Assembly Select Committee on Select Committee on Place Based Systems of Coordinated Care for Children and Families

We have Assembly Members Dawn Addis, Juan Alanis, Laurie Davies, Matt Haney, Liz Ortega, Gail Pellerin, James Ramos, Eloise Gomez Reyes, and Blanca Rubio, and I would especially like to thank Assembly Member Dr. Corey Jackson, Subchair, for being here with us today. He is the Chair of the Assembly Budget Subcommittee Two on Human Services. Chair Jackson, would you like to introduce yourself?

Thank you so very much, Assembly Member. I think I would not have missed this for the world. I think that the data is becoming very clear that if we do not act aggressively on some of the data we're seeing in terms of rise of poverty, in terms of people being lost in the cracks, that overall, we're going to experience a lot more issues down the road that will be more expensive if we be disciplined today. And so I want to thank you for your leadership on this and looking forward to the great information that will be presented.

Thank you so much, Member Jackson. Annually, California spends over 200 billion dollars in federal, state, and local dollars towards cash grants, food assistance, and other crucial services for children and their families. Despite these investments, Californians still have the highest rate of poverty of any state in the U.S. According to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2022, the supplemental poverty measure was 13.2 percent of Californians lived in poverty compared to the national supplemental poverty measure rate of 12.4 percent.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, 13.8 percent of children live in poverty in our state as early as 2023. Promise Neighborhoods and cradle-to-career initiatives effectively increase the return on our investments by providing coordinated neighborhood and community services up and down the State of California. I know this from experience. Place-based work has been a cornerstone of my own career.

I started out working in New Haven, Connecticut, and throughout the State of Connecticut using a place-based model with an organization called LEAP, an organization that one of our guests here, Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone, might know very much about because he was a part of that work through the Children's Defense Fund when we started that.

The idea that children could take care of children, that families could take care of families, and that we could do that because we were organized around a community of care, and it was just a couple of years ago that I served as the CEO of Oakland Promise, a place-based anti-poverty initiative. There, I saw the ways in which cross-sector collaboration makes a world of difference.

It is my goal that through this Select Committee, the Legislature in California will gain a greater understanding of the work that cradle-to-career initiatives do and how we can best understand the work and the scale of investments California needs to make, must make, in fact, in order to sustain these efforts. A penny in, a life out. With us today, we have national leaders in cradle-to-career and cradle-to-career experts throughout the State of California who will help us to achieve this goal.

We have an update to the agenda this morning. Mauricio Torres from SPCS is not able to make it with us today because of illness, and we hope he will feel better soon. I also want to make note that we will have an opportunity for public comment after we get through our three panels. The call in number for this hearing is 877-692-8957, and the access code is 1315437. You can find this number on the screen.

With that, I want to thank each of our panelists who are here today for their lived experience, expertise, and advocacy, and for Chair Jackson for being here in person and for my fellow Committee Members certainly following the work that we will do here today. We will initiate our hearing with our first panel entitled, Whatever It Takes: the Harlem Children's Own Model. It is with great pleasure that I get to establish and recognize and honor and introduce Geoffrey Canada. Geoffrey--Mr. Canada is really the founder.

He's the founder and president of the Harlem Children's Zone, a world-renowned education and poverty fighting organization based in New York City where I grew up. Under Mr. Canada's leadership, the Harlem Children's Zone became a model of place-based innovation for organizations across the country and the world. In 2010, President Barack Obama created the Promise Neighborhoods Initiative to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone's work in under-resourced communities throughout the United States. I'm deeply looking forward to Mr. Canada's remarks.

I believe they will deepen our understanding of what place-based cradle-to-career initiatives is through the example of the Harlem Children's Zone, and also because Mr. Canada, in my estimation, is essentially the godfather of place-based work throughout this country and is a national model for us to be able to follow. So it is a great pleasure to be able to have him here today. Mr. Canada, with that, I will leave the floor to you to join us by video.

Thank you, and hopefully everybody can hear me okay. I hope. Okay, great. Look, I am really excited to be here because what we were able to create in Harlem, I think is a potential blueprint for struggling communities across this country. So let me just say a word about the creation of the Harlem Children's Zone. We created the zone when Harlem was falling apart. Everybody was leaving Harlem. No one wanted to stay there.

We had the worst reading scores, the worst math scores, the highest incarceration rates. People just thought that Harlem was a place where children could not make it. We've been at this now for 21 years. Today, my 10,000 children who are part of my zone, we chose a 97 block area, 10,000 children. We have completely eliminated the achievement gap between Black and white and brown children in my 10,000 kids. We have close to 1,000 kids right now in college who come from our zone.

And over the years, we've graduated more than 1,800 children with college degrees. So those are the things that sort of make me say, 'yes, our kids can make it.' By the way, we choose the poorest kids from the sort of worst environments that we can find. We are targeting our housing projects to make sure that these young people are the ones who need us the most, and those are the kids that we've been able to close this gap with.

But as importantly, this work is about a community rebuilding itself. We talk about how we met with our community residents. We said, 'we want to bring Harlem back. We want to clean up the sort of empty lots, eliminate the graffiti, create safe sort of avenues for our children to walk through,' and Harlem, which had not one national chain 20 years ago because businesses did not think you could do business in Harlem. Too poor. Too violent. Folks weren't really making it.

You cannot name a national chain right now that's not working in Harlem because everybody realized this community is coming back. The biggest challenge by the way we face is Harlem is gentrifying so quickly, and if I had to do it all over again, I would do what maybe some of the folks at Meta right there in San Francisco did in making sure that they're purchasing low income places for their residents so you don't get placed out during gentrification.

But we still know that for our children, we have created an environment where 20 years ago, no one in Harlem thought they were going to college. Today, you ask a young person, they think everybody from Harlem goes to college because we've changed what it means to grow up in a place. This is what's so important about a place. Places have identity. The identity of Harlem was it was tough. It was gritty. People hustled. People sold drugs.

You did whatever you needed to do because you knew you couldn't make it the normal, regular way in Harlem. We have changed that now. So that place is a place where kids think, 'oh, you can make it.' You can be successful in Harlem. And one of the reasons I came out of retirement was to support the work of other place-based initiatives across the country.

And I just want to say to the Assembly and to this particular hearing, California is a particularly important place when it comes to Promise Neighborhoods. They have some of the best ones going there--not just the one that you mentioned in Oakland--that national foundations are thinking to invest in, but you've got the folks in Hayward and the folks in San Francisco and Meta, and you just see one really significant effort after the other.

When I'm talking to people around the country and they ask me which state has sort of the best Promise Neighborhoods, I point to California. I know they're trying to do a Promise city in San Francisco, and we are very excited that California is leading the country in this place-based effort to rebuild communities while supporting children from birth through college and getting those young people connected with the labor market. There's no rocket science here.

This is targeting a place that has historically been underinvested in, staying with young people, providing health, the mental health, physical health, arts, culture, sports, and quality education. It's connecting after-school programs with in-school programs and making sure that we're holding ourselves accountable for the outcomes that young people are providing. So anything that I can do to spur this movement on in California, which is playing this outsized role in the country because now other states--Florida--is looking at what California has done.

I'll be talking with the Governor of Maryland on Wednesday who's interested that California is leading in this place-based initiative and they want to do something statewide in Maryland. I think the significance of both what has occurred and what could continue in California is really critical. Here's the last thing I want to say and then I want to stop. I've been teaching and have been an educator for 47 years.

Because of Covid and the impact, this is the worst educational environment I've seen in my entire career. We need to do something dramatic and comprehensive if we're going to stop the next generation of inequality from happening in our communities that have been underinvested in, in particular Black and brown communities. And so this is a time to act boldly and with purpose, and on that, I'll bring my remarks to a conclusion.

Thank you so much, Mr. Canada. I think we might have a couple of questions for you if you don't mind staying with us for a little bit. My first question: just recognizing the incredible impact that the model of Harlem Children's Zone has had on the country, you've had an opportunity to see across many states what the kind of enabling and statewide environment is for really being able to establish Promise Neighborhoods, cradle-to-career partnerships across the state.

Can you give us a sense of what some of the enablers and opportunities for state policy and a state framework that needs to exist in order for place-based initiatives to really thrive?

Yeah. So in this, I think there are a couple of key components that we found. The first is how do we use data? This kind of an effort needs to be targeted in places where this comprehensive set of supports are necessary. So the first thing we say is: are you aware of your data and are we targeting these resources directly to the communities that need them the most? There are some places, to be quite honest, they're doing okay. The kids are doing fine.

They don't need targeted place-based, comprehensive strategy like Promise Neighborhoods. So that is one of the issues. The second issue that we need to recognize is these are not small projects that you think about, sort of small amounts of resources. To do this work, you need to fully fund these places.

And so one of the things we've been finding around the country is that there are a number of places that have put up significant dollars to support this work because they realize this is not a 50,000 dollar or 100,000 dollar effort. This is going to take seven and eight figures if we're going to really make a difference. And so one of the challenges that we brought to states is: are you prepared to do the investments necessary?

And here's something that I believe in very strongly and I would say, 'I think you all need to consider this.' We believe this works best as a public-private partnership where you are taking public dollars from the state and finding investments from foundations, corporations, and wealthy individuals to support these efforts so that you're maximizing the resources, and by the way, the investment of other folks in these places. We think those are some of the key areas that make a difference.

And the last thing I'll say about this is the accountability. These dollars are precious, they're significant, they're necessary, and we have to hold people accountable for producing the results. This is a results-driven set of activities and we want to make sure that when public dollars are invested, we can rest assured that we're going to handle the accountability and we're going to know what those young people have accomplished with this investment. So those are a few of the areas I think are really important.

Thank you very much for that. I just had a question and it's more for those who want to learn more about this process. What are the key components to a place-based approach? What are the key services that young people are given to ensure that they're on a trajectory to thrive?

Great. It's a great question and absolutely critical. There is a phrase that people use from cradle-to-career, and I don't want it to sound like a slogan, so I'm going to just walk you through the components in Harlem. Now every community can do this slightly differently, but these are the components. We start with Baby College which is a program for the parents of children, zero to three. We teach them about brain development. We teach them the proper way of disciplining children.

We make sure that they're aware of the nutritional needs that young people have and the health needs that young people have. That program--we make sure our young people start off with all of the science about singing and reading and talking and counting the children. From there, our kids go into our pre-K program for three and four-year-olds. It's a full day program and our goal there is to make sure our children enter kindergarten on grade level.

And we have a series of tests that we give that demonstrate where our kids are at so we are constantly ensuring that we know what we're doing well and we're not. One of the big misconceptions about the Harlem Children's Zone is people think all of our kids are in our charter schools. They are not. They are not. Out of my 10,000 kids, 2,000 are in our charter school. The other 8,000 are going to traditional public schools.

So here we connect with the public schools and providing after-school programs for kids on the weekends, during the holidays, in the summertime that work in conjunction with the public school to help provide these key supports, academically and behaviorally for children. We have a full social work staff so--you can't save kids if their families are falling apart--and we focus on things like the housing condition so that families who have children with asthma and may have too many sort of vermin in their house, we're helping folks figure out how to deal with that.

From elementary school, we have a middle school programs that run, which tend to focus on academics and arts and sports and then into our high school programs where our young people--we make sure young people can find jobs.

