master plan framework.

This, as you know, lives under the neighborhood services and education committee, and any memo that get that that involves children and youth and families has to go through not only this filter, but ultimately get signed off by the city manager's office to ensure alignment. So that that ensures that we are connected interdepartmentally. And then outwardly, we we we have also embedded into the pilot locations the need for coordination between the city and those pilot sites.

Thank you. And so a follow-up to this last piece is how is the city manager's office coordinating with the county?

Yeah. So so we hold so in addition to our internal executive leadership team, which consists of, like, Jill and John, Andre, Olympia, and Israel, and I shouldn't start naming people because I'm gonna I'm gonna leave some people out there. We have as we have a we have an a executive team. We we also have standing meetings with the county in terms of other department heads at the county. I mean, I'm looking over there.

Patty Ramirez is I mean, sometimes I I get confused, and I think she works for the city because she's been in so many meetings. But so we do have a standing meeting with department heads at the county to ensure alignment, to also resolve conflict. Wherever they're know, sometimes we may end up in the situation where, you know, we you know what? We gotta work some some things out. Sarah Duffy has been real key in terms of convening anybody at the county that we need at the table. And then, of course, at the electeds level, you know, we we also have briefings that we do both to our city council members as well as to members of the board of supervisors.

Thank you. And the memo from supervisor Arenas provides direction to hold joint sessions between NSC and CSFC annually. Does the city administration support this direction?

Absolutely. We could annualize that.

Okay. Perfect. I'm gonna make that friendly amendment to my memo as well as the friendly amendment recommended by supervisor Young that includes aligning outcomes in q one.

My plate is still on. I, may

I turn?

Yeah, sure.

Of course.

Yeah. And I just want to be, to provide further context in terms of aligning outcomes that we're looking at aligned data and evaluation infrastructures. I've seen a lot of really innovative approaches to evaluating our steps today. Can we all merge that in some way so that it both reflects the work that's being done city, county, and community?

Yeah. And supervisor, if I could add that we'd also be remiss if we didn't mention Camille and Angelica and others, Celica and others at Serrato Foundation, who have agreed to fund our evaluation system. And we have been meeting with them and we've been doing it jointly, both city and the county, in coordination with them just to make sure that there's that alignment. So I I I wanna you know, quick shout out to Camille and her team at Sobrato.

Thank you. Thank you, Sobrato.

Just two more quick questions before I make the motion. So data sharing between the county and the city is critical to the success of these programs. What actions are necessary to formally establish data sharing agreements between our two agencies?

Yeah. That that actually is part of the work entailed in in in my previous comments. You know, it it it's it's it's easy to say let's share data. It's a little harder when it gets into issues around confidentiality and all, But we have some internal commitments at at all levels to say, hey. Look. We we gotta kinda figure out how to do this once and for all. We can't let bureaucracy kinda, you know, stand in the way of of of just good common sense. And so that's how we're leaning into this work, both at the city. We see the same from the county and and and also, you know, with a lot of support from Sobrado. So we haven't quite cracked that nut yet, but that's one of the challenges that we have internally. If we're gonna make this work, we're gonna have to address that issue because that's always the the showstopper.

Thank you. And that direction is included in my memo. So my last question is about funding, which we know that sustainable funding is essential to implementing the Children and Youth Services Master Plan. Can the city manager's office confirm that the city is working to determine which programs or services may be eligible for Medi Cal reimbursement?

Yeah. Council member, absolutely. You know, one of the things you know, we we know that both the city and the county are are gonna be entering into very, very constrained budget process. Right? But we also can't let that be the big delimiter to this work.

Right? I think there's a lot of creativity in this room and a lot of resource in this valley, and so I think we gotta get really creative on both, you know, on the city side and the county side and really make sure that we prioritize this work. Otherwise, we end up reverse engineering, you know, on other issues such as, you know, the unhoused and other other other situations like that. But so so really making this a priority is is is number one. And then secondly, I think also looking at at the wealth in this valley, you know, we we wanna put a challenge out to the private sector, which if you really take a look at kinda like net donations to local city and county, it's it's it that number's in the wrong direction.

And we're hoping that we have some champions in the private sector that care enough about our children and youth to really step up financially as well. And so yeah. So the answer is yes. We're gonna have to get real creative to do that. And there was a second part of your question that I don't think I got.

Can can I weigh in? Sorry. Over here. Andrea. Oh. I'm sorry. Angel, I can take the Medi Cal question. So You go. Andrea Flores Shelton, assistant director Parks Recreation Neighborhood Services. Council member, the housing department as well as PRNS are engaged in the Cal AIM coalition, and we're looking at building infrastructure whether we have the feasibility to build the infrastructure within the city to become Medi Cal eligible, so that is quite a step that we need to look at, so we are looking at that to support our systems and we can provide updates as necessary.

Okay. Thank you both for those responses. I especially, again, wanna thank city staff for helping me prepare this memo that I've submitted for consideration by the NSC committee today, and particularly grateful for the thoughts and contributions of Angel Rios, Andrea Flores Shelton, Jim Shannon, Olympia Williams, Jill Bourne, and all of your teams. Thank you for helping my team and I identify some key next steps and opportunities to sustain and expand services to our most vulnerable residents. Many of these recommendations mirror those in the memo from supervisor Arenas, and together, our memos will provide the direction needed to continue our essential work.

So I am excited to see our policy work in action, and I look forward to working with all of you to support this transformative investment in underserved neighborhoods. And with that, I move to approve my memo again with the two amendments, One amending to include an annual city of San Jose and county joint meeting of these committees and including the aligned outcomes in q one related to data and evaluation investment.

Second.

Alright. We got a motion and a second. Can we have a vote, please?

We will need to take a verbal vote. Yep. Campos?

Yes.

Candelas?

Yes.

Cohen? Aye. Duan? Aye. Ortiz? Aye. That motion passes.

Great. And do we have any other

colleagues who'd like to give any comments

or no?

Okay. Thank you so much. I appreciate everybody's comments. I wanna thank again staff for all their hard work. Thank you to everyone who took the time to be here and provide your input. And that leads us to adjournment. Thank you so

much. Oh.

Oh, let's gavel. There

you go. It's official now. Oh, shit. Think I broke the