All of our young people over 15, we try to make sure they can earn a little money because if my kids have no way--these are poor kids--they have no way to even earn 20 dollars, they're going to be out in these streets hustling, trying to figure out how to earn some money. So we want to make sure as part of all of the work we do, we allow young people to also learn how to work, right?

These are real jobs that they have that they're held accountable for producing, whether they're writing for the newspaper or part of our music program, they have to perform, they know that's part of their deal, and then our issue is to get our kids into college. We get about 99 percent of our kids end up going to college and--well, let me put it this way. They end up getting accepted to college. About 90 percent ended up going. Sometimes kids decide, 'I've been accepted. I don't want to go.' That's fine.

We have a program that works with these kids while they were in college because what we found was, we were sending our kids to college and then they were dropping out after being a year or two and it kind of made things worse than if they didn't go. They took out loans. Now they didn't have a college degree.

So we have a program that works with our kids all four years they are in college or five or six, however long it takes to get them out, and then try to connect them to the labor market once they get out. We are doing that while at the same time dealing with the issues of violence in our community, the issues of parks and playgrounds and streetscapes. So we're doing all of these comprehensive supports while supporting our young people at the same time.

That's the project that we do in Harlem. Most folks simply say cradle-to-career, targeted in the neighborhood, and I've sort of given you more of a program by program approach of what that really looks like in Harlem.

Thank you, Mr. Canada, and building on that a little bit, you use the term 'we.' We know that there are many people, and as you've mentioned, this is a public-private effort and certainly in the Harlem Children's Zone and throughout the country, and I know in the State of California, these place-based initiatives have many different organizations, partners, collaborations. Can you speak a little bit to the kind of collaboration opportunity and what that actually looks like and what are the markers of success of a strong place-based initiative?

Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. There are a couple of organizations that have really excelled in creating these place-based initiatives and getting everybody at the table and getting them organized. StriveTogether is one of the leading national organizations, and they have places they're working with in California with organizations and programs. So that is a backbone entity that takes responsibility for the coordination of these services, but we've seen the United Ways that have sometimes tackled us.

We've seen other not-for-profit organizations decide they're going to be the comprehensive umbrella under which these programs operate. In each community, it looks somewhat different, but let me tell you some of the key, I think, players that have to be involved. We have to get K to 12 involved in this work. These young people need to make sure that their education experience is being supported.

And so we've been pushing community schools as another one of the vehicles that can be in a Promise Neighborhood that connects those schools and after-school programs, but we have seen folks just begin to work with the public schools and the Department of Health and the Department of Transportation, Department of Safety, building a consensus on how we're all going to come together and work as partners in a neighborhood.

And of course, there are the neighborhood organizations which I think are critical that they are part of this work and that they have serious buy-in if these efforts are going to be successful around the country.

Thank you, and this is perhaps a leading question, but one I want to make sure we get out on the table. For your 10,000 children that you've been focused in on--well, I'll say this. California, any state, has a challenge of thinking about their budget opportunities and investments from a year to year approach, right? One year we'll support something, one-time funds, another year we will not. And you and place-based work is really focused in on the long haul, right? It's generational work.

Yes.

Can you just give us a sense of the scale of investment that we need to be thinking about and the opportunity costs when we don't invest?

Yeah. This is a great question. We tell folks that it costs us about somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 dollars on top of the school cost, for us to provide these wraparound, comprehensive services to young folks. And that's a yearly cost, right, because we start with them at Baby College and we stay with these kids over the course of the year.

And there are some places, and I dare say, when the budgets are being put together, folks were looking at that 2,500 dollars, thinking, 'can we afford to do this?' But if I had this Assembly at Harlem, at the Harlem Children's Zone, I would be putting up my map of the incarceration rates in Manhattan. And what you would find is that my zone has been sending hundreds of young people into our jails and prisons for the last 20 years, every year.

And the cost, when I started this, for a young person going to jail in the city was about 100,000 dollars a year for the city if you went to jail. It's over 500,000 dollars a year right now. I know that's hard to believe, but you can Google it and see.

And what I have argued is, we have spent billions of dollars on a failed strategy, which is to ignore these problems, to let these children fail, and then put them in jails and mental health institutions and Unemployment and Welfare and all of that stuff. My kids are coming back paying taxes. They are getting jobs. They are citizens who are contributing to the health of our community. So I think it's cheap, to be totally honest with you.

I think if you look at what we're spending and what we're getting back and the fact that out of my 1,800 kids who've graduated, my 1,000 kids who are currently--none of them are involved in the criminal justice system and nor will they be--these young people will grow up and be contributing citizens, and I think this is a generational investment. I tell folks that--I tell my parents when they start with me at one, at six months, that we're going to be providing these services when their kids are going into college.

We're going to still be there. So that's why I think we have to think about this work differently. We can try and do those short-term investments. They have never panned out. You were just throwing good money after bad. These kind of efforts, you need to think in five and ten-year increments if you're going to allow these to have the kind of impact that makes a difference in your community.

Well, we're so thankful to you, Mr. Canada, for being able to join us. I believe you're in New York City right now and so thankful that we're able to hear from you. We know that you are a true advocate of this. We're thankful that you came out of retirement, so to speak, although I didn't see you go anywhere to be able to make sure that we had an opportunity to have these kinds of models supported.

Your work is going to certainly be broadcast more certainly as we get to hear from other place-based initiatives in the State of California, and we want to thank you for your lifetime of service and your lifetime of work and leadership in making sure that we have the Harlem Children's Zone to be able to stand behind and recognize and understand. So thank you for all of the work that you do. We're so thankful to have you here with us.

Well, thank you. As I leave, let me just say this. We at the Harlem Children's Home at the William Julius Wilson Institute, we are committed to California, we are going to be in California, and we are prepared to help in California as much as humanly possible. So I want to thank you for this time and say that anything we can do, we're prepared to be helpful.

Thank you. And with that--Mr. Canada being a part of the newly-formed or recently formed William Julius Wilson Institute--I know many of you all will continue to be able to interact with him and the work that they are doing to support place-based initiatives throughout the country. I just wanted to take a moment as our next panel is coming up, to be able to frame a little bit and define what a Promise Neighborhood is or a cradle-to-career partnership.

So just so that we get grounded a little bit, Promised Neighborhoods and regional cradle-to-career partnerships are constructed to remedy the fact that some communities face historic disinvestment and families living in these places need systemic coordination of public and private strategies to make any personal or individual efforts stand a chance for entire communities to rise out of poverty.

Both approaches formalize and strengthen how all stakeholders come together around a shared community vision, use evidence and data as a means to improve delivery of services, and measure progress toward agreed-upon targets, as well as leveraging all available resources to meet that vision.

These approaches intentionally consist of cross-sector organizational and system leaders, education, business, government, nonprofits, community-based organizations, as well as grassroots organizations, neighborhood leaders and individuals, members of the community living together to be able to provide transformational change as intended through this place-based model. These practices take an approach which centers a whole child and a whole family and de-silo governmental programs to ensure that families and communities are met where their needs are.

These approaches uniquely support individuals assuming responsibility for their own upward mobility while identifying and addressing structural changes needed. The work can be complex, but at the end of the day, it is incredibly simple. What would happen if we were able to wrap our arms around every child and get out of our silos to be able to make sure that that child had an opportunity to succeed from the time that they were born?

With that, we'll be moving to our second panel, which is: It Takes a Village: Doing the Work of Cross-Sector Collaboration. And with that, we will have an opportunity to introduce Sandra Ernst. Actually, if we could have all of the panelists come up for this section at this time, that'd be great.

Thank you so much. So this second panel is It Takes a Village, doing the work of cross sector collaboration. We'll have three panelists, or are two. Miss Sandra Ernst, Chief Executive Officer of Oakland promise. Marisa Torre, Vice President of program operations for SBCs San Diego. Julieta Martinez, parent and community Member for Hayward Promise Neighborhoods. With that, we will begin with Sandra Ernst. Sandra will have an opportunity to introduce herself. She is a passionate leader and advocate. She is focused on leading an equity focused organization.

And this is so critical to the work she's doing. This in 8018. My district of Oakland, Alameda and Emeryville in Oakland. And we're so thankful to have Sandra here, who has a lifetime of work in both college access and completion, as well as now leading Oakland Promise. With that, Ms. Ernst.

Thank you. Assembly Member Bonta Assembly chair and Committee chair. And thank you all for inviting us. Today, I'm going to tell you a little bit about Oakland Promise and why we exist. We are a cradle to career organization, primarily focused on education and ensuring that Oakland students get access to education and economic mobility, ultimately. So the problem statement of why we exist, too few of our students in Oakland were making it to post secondary education.

At the time Oakland Promise was formed, a 9th grader only had a 10% chance of completing post secondary in six years. And that is not acceptable. And what we do is ensuring that our students have access to post secondary. Because if you have an A degree, you have the ability of earning 13% more than someone with a high school graduation. And if you have a four year degree, you have the opportunity to earn 40% more between the ages of 25 and 34.

So it is absolutely imperative that we give that access to our students. So, Assembly Member Bonter first said that she was at Oakland Promise. She was the inaugural CEO at Oakland Promise. And at Oakland Promise, she was able to set up the organization in a way that allowed us to get access to more funding. When Assembly Member Bonter was at Oakland Promise, 93% of our budget was private foundation and only 7% was city. But through her efforts, we were able to get the Children's Initiative Fund.

So that is a measure. It is a municipal tax that get about $700 parcel tax for every parcel in Oakland. And we were the implementation partners for the college access portion, which is huge. So right now, 65% of our budget is because we were selected as the implementation partner. So when you hear about public private partnership, Assembly Member Bonter made sure that that happened for Oakland Promise. In addition, we have a set of collaborations that we are a part of.

At Oakland Promise, we cannot do all the work alone. So we have the Northern California College Promise Coalition. And through those efforts, again, Assembly Member Bonter was the inaugural person that started this coalition, we were able to go for AB 288. And for those of you who may not be aware of, AB 288 is an Assembly Bill to prevent displacement for scholarship. We are a scholarship organization. Primarily, we give scholarships to families and students to go to postsecondary and AB to ad.

It prevented the schools from taking away grants from students in California. Very few states in the country have that as a possibility. So this is a win for our students. We have four core programs. The first one is brilliant, baby. Brilliant Baby is for our medical eligible families in Oakland. There's about 1700 medical eligible babies born a year. And we seed these families with a $500 savings account. And through those savings accounts, we also offer financial coaching for the parents.

It is not enough to just actually it does help to give the money to parents because it does change the mindset that they have money for their students. But it is much more effective to pair it with financial coaching. So our families get financial coaching and a seeded account and get family connection, and through the family coaching through these connections, we have done a 10 year longitudinal study.

We are in the middle of a 10 year longitudinal study, and it shows that our parents, our caregivers, actually have better health when they participate in the Brilliant Baby program than the control sample. Our families access social services more when they are a part of the program than when they are not a part of the program. So that is hope and that is what we want to make sure that our families in Oakland have.

And they have aspirations for their children and know that they are going to go to post secondary. We have another program called Kindergarten to College. The Kindergarten to College is similar to what you would say a rising tide lifts or boat, because all the students in Oakland, all kindergartners in Oakland get a $100 college savings account because we want to start building the identity. The identity that college going is par for the course for a child in Oakland.

Just as you heard Mr. Canada say that our students know that they are going to college, ultimately that's what we want to make sure. We want to ensure every kid in Oakland realizes that they are college bound. And we have our College Access Program. It continues to build on the identity, but also make them do the behaviors that make them eligible to go to postsecondary. Our College Access Program has making sure that they are high school ready. We heard about kindergarten readiness.

Our College Access ensure they are high school ready. They complete the FAFSA or Dream Act, and that they apply for our scholarship as well. And through that program, last year alone, we gave 900 scholarship at the tune of $3.7 million. Since inception, we've awarded about 3000 scholarships, $25 million. This is a lot. So thank you, Assembly Member Bonter, really, for ensuring that we have access to additional funding through the public Partnership to be able to make that happen for our students.

And ultimately, our last program is our college completion. In college completion, you heard Mr. Canada say that we were seeing our kids not go to colleges one year, two year, and not being able to succeed. We have mentoring for our students, we have advising for our students, and we also give them the scholarship, but also it's a wraparound support. When our kids like when they need more money. We have a Fund called the Dream Keeper.

Also, that was something legacy from our inaugural CEO that we can bring them for making sure that we can support them. When COVID happened, we could bring them home. They didn't have money to get on the plane, but we can get them home so they know they have someone that they can rely on. And the Pierce De resistance is that our students are graduating at a 54% rate. For comparison, 32% is a graduation rate for an Oakland student of the same demographic.

So our students are graduating at a 66% higher rate than the rest of Oakland students. And recently we heard about promised neighborhood. We are on our way to being a promised neighborhood, and hopefully next year when I come back here, we will be a promised neighborhood. Being jealous here from my Co panelists who are but we have recently been awarded the full service community school. Because we know partnership works, we cannot do it alone.

Our biggest partners are the schools and the Oakland Unified School District, as well as the charter school. And this is a planning grant. The Federal Government believes in our work, and we want California to believe in our work as well.

So our Oakland students thrive when given the opportunity, while our efforts are voted in the local context, empowering families to thrive and uplift their outcomes, improve outcomes for Low income families in Oakland, that is not solely a regional effort, that's a strategic investment that you are doing in California. Because if it works in Oakland, ultimately it uplifts the whole State of California. The work is creating a positive ripple effect that extend beyond our borders.

And as our board chair always say, this is not local work, this is nation building work. And I hope to have your support.

Thank you so much, Ms. Ernst, and thank you for outing me. But obviously this is our collective life works. And it's been a pleasure to see your leadership in the organization that I certainly feel very invested in with this work as well. We will move now to our next panelist. Where are we? Hold on, sorry. Ms. Julieta Martinez Costa. Julieta is a dedicated parent and community advocate based in Hayward, California.

She currently serves as a family engagement specialist at Tennyson High School, which is one of three high schools served by Hayward promised neighborhoods. Julieta brings community voice to our hearing today. Having accessed resources provided by Hayward promised neighborhoods, she has been engaged in programs like Tubercio, Vasquez Health Centers, Promotores De Salud Training, Cal State, East Bay's Community Leadership Initiative, she has also been serving as a district English Learners Advocacy Committee, a DLAC Member and a parent ambassador at Hayward Unified School District.

Julieta, thank you for being here as well. And I know we have Edgar Chavez here as well from Hayward Promise just to provide some additional support as needed. Thank you, Julieta.

Thank you. Thank you everyone for having me here. I would like to share my story so you can connect what I'm here and the work I do. 23 years ago, I immigrate from Mexico to this country. I bring a baby. She's now 23 years old, pro the alumni of San Diego State University, who this year returned to gave back to her community as part of Hayward Promise Neighborhoods team.

Working as an outreach coordinator, I also brought with me a bit of community experience thanks to my educational volunteer work in marginalized rural communities in Oaxaca, my home state. Being a young mother. And by the time with that second child, with that passion for learning and improving myself, I took the opportunity to participate in a program called Event Start for Families at the Adult School, which gives parents access to training and support to create a literate home environment and enhance the academic achievement of our children.

That started to seem the path for my own kids to have a promising future. At that time, I didn't have any idea that something that big was in my hands, and neither know that there were programs to achieve it. I took every opportunity to educate myself, being mother and working adult, while I had to adapt to a new country, embracing a multicultural community, learning English as a second language, and eventually obtaining my high school diploma.

12 years of volunteering became my personal and then professional career, which began in my children's schools and extended to different organizations from which I learned and practiced very useful knowledge and skills. All of this at my own pace and at different levels time by time. As a Member of my community, I understood the importance of civic involvement and advocacy. As a trained health promoter promotora I became a real source of information and prevention resources for my community, in addition to navigating the complex health system.

As a counselor for survivors of sexual abuse, I understood most of the traumas that affect families and the importance of promoting self care and mental health. As a volunteer on leadership committees, I gave voice to parents of English Learners and highlight importance of being involved and informed to support our children's education. As Parent Ambassador Lead, I help other parents to gain leadership skills and being involved at their schools.

This is a partner program between La Familia, a community outreach nonprofit organization with the school district in which parents are trained in being a bridge between HUSD other parents and community resources. I also was part of the first HPN Community Leadership Initiative in which my oldest daughter was able to join too. I joined the Second Chance at College, a partnership program with Chapel College that meant to encourage and support HUSD community to go back to college to pursue their educational goals.

The City of Hayward has also been part of my personal and professional growth through the Police Community Academy years ago and years later with the adult English conversation circles and ESL grammar classes. Thanks to my volunteer work, I had a strong connection with my community. I gained its trust. They relied in what we have in common. I understand the challenges they face because I have experienced them myself.

From the complex city I'm sorry, second language of the school system to the care of our family's mental health, guiding our children in their own academic needs. Because I am a special ed parent that I had to advocate for my 19 years old son who made it to his high school graduation and I'm pretty sure he will be able to have his own tribe and story. And I still have work to do with my Hayward Promise baby who is now third grader.

We already know that for every family in this country, it is crucial to have access to inclusive basic needs programs recreation, early child education, special education services, English language development, mental, academic and vocational counseling and opportunities. College preparation is also highly effective. As a community Member, I have been very fortunate to see how partnerships can align services for kids and their families since the Jackson Triangle first grant. The second one at South Hayward and Downtown Hayward promised neighborhoods that just started.

Our Credible to career network was put to the test when we faced something as devastating as the pandemic was. I witnessed how each agency and the community itself organized to support our families with what was available. At the moment, I was part of those efforts, being part of TBAC Promotora's team, assessing the community, doing outreach and education about COVID vaccines, preventions and self care, distributing diapers, cleaning supplies, food, et cetera.

Thanks to a collaboration with Forces and Chabot College, we also help families to learn to use basic technology that allow to keep their kids learning from distance. I hope my story of vocation and commitment helps to see how worthy and necessary is to support these networks that provide opportunities and tools resulting in a huge positive impact in individuals and their kids. Because children deserve to born and grow healthy, loved and able to fulfill their dreams as part of a productive and transformative society.

We are so fortunate to have HPN having programs and services that are available for everyone and leadership teams that are able to implement what is needed according to the communities they serve. Lastly, I would like to share that this 2023, I finally felt ready to step up and still support my great community as a family engagement, outreach and equity specialist attending Song High, one of the schools that are served by Hayward Promised neighborhood. Thank you.

Thank you Julieta, for that very first person experience. And whenever I talk about my children, I always have a hard time not having tears come from their successes. And so I'm thankful that you were able to share a bit of your experience and theirs as well. Edgar, did you want to share anything.

About no, I was just here to support. She's really been here from the beginning.

Yeah. Thank you. Perfect. I think I will first just kind of ask Ms. Ernst a couple of questions. Can you share a little bit the nature of the collaboration, challenge and opportunity? I will say Oakland Promise is an individual organization, but the work that happens for this place based initiative happens with a lot of other partners. Can you speak to the work that the work of partnership and the requirement of partnership in making sure that every child is served.

Thank you for the question. That is a muscle that we continue to grow as an organization that is expanding to scale. We know that we cannot do the work alone. So primary partner is the school district and other partners. We don't have expertise in all the different areas from the cradle to Korea. So bringing folks together to come up with the best solutions and the best wraparound services for the needs of the community is key.

So we did a need assessment, actually for the full service community grant, we did a needs assessment and lifted the needs of the community and through that gathered the partners who would be able to deliver on the outcomes needed. So that comes with a lot of work. Partnership is difficult because you need to nurture the partnership, you need to respect the partnership.

So doing partnership work requires a lot of intention and care and doing it with school district from the beginning we were with the school district, but doing it with charter schools as well, which it's a lot of different organizations for charters. So it's not all one as OUSD is. So having a lot of initiatives, actually opportunities, I would say, to get to understand them better, the impact of their work better, but also, for example, the children's initiative.

We are responsible for the outcome, but we have to get others to do the work for which we are responsible for the outcome. So really building results based accountability measures that we can all abide to is very important from the very beginning.

Thank you. And Ms. Martinez, during your presentation, you offered an opportunity for us to hear about the impact that being a part of Hayward Promise has had not only on your children, but on you. I think one of the things that we don't really focus in on is that a promised neighborhood or a place based initiative, it affects the children and their parents and communities.

Can you share a little bit your first point of entry maybe was it with getting your children involved and then some of the ways in which you had an opportunity to get more involved in the efforts of Hayward Promise to make it a stronger organization?

Yeah, I have to say that from my parents. My mother always said that education is important, so that was in my mind. And my father loves to read, so I have that example. Can everyone hear me? And when I start to realize is being part of those programs, I took early child development classes and I really understand what was about my own infancy. And my oldest daughter is like, oof, I need to do something else.

So I start to getting more involved because in Mexico it is a system already in place. That is what I was familiar with. But being here it's a little bit different. And I didn't know how to ask some things and I feel embarrassed to ask dumb questions. But I start learning from other leaders and it's like, zero, can I ask how this work? I don't understand about sophomore, seniors, what is that? We don't use those terms and grading. Right. In Mexico the maximum qualification is 10.

And here is an A. So I start to learning basic things. How? Because I start to go to meetings, activities, everything are local in my school, just my school. I don't want to do anything else. But when I start to see the relationship between your involvement, your kids is like zero, English learners. What is that why my children are classified as English learners? I myself have English learners. Right.

So I start to realize and I start to involve at a district level, but it's like many things because I have to work. So 12 years, it took 12 years to start to understanding that puzzle. So I don't know if I answered your question.

That's really helpful. I think it also speaks to the experience that newcomers have into the US. And California and the need to be able to come into a community. And it certainly sounds like you were able to turn your own experience and kind of seeing things that didn't necessarily make a lot of sense into advocacy and asking all those really important questions. Can you speak a little bit specifically to the promoters program that you're involved with?

It's funny because sometimes we think that there is a way to get to someplace. But for me, I start to learn vocabulary in English. I learned to read and write, but for me, what's difficult to talk and when I start my education, I obtain my diploma with a program that I bring all the things that I get at my country. And that I need to complete my 2220 credits. So for me, I think I just need to do 20 credits.

But in my limited English, I remember having the book that be booked for American government or United States history and my dictionary here in order to do the test and that. But I get my high school diploma. But again, the challenge was to talk. And thanks to promised neighborhoods, because people invite community to talk about it, their needs and things like that, they provide childcare. So I was able to bring my little one with me and they provide translation.

I was pregnant before and for many people it's like you need to stay at home. But I want to learn, I want to do something productive. And that's why I start to do many things. I know about more organizations, about learning, about advocacy. I don't know if you are familiar with Parent Voices. I came here that day that is Stanford Children, right? I know that you need to do certain things in order to advocate for what you need, what your community needs.

So at different level, I start to be involved in my own community. I start to know what is the structure, how the district works, how our government works. And I realize that it is important to be involved. And if my kids born here, they need to know that they have a voice, right? If parents are so busy working, it's valid. There are priorities. But our kids needs to start from early ages to understand they have voice.

So coming back from those years, I was so young mother. I just want to have education and to help my kids to thrive. And I think I'm doing well. And I can say it's really different from my three kids. With my daughter, I have to learn how to navigate the system and taking care of her mental health. It was so hard for her. For my son special education, I learned that I'm the same as him learning.

And from my little one for her was really different experience. I start to practice my English with her and I start to understand how an English learner's brain works. And I was in the middle. I want to practice my English, but I want her to be bilingual. It's kind of difficult, but I realized that there are many things for getting those things bilingual programs, right?

I can say I love to speak in Spanish, I have a really good Spanish, but maybe I don't have the skills to teach my own kids. So I have to look for all those things to help them to grow.

And here you are in the state capitol of California in a hearing thank you. Advocating for your children and all of our children. So thank you. Ms. Ernst, I'll ask a couple more questions of you. I think you mentioned or I know about obviously the Brilliant Baby program, the college savings program. One of the things that I think is hard for people to grasp around place based initiatives is the kind of the longevity of the work. Right.

You're following a child for 18, 20 years in order to be able to be successful, and it's hard to do that with data. And we want to always, to Mr. Canada's point, really talk about the impact and the outcomes. It's wonderful to kind of hear the inputs, the different kinds of programs and services that we can pour into children and families.

It's really also important to understand the outcomes and the impact of those services from just sharing a little bit about, I know the randomized control trial that Brilliant Baby is doing. Can you just remind us again of that particular program, the intention of it, and some of the initial findings of the randomized control trial?

Yes. So the randomized control trial follows our babies and then also has a sample group. A sample group. We work with the Children's Hospital as well as La Clinica or two different hospitals that we work with to follow the same babies. So we are doing the 10 year trial we did the 18 month report came out and showed that families participating in the program access health care more. They have better parental health and they have greater aspirations for their kids.

Right now, we are in the middle of the 36 month and we are going to follow those kids for the next 10 years. So a big thing that we noticed with that program was that just having the CSA account is helpful, but paired with financial coaching is even more helpful. And especially for our black families, there's a much wider gap difference between the sample population versus the control group. So we are seeing that to be very beneficial for our black families.

And when we look at these parents, accessing social services more is beneficial for not only the child, but also for the entire family because they have access to more resources. And access to more resources make you mentally as well. They have better mental health from that as well because they feel supported. So brilliant. Baby, we know it works. And actually, Willie Elliott recently is at UC Berkeley. He actually wants to cite our report for the 10 year for the longitudinal trial.

And also I have a quote from him. I believe that I wrote it down because.

Actually, I did not write it down, but I know that Willie Elliott actually believes that this is very exciting work that we are doing at Oakland Promise and wants to see it replicated other places. And we are actually selected by the state to be for the CSE account, which actually was modeled after the Willian baby.

Yep. You're referencing California's investment in every child to ensure that every child has the ability to establish a college savings account program, which is absolutely critical. It's some leadership work that our Governor has really taken a serious investment in. We also know that those college savings accounts right now are being underutilized and under accessed.

Can you share a little bit the importance of having an actual program on the ground able to be able to support families in accessing and understanding that they have those college savings accounts?

Yes, because just knowing that you have the account shows from the study is an opportunity for our families to feel more hope and optimism for their children. And we are an outreach partner with the state when it comes to talking about the CSA program for the state and our families. Being able to get the financial coaching actually have allowed our participants to make decisions about their finances that they would otherwise not have done.

We usually think financial coaching goes like when you have money and actually it works when you don't have money, so it works for you to access more resources. It helps for you to understand how do you get what does that mean? Credit? What does that mean buying a house? One of our brilliant baby parents ended up buying a home because of the coaching that she received from the financial coaches when her child was younger.

And then five years later, she ends up buying a home because she understand how to build her credit. So this is not financial coaching on where to it's not investment coaching. This is how to do your basic needs with the money that you have.

Right. And then I wanted to just switch our attention a little bit to the upper part of the kind of the career oriented part or the college to career component. Mr. Canada mentioned in his remarks that one of the challenges that the Harlem Children's Zone 10,000 students faced or that we all face is that we start college and we're not necessarily able to finish it.

And what happens when that happens is that we end up getting a bunch of debt and we don't end up with a degree and putting our community Members and our students, our children, further in a situation of despair as opposed to a place of promise. Can you speak a little bit to the college access and completion pipeline of your model and what the intention is and some outcomes that you know are existing with the college completion components?

Yes. So right now, about in Oakland, two thirds of the students graduating high school end up going to post secondary. And at Oakland promise the students that we accept. The universe of students that is likely to be eligible for our scholarship is about 1700 between 1501700. Last year we awarded 900 scholarship. This year we are awarding 1100 scholarships. And these are scholarships from $1000 to $16,000.

And the service that we provide to these students is not only for example, I talked about how they making sure that they do the behaviors that get them to succeed in college. So that means being on time, filling out your FAFSA or Dream Act, making sure that you're talking to your financial aid counselor. And what we were noticing with our students, we would give them the scholarship and there would be a drop off in the summer. So it's called summer melt.

So the student had every intention to go to post secondary and did not end up enrolling in post secondary. So we have a program with OUSD where we are working together to track the students. So all the students in our program making sure, especially the students who were supposed to enroll in community colleges, so those students we work collaboratively.

So that is one collaboration, Assembly Member Bonta that we do very well with the school district and we triage, we say we have 300 students saying they are going to community college, let's ensure that they make it to the door. And how we sometimes it's a simple thing, it could be literally $4. If a student take a class at a community college they may have a hold on the account because the school may not really understand.

Were they a student before or are they a new student coming into community college? And they may have a hold on their account because they look like a continuing student and not a new student. So being able to remove those barriers for those students greatly increased the number of students enrolling because they would lose hope in the summer because no one was there to help.

No one was able to support them in the summer because they finished high school and then they apply, and then now they are being asked all these questions and they have no clue what these questions mean. Being able to support them in the summer. Our Summer Melt initiative has really increased the number of students going to post secondary. And we have mentors, these are professionals, people in their careers who have signed up to be mentors in the program.

We have advisors, our advisors are trained to support students. We have also another partnership with an organization that supports us in supporting students in postsecondary because we know the most critical time is year one and year two. And our students are going from year one to year two at almost 90% rate. So we need to increase the year two to year three because we are seeing the drop offs happen now more at the two to three years.

So we continue to monitor the data to support our students better. But you heard it before, 54% of our students are graduating post secondary in our six year rate, and that is 66% higher than similar demographics in Oakland.

That's great. Thank you for that. And as we wrap up this panel, I will just ask both panelists to just share a final thought related to this. We all went through COVID, COVID-19, Hayward Promise, Oakland Promise, Hayward in this City of Oakland and the City of Hayward, because of these place based initiatives, already had an infrastructure that was in place to be able to support their communities.

Everyone had to pivot during COVID and figure out how to be able to continue to support our children and families during that time. Can each of you speak to some of the ways in which you used the existing infrastructure of your organization of Hayward Promise and Oakland Promise to be able to support families through COVID?

Sure. I would like to go back to your question about the promotoras program. Okay. The promotoras program is a curriculum that was created for Pablo Freddy, and it's based on popular education, very effective with adults. And for those promotoras out there, it is an opportunity to know about resources for themselves, but also to share with their community. So it's like win win situation. You can use for yourself, but you can let people know what is available for them. And in that process, you are getting skills. As for me, I learned to facilitate.

And because of that, when we have the Pandemic, we were able to set that curriculum to do a training online by Zoom. But we have to change some things because that popular education had some interactive activities, and it's about reflecting about their own knowledge and sharing and learning from everyone. So at the Pandemic, promotoras were ready because they did outreach. But now we start to do outreach, calling people. But because it is a network, promotoras are part of the community. They already are known for everyone.

And it's like, hey, this is Julieta. How are you? I'm doing good. No, we have some problems, we have some needs. So we start to do that. And at first, when everything was stopped, someone says, we need to do something and have a promotora is calling the community. And we have the data already. Those parents that participate in fortress programs, zero to eight years old or school district. I was part of DLAC. So many people, no promotoras. And they were happy to answer those questions.

Do you need help with this? Do you need that? Do you need those things? Diapers food. zero, no. My family Member has COVID, so what I can do and we direct people to the right place to get help and like, doing many things, not just calls, but doing to the distributions. Diapers food.

Knocking doors, telling them that you need to get the vaccine or do you know that this can happen or do you know where is the place to get the vaccine or to be tested and all of those stuff. Promotoras were ready for that. And agencies have what you said already, something to start helping people.

Thank you.

Yeah, the effects was huge on our kids because what we were seeing before, we were seeing the scholarship taken at like a 90% rate when we awarded the scholarship. And now we were seeing 75% of the students were enrolling in Postsecondary. So it was really problematic to see that in our students. We had a drive for like giving computers to students and it wasn't enough. The computers were helpful, but when you have a home that is not conducive to learning, it was extremely difficult.

So it did open. Also, other doors, for example, allowed us to have many more interviews of students. When we had family connection, we could have it through Zoom and way more parents attended actually the family connections when it was through Zoom than when we had them in person.

But when we were interviewing students, for example, for the scholarship, and you see a student who is mortified because their parents are like crawling on the ground in the back, trying not to be seen on camera, their brothers walking without a shirt on in the background, and here they are in the middle of a scholarship interview. And those were the early days where there was no blurring and there was nothing that you could do to get rid of unwanted people in your background.

So that was extremely difficult. And we saw a big dip in our scholarship uptick for the first two years. Right now we are back on schedule this year, but I would say for two years it was pretty bad. But we were able to do other kind of support for our students. For example, with our dream keeper scholarship. So it wasn't just for tuition or anything related to school. It was any kind of needs with very little need to show proof for access.

Because if you are giving a student $500 is not a huge thing for you. But we know that. For example, San Francisco I forgot which it was a study that showed $500 can make a student drop out of post secondary as little as $500. And it's well documented that this is what could get someone from having a degree or not. And it's unconscionable to think that we would prevent someone from succeeding because we were not able to give them $500.

But that is how little it is. Similarly to what Mr. Canada said, that it takes $100,000 to $500,000 to keep someone incarcerated and it takes $500 to keep a kid in college. So we really need to do what it takes to remove those barriers to access for our children.

Thank you to both our panelists and to Edgar in support. We know well, I am now serving as chair of the Assembly Committee on Health, and we spend a lot of time and will spend a lot of time talking about our health concerns within the context of the social determinants of health. I think a lot of the work that happens within our place based initiatives really go to address some of that.

I very much appreciate both of the panelists kind of lifting up the fact that because of a more holistic sensibility around how to be able to support children and their families, it ends up increasing health outcomes for for our children and their families and our whole community. So wanted to lift that up. Thank you both for being with us today, and we're going to move on to our next panel.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And our next panel is how to sustain cradle to career networks in California. Our panelists will be Emerald Evans from Grace and Child Poverty, California. Our Richard Ryeff, chief Strategy officer for the Mission Economic Development Agency othello Meadows, managing Director, Port Folio for the Blue Meridian and Josh Davis, Vice President of policy and partnerships with Strive Together.

So if we've had an opportunity to hear from the history and kind of an original model of place based initiatives from Mr. Canada in the first panel, we were able to hear in our second panel some of the intricacies of the program based work that leads to really generational opportunities and outcomes for children and families with a place based approach.

We will now move into a panel that focuses more on how we actually are able to sustain the cradle to career networks in the work that they do and what kinds of investments we need to make in order to be able to do that. And quite frankly, again, towards Mr. Canada's opening remarks, how we can ensure that California continues to remain a leader in all spaces, but certainly this one related to investing in children and families in this place based approach.

We will first begin with Emmerald Evans. Emmerald Evans is policy associate at Grace and Child Poverty, California. She provides technical assistance and leads the California Cradle to Career Coalition in their policy efforts seeking resources and the expansion of their proven model to be statewide. Emmerald, thank you so much for your leadership and for being with us here today. And I will pass the mic over to you.

Yes, thank you. You actually started my intro for me, so I'll just go straight into it. Here at Grace, we envision a liberated future for systemic racism, free from systemic racism and poverty, in which all children experience childhoods of abundance, dignity, love and opportunities to thrive. We are proud to be the backbone of the California Cradle to Career Coalition founded in 2020, driving their vision to push policies that built the Cradle to Career movement.

Create long lasting community solutions that benefit everyone, no matter of their background, their skin color, their gender identity, their sexuality, class, age or ability. Place based, coordinated, community driven antipoverty solution strategies are a critical component of the 2019 legislative plan to lift children and families out of poverty by 2030. We understood then, and even more now, following the Pandemic, the importance of place based strategies for poverty alleviation.

The Creditor Career Coalition is made up of 16 partners located across the state, including as far as Del Norte and Modoc counties to the Bay Area, the Central Valley and all the way down to San Diego and Southern California. They are a group of community leaders from organizations that serve children at every stage of life, from before birth, through college and career. These organizations have been inspired to seek equity and make all communities in California a better place to live.

They do this by transforming the systems that serves people, by supporting people across the cradle to career continuum. Understanding that it takes a village to raise a child, they integrate that proverb into strategy and practices. The coalition is made of federal promised neighborhoods and regional cradle to career networks.

Neighborhood Members are implementing place based cradle to career services ranging from newborn home visits to parenting classes, childcare early learning programs, tutoring, after school and enrichment programs, college readiness programs, housing support, tax preparation, food pantries and vaccine outreach and education. Cradle to career regional networks.

They focus on the scale of successful approaches across the cities and counties to improve outcomes on the larger scale through convening cross sector of groups to create blueprints and achieve regional equity goals funding nonprofit organizations and coordinating school districts, health departments and organizations across counties and regions to ensure greater access to health, educational and socioeconomic support. Both of their capacity buildings rely on a common approach which is community centered and results focused. It's leveraging cross sector partnerships and collective actions to change outcomes.

They're using data to drive decisions and then they're embedding it with an accountability structure. The credit to career movement has started because, like much of the country, California has divested from communities. People have been displaced pardon me through gentrification of urban center communities and have not received the adequate resources to thrive.

And what is missing in high poverty communities but yet proven so successful where they have been piloted, is a dedicated entity working to ensure that investments meant to fight poverty are used effectively, equitably and reach every single child and family whom they're attended for. Coordinated neighborhood services are community and data driven, and they are important for fostering thriving communities. Because they empower families, they provide a tailored solution to their local needs. They're promoting inclusivity, encouraging civic engagement, optimizing resources, fostering change, and enhancing social resilience.

Our coalition strongly believes that policy is a lever for systems change and as such, we aim to take collective action and support solutions that advance positive children and family outcomes. One of our collective change effort levers has been to develop and advocate for a state level policy agenda that will financially invest in California organizations seeking to implement the place based cradle to career initiatives.

Through these efforts, we aim to level the playing field for all youth and families in California ensuring a child's potential regardless of their race, their ethnicity, their zip code, or even circumstance. These organizations are providing systems change with a unique capacity to leverage $400 million over three years in existing state investments to make collective impact, including to Convene Multisector Partnerships, desiloing funding streams, ensuring coordination and prevention of duplication of services, collecting data and conducting evaluations.

And instead of implementing a one size fits all solution, these place based systems take into account the unique context, the unique challenges and opportunities of a specific community or geographic area. In addition, they're implementing again many of these state programs, including the accessibility of the array of safety net programs that are administered by the state.

These place based initiatives are data driven solutions yet again that have resulted in Fresno County lowering their preterm birth rate for African Americans from 14.7 per 100 infants to 8.2 for those who participated in their home visiting programs. Mission promised Neighborhood increased their targeted school graduation rates from 68% to 90%.

Truly Vista Promised Neighborhood having an average of 91% kindergarten readiness rate for the past six years, and with their baseline increasing from 77% in 2014% to 100% in 2020, Oakland Promised Neighborhood their college graduation rates, as she mentioned plenty of times, resulted 54% higher than other socioeconomically disadvantaged students in California. Marin Promised Partnership increased their percentage of 9th graders being on track to meet a 3G requirements at Tam High School from 28% to 58%.

Hayward Promised Neighborhood targeted school tennis and high school graduation rates for Black students rose from 63% to 94%, and Black students meeting their UCCSU requirements from 15% to 44%. These strong results delivered by the networks will achieve high social and fiscal return of investment in both near term and long term. Moreover, state funding for these networks is a cost effective way to ensure that children receive coordinated and effective resources that will yield tremendous return of investment.

For an example, every dollar invested in a promised neighborhood generates a six point, 12 cent return. For regional hubs like Fresno Cradle to Career, they have demonstrated as high as a $12 return. For the past three years, the coalition has advocated for the It Takes a Village Act, which included two bills, AB 1321 and AB 20517 championed by the Loveliest Amendment Revanta thank you alongside budget requests, even though cradle to career networks have not been fully funded. Pardon me.

The Governor included $12 million in the 2022 state budget for the four California Promised neighborhoods, which is swiftly moving into action thanks to the leadership and partnership of Department of Social Services Director Kim Johnson and her team who have quickly and successfully implemented these initial grants into the field.

The coalition would like to see a permanent commitment from the state by passing the It Takes a Village Act, and this act will establish a three year competitive grant program to implement new and strengthen existing neighborhood based and regional based cradles of career networks. Having heard from our partners today and will continue to hear, can we imagine what this can do for 21 more communities across the state to promote the sustainable growth and enhance the whole child, whole family?

These grants will help credit to career networks link, leverage and enhance the work of educational institutions, social service providers, workforce development networks, community based organizations, nonprofits employers, and those who play a critical role in enhancing opportunities for Low income children and their families.

We have the vision that this work will be expanded across the state and the need for California to continue to lead the way so that we can rebuild communities, ensure children and families have the opportunities to grow, to learn, to play, to work, to live, and to thrive in communities all across California. We're happy to have partners here today to speak directly about what they do. And thank you.

Thank you so much, Ms. Evans. It's very powerful and we'll return to some of those outcomes that you relayed. Dollar invested leads to 6.12 cent return or in some instances, $12. I certainly want to hear a little bit more about that as we move on, and certainly really appreciate you lining up some of the existing place based initiatives. I wanted to also just mention that we have bright futures. Monterey County, ChuLA Vista promised neighborhoods, cradle to career. Fresno county, cradle to career.

Sonoma county El Monte Promise Foundation. Everett Freeman promised neighborhoods, aka. The Corning Promise. The Hayward Promise, obviously. Marin Promise. You mentioned Mission Promised Neighborhoods, which we will hear from momentarily. North State together. Oakland promise. Oakland thrives. Dennis cradle to career partnership. United Way, San Diego. San Diego promise. And on and on and hopefully more. But I just wanted to give folks a sense of the breadth of the existing work already.

With that, I wanted to move over to Richard Bryan, who is the chief Strategy officer of Mission Economic Development Agency. Meta. As it's known. He leads Meta's field building and policy work by sharing best practices from the agency's unique combination of affordable housing development, small business lending, and cradle to career partnerships.

Prior to his current role, he directed Mission Economic Development Agency's place based education initiative, mission Promised Neighborhoods MPN, and he now uses MPN's cradle to Career approach to help drive system change efforts across the City of San Francisco. Moving from a promised neighborhood to a promised city, which we're very excited to hear more about. A Promised City Initiative aligns the best practices from Mission Promised Neighborhoods with the Mayor's COVID recovery Plan, creating holistic solutions in the city's hardest hit neighborhoods.

It's wonderful to be able to feature all of the good work that is happening in San Francisco right now and the vision that the Mayor has with you all to be able to build out Mission Promised Neighborhoods to a citywide effort. And with that, I'll pass it over to you, Mr. Raya.

Thank you, Chair Bonta. And thank you, Ms. Evans, for that excellent summary of the work that we're doing. And it's an honor to work both with your coalition and with your leadership. Assembly Member Bonta, I cannot tell you how important it is to have someone of your stature, of your voice, of your expertise championing this work in California. So thank you a little bit about the Mission District before I jump into our promised neighborhood.

And again, I am the Chief Strategy Officer at the Mission Economic Development Agency, the Mission District in San Francisco has traditionally been a vibrant gateway community for working class Latino immigrants and a haven for artists and musicians. But beginning with the.com boom, we saw more than a third of the Latino population displaced from the neighborhood. That's 10,000 Latinos. We used to be the majority of the community, but that is no longer the case.

Working class families faced exorbitant housing prices, working multiple Low wage sector service jobs, service sector jobs to afford rent. They often had high levels of trauma stemming from immigration status and their inability to be home with children because of the need to work. And there were disparities in educational outcomes for Latinos. Our community responded collectively by creating a Promised Neighborhood. Mission promised neighborhood inspired by the Harlem Children's Zone.

We believed that our children and their families had the ability to succeed given the right supports along the cradle to career Continuum. And we made a promise that we would help bring the community together to provide those supports. Mission Promise Neighborhood in San Francisco is now the quarterback for a team of 15 community based organizations providing a web of support for Low income families.

We do so by bringing together early learning centers, community health clinics, the school district and the city, all aligned around a common vision. Together, we work along the cradle to career Continuum to connect students and their families to affordable housing, mental health services, job training, small business loans, tax assistance, and, of course, academic enrichment and more. For example, we helped families secure $5 million in tax refunds in the last year alone. And over the years, we've helped families complete 32,000 affordable housing applications.

We've preserved or developed 2500 units of permanently affordable housing and doubled the number of childcare slots in the neighborhood. With this web of supports, we saw the percentage of families with a medical home jump from 60% to 80%, the Kinder readiness rate increased to 71%, compared to the neighborhood average of 47%, and the graduation rate increased from 68% to 90%, as Emerald stated. But when COVID first arrived, it hit our community the hardest.

Although Latinos only made up 15% of the city's population, they were 50% of the COVID positive cases because of their crowded living conditions, reflecting the shortage of affordable housing in the community and because their essential jobs could not be done from home.

The trust that our promised neighborhood built with the community and the networked approach we had developed with other agencies put us in a position to reach these families and to work with the city and state to distribute emergency resources to these hard to reach families, including $22 million in income replacement funds to thousands of families, allowing residents to quarantine at home when needed, and $16 million in relief funds for 457 small business owners.

We used our cradle to career infrastructure to come together as a community, a village, to provide for our neighbors who were in greatest need. This is good government. It's community driven, collaborative, data informed, data informed, and accountable to results. As a result, the Governor added four promised neighborhoods to the state budget in 2022, and that is a result of the collective advocacy of Grace, the End child Poverty campaign and of course, Assembly Member Bonta's leadership.

This funding was essential because these initiatives had all timed out of their federal grants, which last only five years. They were all facing massive fiscal cliffs, and their communities were facing the sudden loss of valuable collaborative infrastructure that had been built up over the years. This loss could have been particularly devastating for communities that had already been hit hardest by the pandemic.

The state's investment prevented this loss, protected these communities, and ensured the continued progress toward academic success for students and economic mobility for families in these communities. The state's investment in Mission promised neighborhood was matched by the city and philanthropy because in the same way that multiple sectors have to come together to implement a cradle to career initiative, so should they come together to Fund it, everyone needs to have skin in the game for a truly collaborative approach. California, you've heard this this morning already.

California is leading the way by investing in place based cradle to career networks such as Mission Promise neighborhood. This investment in systems coordination provides solutions to some of the large scale challenges we see in our neighborhoods. By bringing government, schools and community together to collaborate, innovate, and hold each other accountable to common goals. At a time when Californians are looking for solutions, successful cradle to career networks show that the system can work and they help restore our faith in our democracy.

My hope is that the state will expand this approach so that it is not limited to a few lucky communities, but scaled to reach more of our hardest hit communities. This new wave of cradle to career networks could be the vanguard for a truly equitable recovery in California and an example for the rest of the country. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Mr. Raya and I couldn't agree with you more. We have a great opportunity to show what we can do here in California and what kind of impact that will have on others, kind of taking up the cause. And I really appreciate your framing around it, really taking a village. So thank you. With that, we will move to our next panelist, which is Mr. Othello Meadows. Mr. Meadows serves as the managing Director of portfolio for Blue Meridian.

He provides strategic and executional leadership on critical business priorities and leads innovation efforts which expand Blue Meridian's work as well. He also explores new philanthropic investment opportunities, leads due diligence on potential Blue Meridian investees, and manages relationships with current investees with a focus on place matters. And I know from knowing Mr. Meadows, he is a comrade in arms in this work, having long been a part of place based initiatives as well so brings that experience to the table.

And with that, I'll pass it over to Mr. Meadows.

Thank you, Chair Bonson. You're right. This work is deeply personal to me. And immediately before joining Blue Meridian, I was doing this work. And these stories are both heartbreaking that we're having the same conversations about resources and allocations of funding, but also uplifting in what we're hearing and the successes that people are having. I'll start a little bit with a little bit about what Blue Meridian Partners is.

Blue Meridian is a funds aggregator that raises capital from wealthy individuals and organizations and deploys that in a way that is really data driven and backed by pretty intense due diligence, as some of our investees here can probably attest to. But it is a long getting to know you process. I will also say that there is no coincidence that we are in California. The work invested in California, the work that's going on here is as good as any that we've seen anywhere in the country.

And the work that we're talking about today is being followed by folks within our portfolio already who are watching this and eager to see what California does next. On this front, we employ really a three part strategy. Our goal is to increase economic and social mobility for the families that have been disadvantaged for the longest, largely black and brown families across this country. We invest everywhere from Rhode Island to Oakland, right?

Everywhere across the country, from the middle of the country all the way down to Texas. And we're seeing huge impacts as people try to rebound from COVID COVID recovery is actually how we got to the bay and how we first entered our relationship with Oakland, in no small part due to Ms. Monta's leadership, but we employ a three part strategy, which is deep investment in place based partnerships.

So the organizations that we're talking about here have long struggled to have the funding they need to carry out the work that we ask them to do every day. We ask them to do really yeoman's work, and we give them peanuts. So we wanted to change that. We wanted to go deep and invest in those partnerships. The second piece is really investing in technical assistance. We call it catalytic supports, but it really is technical assistance around saying, what are the challenges that you're having?

What are the things that you need help with? What is the technical assistance that can take you from here to here? We call it catalytic supports, but everybody else knows it as technical assistance or consultants. And then the third part, which is maybe most apropos of what we're talking about here today, we hope that our capital is catalytic, and catalytic from the standpoint of unlocking greater public resources and public investment, as well as additional private investment.

But we like to be early in on things, help Grove concept and then help make the case that this is something that ought to be permanent funding for the organizations and the people that do this work. So that's kind of the strategy that we employ. Our kind of holy grail is scale. And we can't get to scale without public sector dollars, right? Blue meridian has a lot of money, right?

But when compared to the scope of the problem, the scope of what we're trying to change, it is not even a drop in the bucket of what's necessary. So to get to our goal of scale, of moving thousands and millions of people out of intergenerational poverty, we have to partner with the public sector and figure out how to do it as efficiently and effectively as possible.

One thing I want to sort of call attention to, that we have come to learn in this work is that what we think of as cradle to career is much larger than I think, the way we talk about it amongst each other. Right. We think about credit to career and we think typically in terms of school academic outcomes, right? And it certainly is those things. But cradle to career in our mind is every single thing that impacts negatively or positively a child or a family's trajectory.

So that includes housing, right? Housing instability. That includes feeling safe in your neighborhood. That includes your parents being able to find good workforce development programs or good employment within their neighborhood. So all these things act upon what we call the comprehensive frame, which is basically how a child moves down that path of credit to career. So everything that acts on that is something that we invest in. And we like to invest in partnerships that are heavily focused on that.

With that, I'll move to sort of some of our biggest learnings thus far. We've been at this for a little while. I should have said, at the top, I manage a portfolio of all place based investments. Bloom Meridian does all kinds of investing. Our portfolio, my portfolio is all about place based investments both at the neighborhood level and at the regional level. And one of the things that I think was alluded to today that I think is really important to highlight.

So collaboration and accountability within these structures, within these partnerships, is both the biggest lever of change and also the biggest challenge in getting this work done. So the places that we've seen have the most success have been the places that have been able to figure out how do we keep everybody at the table, right? You got 15 other partner organizations that you work with. How do we keep everybody at the table pushing towards the same goals?

In my opinion, it's the single hardest thing to do in this work, but it also has the biggest upside if you do it correctly. One thing that another learning that I mentioned earlier, these backbone or quarterback organizations, depending on kind of which model you subscribe to, are severely underfunded, right?

And so every year when you're doing this work, chair Bonta, I'm sure when you were doing this work, when it came time to raise money for next year and your staff and the people that actually get the work done right, that's a stressful thing. And every single place based leader in the country is dealing with that same problem of how do I make sure that I have what I need to go pursue the outcomes that are most critical to this community?

So we've got to find a way to make that sustainable. And then the last thing I'll say is that there's one thing that we see here, and I can't tell you how excited I am to be here because we don't see this all the time. Political will, in my mind, is the single biggest prerequisite to having any shot at making this work have any opportunity for success.

We go to a lot of places where there isn't the political will to say we'll make the hard choices, we'll fight the hard fights, we will put money where our mouth is and actually Fund the things that are showing results. And so without that political will, I think you're kind of dead in the water. So I'm really excited to be here today talking about permanent allocations, permanent funding for organizations that do this kind of work at a high level. So we are excited to be here.

For us, a big goal of ours is to find a way to create enough proof of concept that for the public sector, it becomes a real no brainer, right. It becomes an easy win to get behind and support that so that we can move on to the next thing that requires riskier capital, right? And try to prove concept there as well. So, super excited to be here. Couldn't be happier that we're having this conversation. Thanks.

Thank you so much, Mr. Meadows. And we'll certainly get into some of those things that will elicit us to have political will around this work. We'll move now to our next panelist with Josh Davis. Josh Davis serves as Vice President of policy and partnerships for Strive Together. He provides leadership and strategy for the organization's policy, advocacy, and mobilization work, while also leveraging national partnerships to accelerate progress through the cradle to career network.

We're certainly thankful to have Mr. Davis here to be able to provide the linkage between what we're doing in California and what's going on in other states across the country.

Thank you, Assembly Member Bonta. This almost feels like home. I live in Mississippi and half for my entire adult life, but I have been personally and professionally committed to supporting a group of friends and colleagues for about 11 to 12 years. So I'm very appreciative of the opportunity to be here to speak in support of the children and families here in California. Strive Together is truly a national network that is about 70 communities in 29 states.

And the one north star that all of our communities hold is really to eliminate the predictability of success based on the color or ethnicity of childs and families demographics as well as where they live. And Emerald spoke to this that is really the north star. How can we eliminate the predictability?

That because someone is black, Hispanic, indigenous, lives in a really remote and rural part of the country that we can pretty well predict how their likelihood for success will shape up in 20 plus years and moving forward. So the Strive together network serves about 14 million children nationwide, and that's about 13% of the entire US. Population between the ages of zero and.

In California, we serve approximately 1.2 million children and before coming to California, just been a poor black kid from Mississippi, the only image I had of California was beaches and I had no idea of the diversity of the state, of its people, of its geography. Emeril spoke to this a little bit. We have partnerships that are as far north as Del Norte, Humboldt, Trinity, Cisco U, Shasta. I've been to them.

They look extremely different from the geographies and the people and the places on the border near Chula Vista, all up and down the coast and even over into the San Joaquin Valley. I just recently spent time with the Yurok Tribal Council, and so I've really been able to understand and appreciate and learn about the ways that communities have very similar goals, but the differences in the ways that they go about organizing their work so that there is this compounding effect of all of the resources and all the talent and all the interests that aligns in ways that they can measure their progress along the way.

So when I think about sustainability at Strive Together, we not only think about this in terms of financial resources but the sustainability of knowledge and the capabilities. These approaches are not programs in and of themselves. These approaches require programs and service delivery to actually meet families and children and other service providers where they are. But it's much, much more so about a process that continuously needs to be tended to.

And in order to do this efficiently and effectively and with impact, there has to be this continual knowledge acquisition and sitting on the edge of your learning competency and sitting on the edge of your knowledge base and thinking about the refinement and what's new as well as the continuity of the capacities that are required to drive this results oriented work forward. So with Strive Together, the way that we help to meet sustainability and work towards sustainability is basically in five ways.

So I'll use our coded words and then move backwards. It's three C's and two I's. We coach, we convene, we codify and then we also function in terms of influencing and investing. So when it comes to coaching, what we do is we take the decade plus tenure of knowledge around the field of collective impact and we have been able to determine a methodology for collaborative improvement that we coach our partnerships on and we also coach government actors.

Over the last two to three years because of the success of our state policy coalitions, we've seen policy that's been enacted that is in the interests of our network partners and their coalitions. And once that policy moves from development into advocacy into implementation, we don't stop there at the national office.

We sit with government actors that hold the responsibility for this type of program implementation and help them to think about what is the collaborative improvement methodology that ensures that the public and private partnership that Geoffrey Canada spoke about, that is required.

How do we make sure that the implementation of this policy ensures that there is an absolute return on this investment and it actually meets the impact for those children and families that are most in need of the type of policies that are being called for? We convened our national network and our partners together so that where Strive Together does not hold a content expertise, for instance when it comes to housing and the integration of education and housing, Enterprise Community Partners is one of our national partners.

We look to the Pritzker Childcare initiative that focuses on zero to three as our content experts to help ensure that when our partnerships are considering how to improve their kindergarten readiness and they're thinking about those formative years where critical brain development takes place between 0 and 5, we don't have that knowledge.

But because of our breadth, because of our brand and because of our commitment to equity and economic mobility, we're able to pull in national partners that have the right content expertise and we serve as a convener for our partners and national expert partners to learn together and move towards the development of strategies that meet impact.

With our codification, we ensure that those best practices, whether they be the best practices that move policy from development and to advocacy from our coalitions or whether they are the best practices that ensure that a roadmap for a state to focus on prenatal outcomes lifts up what you do from a policy perspective and a practice perspective.

We ensure that the codification of those learnings are crystallized, shared across our network, are really built by our network and we capture those learnings to ensure that we are able to disseminate and spread and scale those learnings. The impact and investing is where I really get excited. Impact, I'm sorry, our influence and investing. Our influence is really our newest body of work. Over the last, I'd say, four to five years, the Strive Together network historically had focused on getting the work right of collaborative improvement.

The focus on policy was more so of an acknowledgement that policy played a role in ensuring that outcomes were met. But over the first decade of the network there was really this adherence to developing a theory of action, refining that theory of action over and over again to make sure that we understood how the practice of this collaborative action was really moving communities to better outcomes for children and families.

And so in our policy work, which we define as the influence, we've begun to support the construction of statewide policy coalitions, particularly in states where there is a diverse geography, so an urban and rural contingency of constituents as well as where we have a large number of partnerships in the state so that they can pull up from the local needs that they're recognizing that need change at the state level and come together and advocate for those based on real local challenges that have identified potential solutions.

And our invest is also one of the newer facets of Strive Together. In our 2023 strategic plan, we granted just over $66 million out to our network. We were able to aggregate capital. We were able to really be successful to have large philanthropic funders come to the table to understand that we could serve as a vetting mechanism because of the data that we collect on all of our partnerships.

Review, the annual assessment that they provide that says this is where they need help, this is where they're having success and to be able to serve as a good partner to large philanthropic organizations, donors and funders. In our 2030 strategic plan, which begins in 2024 and moves through 2030, we're basically doubling down on that.

Our plan calls for investing $130 million into our network that supports both the practice and the policy work from the local level to the state level, and ensuring that there is a congressional and a presidential agenda that we're able to influence based on the needs of families and communities that are connected and tethered to our local partnerships that then connect with our national office. So I think about so what if these partnerships were not here?

I was thinking about how to answer that because the work that they perform outside of a program, you can't go and do a tour to see how coordination takes place in the background. This work is highly, highly invisible. This work ensures that there is an intentional focus on where are there gaps in this continuum?

Colleague Othello spoke about cradle to career, considers how to support a child and an entire community of children from the prenatal stage all the way through workforce. That's nobody's mandate, government does not mandate that education, safety, transportation work together, these are all very siloed functions of our government. Philanthropy doesn't mandate this. The people that mandate this are poor families and children. Those are the folks that recognize that just because they can recognize their own will, their own needs and the desires that they have, there are so many structural challenges, there are so many entities and programs and systems that need to be navigated.

So this is not a mandate that comes down from government. These community partnerships that operate in a specific place and that think about this continuum from birth all the way into the workforce have done so because of the call in the will of residents, communities and families.

This is in a lot of ways sprung up as a volunteer effort that is either funded by philanthropy or funded by a small seed grant. And so without these partnerships operating, you will have gaps and cracks where children are falling into these cracks at major transitional moments from leaving a hospital and not showing back up into a formal education setting, sometimes until they reach kindergarten.

Moving from an elementary school into a junior high, leaving a high school and not necessarily having the right supports that are understood to impact retention in college, or moving to the identification of a career choice. That's nobody's mandate. This is the role that these place-based partnerships hold as a cradle to career sort of towards-

You'll also see duplication, resources that are provided for programming not effectively and efficiently being utilized in a way that really gets to the most use of limited resources with impact and distrust, that's something that we can't measure. We heard from our friends in Hayward about the optimization of the Pomodoros. This is also a strategy that is employed up and down California, that critical component as a community broker. It's not something that you can put a price on.

And so because this work is so highly invisible, those are some of the things that we believe and we know. Our place-based partnerships who operate from cradle to career really help to solve for along this continuum. In all honesty, they help to serve the interests of all public objectives and all public goals. I couldn't agree with Othello more in thinking about the integration of safety, transportation, health, economic mobility, everything that our partnerships are working toward.

They touch on these facets of the public's obligation to create an economically viable, a safe community and educated citizenry. And those are the reasons why we continue to be in support of this work in California. So I've been coming out here for 11 years now. I was lucky enough to be a grantee of the Promised Neighborhoods Grant back in 2012 along with the friends from Chula Vista admission.

And so for eight years, I sat with them and learned in a national community of how to move from operating a grant to really standing on the wills and the wishes of families that were invested in these communities that were invested in these zip codes, these census tracks, and thinking about sustainability in those ways of what's the knowledge that's required. What are the capabilities that required along with the funding?

And so in the last five years in this role at Strive Together, we have been so incredibly excited about the progress that the State of California has made in recognizing that it has a role to play. Nobody's being asked to carry this along. Everybody has a place to chip in. So thank you Assembly Member Bonta, for allowing us to come and be supportive of these efforts.

Thank you so much, Mr. Davis. And I think we'll touch into some of your framing, which I think is really important. I think one of the biggest challenges that I've come to know in this place-based initiative work is that it's very hard to describe in terms of what the impact of the work is and ultimately kind of where it sits, how it happens, why it's important because we have put ourselves in a mindset of being program oriented, right?

So through a series of programs and inputs, we will create the kind of change that we need to see. And we're very short sighted often in our allocation of resources around those programs. So I wanted to first start with likely with Richard Raya, because you've had the experience now of being in the space of going from an initiative that was place-based in the Mission to thinking about what that would mean to building out at scale for the entire city.

Can you speak to the approach that you all have taken in being able to do that? And I also want you to touch on a critical piece that you mentioned and that Mr. Canada mentioned, which is the role of housing in the work.

Yeah, so I'll start with the housing piece. When we got our Promised Neighborhood Grant 10 years ago and we talked to the community about what will it take for their children to improve their academic outcomes. The number one priority that we heard was we need affordable housing because of the fact that they were living in overcrowded conditions or in cars or in garages or shelters or just being displaced out of the community altogether. So that became a big part of our work.

We ended up working with many of these families to visit City Hall and let our elected officials know that we needed some new policies around affordable housing preservation and creation. And we were successful in passing some of these policies, one of them being the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, where a lot of our tenants in apartment buildings now have the first right of refusal on an apartment building when it goes onto the market for sale. So housing has been critical.

We are, of course, referring tens of thousands of families to the city's below market rate rental program. But we are also building new affordable housing at the same time. So it's a critical part of what we do. In terms of the Promised City Initiative, we have started to see that what worked in our neighborhood should not be some sort of boutique project for one lucky neighborhood, but rather, this should actually be the normal way that our city works in low income communities.

So we've identified several communities that, like ours, have a history of being redlined, marginalized, segregated, disinvested. And we had this idea with city and school district and other community leaders that why don't we replicate this kind of community collaborative that we see in the Mission? Why don't we replicate that in other neighborhoods, other hard hit neighborhoods, and create a city that takes this approach as a normal way of doing business? And we could call ourselves a Promised City if we can pull this off.

So that's what we're working on right now. We're working with other communities, respecting and honoring the leadership in those other neighborhoods, because we are focused on our neighborhood, the Mission District. We're not going into other neighborhoods to take the lead. We are supporting leadership in other neighborhoods to create their own cradle to career place-based plans for improving academic outcomes, addressing many of the surrounding issues like affordable housing, the need for mental health care, et cetera.

So that's our vision with Promise City, and we are in the midst of that initiative right now.

Appreciate that, and I'm very hopeful that we will see that come together very soon. Ms. Evans, I wanted to touch on something that you raised earlier around the need to focus in on coordinated and effective resources. When you were talking about some of the results at Mission and Chula Vista and OP and Marin and Hayward, you were able to provide some really pretty incredible outcomes around primarily academic success, was, I think, one of the areas that you focused in on.

Can you share your response to the question of how do we figure out who gets credit? So, you know how we like I say that just as a practitioner, right? It's always kind of like, well, if we hadn't done that, then we wouldn't have that outcome. And there's a scarcity mindset around making sure that we are providing better outcomes for children and families.

And I know that one of the critical things is making sure that there's actually the level of attention paid to coordination and effective services. So either with those examples or just some of the work that Grace is doing, what's your sensibility around that idea of answering that question of who gets credit?

I open it up for other folks if they want to talk about it.

I couldn't help but laugh because it is at the crux of what we were talking about earlier in terms of how hard partnership is and the idea of causation and who did what. To me, a sign of a good partnership- And we see these across the country, like, literally everywhere, a sign of a good partnership is one that doesn't care, right? And that's rare. It's really rare to find a partnership that celebrates the wins together and mourns the losses together.

But we almost look at that as a bit of a litmus test of the strength and health of a partnership. But it is something, and I think Josh was talking about something that needed to be constantly tended. But those relationships are one of those things that needs to be constantly tended. There has to be the ability to disagree. There has to be the ability to speak freely and openly to your partners without any fear of retribution or of fallout.

There has to be that level of authenticity and honesty. And when we go to a place, we're looking for that authenticity, right? We're not looking for somebody that says that they never have disagreements and that there's never a battle about who gets credit, but we're looking for folks who are willing to stay at the table together and kind of wrestle through that. I don't have any answer for how you determine who gets credit.

In a prior life, we spent a lot of money with evaluators trying to figure out how do you make the case that the backbone, and so Josh was talking about this a lot. How do you make the case that the backbone and that partnership is what elevated these test scores or reduced this violence, right.

And it's very difficult to find concrete data that says because this coalition of people is together and they're sharing information and they're working collaboratively, it's very difficult to draw a straight line from that to those outcomes, right? And so there's a level of trust that philanthropy has had to get comfortable with. But I think that doesn't necessarily mean that we should stop trying to find a way to tell the story of how powerful these partnerships are. But it's difficult.

It's difficult because there isn't a thing that you can say one plus one equals that. And a lot of times that's what people in the public sector that's what people in the private sector are looking for. And it's until they spend some time with practitioners, with folks doing the work, that they realize how difficult it is to say, 'oh, because of this that happened'. So I wish I had a better answer.

Yeah, Ms. Evans, and then Mr. Davis.

Yeah, I was going to know, as we keep emphasizing, this is community driven. And I think when we recognize where the needs are, it's driving from the community. Right? And I think we were just at a tour in Good Samaritan. He mentioned, he said these are the theory of change of the community, right? Like, this is community needs that are being uplifted, that then these partners then come together to recognize the need for, again, the community.

So really centering it in that I think they get the credit for working hard, for participating in services, for engaging, providing their impact. I mean, to even Julietta of being here to speak to her work and how much she's engaged to bring her lived experience to uplift the needs. Because sometimes, again, you are so high level that you're not recognizing what's going on the ground and what's really, really needed for communities. So I think also communities deserve some. So just want to add that.

I'll just name the obvious. Since we are here in a policy and political building, the credit only matters because of the money. I hope that it's okay for me to say that I've come a long way to be here. That is the only reason the credit matters is because people's jobs are connected to this coordination and the delivery, right? Again, I was one of these kids. I was one of these families. Everybody on here from this panel was one of those families.

And neither of our mamas, daddies, or caretakers would have given a damn who got credit for how we got here. It's a fact. I guarantee it. And so the role of government is to help us think about and move into place how to solve what is sitting at the crux of the credit, which is the funding.

Thank you. I'll keep with this a little bit because this is an important piece in walking around the pieces of legislation that we were able to focus in on that related to It Takes a Village and supporting this place-based work. I sit on countless kind of subcommittees that really look at, as you mentioned, housing or silos, different silos, health, fentanyl crisis, affordable housing. Every step where we go, we are looking at this work from a tranche of very specific needs.

And very rarely do we actually give ourselves the opportunity to think about whole child, whole family, whole community, which I believe credit does equal resources. It's the plain fact of it all which I believe is the biggest challenge to one supporting this work moving forward, and also the greatest opportunity that we have for every child and every family member in the state of California.

So from the perspective of what we need to do differently as a state in our policy making and our policy agenda, what would be your recommendation as practitioners, as people who see this work in this state, across all of the initiatives across the country, how do we need to reframe our policy agenda and our resource allocation to be able to most fully support this work?

I'll take a first crack at this. From my perspective, government needs to restructure the way that it funds programming. So right now it funds in silos. Going back to what you were saying, Assembly Member that we are dealing with a system that does not reward holistic approaches, it actually rewards siloed approaches. And we see that in the way that we organize. Not only our departments, our departments are not holistically designed. When I say departments, I mean our state departments, our city departments.

So we need to actually figure out how can we align systems at the highest levels and have collaborative conversations and then have the resources actually reflect these collaborative approaches. And so I'll just give you one example. I think with our Promise City initiative, we are seeing that we have to compete with our partners for city funding, with the way that funding works right now. And that's antithetical to collaboration.

And so we know that one of our end goals is to actually have our city figure out how to fund collaboration, fund a holistic approach. And so that's going to require a lot of changing systems, just changing the way the guidelines are written for how money is spent. And so that's going to be a tough one to crack, but that is our challenge.

Assembly Member, if I may offer three succinct ideas. One, obviously the lack of flexible funding for this type of work is critical. These partnerships act as conveners and connectors between communities, families, and youth and public institutions, local institutions, local systems. They act in a policy perspective by ensuring that as state and local policies are decided upon, that there's a feedback loop to let you all know how the decisions that you've made are showing up in community.

And in reverse fashion, what are some of the factors that need to be addressed so that there are not policies made in the absence of an actual problem. And data, that is the other critical role that these place-based partnerships are playing and that is helping to lift up and make meaning out of data in those spaces where the public and government need to understand what is being produced and how they see it.

So this lack of flexible funding to allow place-based partnerships to serve those roles as a convener in the policy apparatus of the state and of the local government and in data and insight making. The second is integrated data across systems.

And I think that this is a place where the state of California is actually leading the rest of the country, the Governor and the State Legislature's investments in the cradle to career longitudinal data system is allowing for the rest of the country to understand, observe and learn from these critical linkages across systems of workforce and education and health and human services. How can you predict accurately the type of workforces necessary?

And how your population, your community, your state residents are being prepared and served so that there is economic vitality of the entire state in an equitable fashion. And I do think that California is leading the way. But that is another challenge and another critical piece. And this third is as a function of government.

We were so impressed by the State Treasurer's office, by attending the Strive Together National Convening back in September and speaking out, reaching out to the California Cradle to Career Coalition saying, 'hey, we have this program CalKIDS. And there are millions of dollars that are going to be left on the table if we're not able to identify and sign up children and families for this incredible benefit that has an equity focus'.

So seeing the state apparatus of government recognize that our partnerships play a role in being able to know, identify and help inform with trust this benefit that's already been made available is one of those other examples of how these partnerships really improve the efficiency of government and can help to meet impact.

And so those are the three things that I would offer, are the government's ability to establish flexible funding, so that the partnerships play those three roles, convener as a part of the policy apparatus and data, integrated data systems in how government serves in ensuring that this longitudinal way of being able to make insight and meaning to act in a much more sophisticated and proactive manner and looking to these partnerships to serve as an embedded function of government.

I'll ask a question of Mr. Meadows and then would love for all of you to kind of give your last just- I'll give you 1 minute to say whatever you want to. But the issue around kind of the public private partnerships and funding associated with that in order to be able to ensure the role of philanthropy versus the role of public dollars is incredibly critical.

You've obviously had a long career and are now running a portfolio that is based on the premise that with philanthropy and this catalytic funding, we'll be able to ensure that there are public dollars that come from that. How do you anticipate or expect the public to, government to actually tune into the catalytic funding and opportunities that philanthropy is offering?

Yeah, it's a great question, and we spend a lot of time thinking about that when we go to a place, right? One of the things that we are sort of trying to understand is the appetite from the public sector for doing something different. And we get varying kind of responses or degrees of willingness to engage on that front. Typically, our approach is to show much very similar to what Josh just said, right?

We are typically trying to show that we are willing to de-risk a lot of the public funds by saying we'll go in to the thing that hasn't proven itself yet or we think has proven itself, but maybe it needs more for you to really buy into it. We're willing to provide those funds. Right? We're willing to say, here's a long runway to prove this concept.

If we prove this concept, are you willing to work with your community partners to say, 'man, we can either reallocate these funds that we spend really inefficiently right now, or is there another mechanism for us to get additional funds?' We're looking for that sort of partnership or at least openness to it. An example is in Dallas. There's tons of CCMR dollars that get left on the table every year, right?

And the only barrier really to accessing that was much like I said, having an organization that could go to the schools and help them understand that these dollars were there and available, right? A billion dollars. It's Texas, it's a lot of money that's just sitting there. The only barrier was the funding needed by the backbone organizations to get out there and do the actual work. So when we go and we talk to folks, we say we think that that's a pretty good deal, right.

If we go spend the risky capital on the front end, which sets you up to come in and say, here's a thing that already works, we're going to expand it. And so it is part of what we're looking for when we go and we invest in a place. If we go to a place and there's sort of a negative environment around that concept, we're not as interested, right? And that goes both ways.

We've gone to blue states where there's a strong interest of going to red states that have a different economic interest, but some common interest around the overall health of this community. So for us, it's almost a prerequisite. We're not interested in going places where we do all the hard work or the other funders there locally do all the hard work, and then the government says, 'yeah, we see that that works, but we're going to fall back'.

Any final comments? We'll start with Ms. Evans.

Yeah, no. As you mentioned, it's pretty complicated to kind of explain this work, especially in a legislative process. And so we just really are grateful for this opportunity to educate and to continue to amplify this work, and we're excited to continue to advocate for this work. So I just want to say thank you.

Mr. Meadows.

I've been talking a lot, so just thankful to be on this panel. And I want to acknowledge the partnership of a lot of people in this room, a lot of folks that we learn a lot from, that we then try and take to other places and help them do much of what you guys are doing here. So Blue Meridian is very grateful and thankful for the partnership and the learning that we're doing along this way.

Thank you. Mr. Raya?

Yeah, I'll just say know, I was one of those kids that my family was homeless. We had to live in a shelter. We had to live in our car at times. And both my mom and I are high school dropouts, I think, because of that. And I think it didn't have to be that way. I always thought it didn't have to be that way. It just felt like the system wasn't really set up to support us on a journey toward academic and economic success.

So that's why I got into this business. And when I did graduate from Berkeley after going to community college, my whole mission has been, how do I help the system support other children like me and other moms like my mom? And the Harlem Children's Zone inspired me. When I saw it, I was like, yes, that's what we need. Something that connects the dots, something that organizes the different players and fills in all the gaps.

And in my experience with Mission Promise Neighborhood, I have seen proof of concept. It can be a very theoretical thing to talk about backbone agencies, collaboration, results based accountability. But to see it in practice, you can feel the power of it. And so now that we have proof of concept, I think it's time for us to normalize this as kind of the next evolution of government. This is how government can be more collaborative, more connected to the community, more data driven.

And so I see us in this room being part of that mission. I see you in particular being a champion for that. I'm really honored to be a part of that with all of you, and I look forward to seeing where we take this.

Mr. Davis?

Yes. Thank you, Assembly Member Bonta. Thank you personally. You're such a champion and a champion like we've not had in the past. So I'll offer these remarks not necessarily to you, but to your esteemed colleagues in the Assembly, in the Senate, and in the Governor's mansion. I would say help us help you. What we do is not novel even to the state of California. The state has made incredible investments in the community schools model.

So there's this recognition that at this smallest unit where children are met, have so many of their needs served, that there's investments there. The states made investments in serve. So there's this recognition that there's something about regional partnerships that is impactful and smart when it comes to organizing stakeholders to operationalize a process on a shared result. There's a gap from schools to these regions, you're missing neighborhoods and you're missing regional collaboratives.

And so with over $2 trillion, over $2 trillion that are coming to communities in the national legislation that is CHIPS, semiconductors, bipartisan infrastructure, ARP which is still unspent, and Inflation Reduction Act, these partnerships have already proved that they know how to sit as a part of that mechanism for deploying these capital when it comes to states in a formula funding or how to draw these down from a competitive standpoint and get these dollars that have been authorized and appropriated to ensuring that communities that have been left out forever day are not left out.

So I implore your colleagues to help us help you, so that this historical type of investment that's going to be made will not bypass the communities within the state of California that really, really need to be included in this historic and transformative period in our lifetimes.

Well, thank you to our panelists for holding space in this section as we really think about the incredible opportunity that we have before us. I want to appreciate you all for coming forward. We're going to end this panel now, and we're going to move to public comment. And I will offer some just closing remarks prior to public comment. And I lost the page. Oh, here it is.

So I just want to thank everyone, all of the panelists today from Mr. Canada, who came forward from Harlem Children's Zone and the William Julius Wilson Institute. Ms. Ernst, Ms. Martinez, Mr. Chavez, as well as Ms. Evans, Mr. Raya, Mr. Meadows and Mr. Davis. In coming forward to really be able to paint a picture of what is actual work that has been happening for decades, place-based initiatives.

And this idea of taking an approach that would allow us to be able to have a thoughtful, long term, holistic approach to supporting children and their families and by doing so uplifting communities, is not new to us. It's a decades old concept that actually originated in truest form in terms of funding support in the Federal Government during the Obama Administration with the Promise Neighborhoods Initiatives that were launched before then. We had community schools.

We had a lot of other ways where we were providing resources at the national level to this idea of 'it takes a village'. The reality is that this concept of it takes a village harkens back to my ancestry and the ancestry of many. When we think about this African proverb of 'It takes a village to raise a child', that is where we are right now. We have an opportunity to really have an intergenerational end to poverty.

That is the work that this place-based initiatives approach allows us to be able to take on. It is daunting, but it is completely achievable. We have the examples of so many of our place-based initiatives here, our partners who were able to present on some of the results, some of the opportunities, some of the ways in which they've been able to create a better community for our children and families.

That's in urban communities, in the most rural, in our high needs communities and where there are pockets of communities who continue to be unserved, not understood, and who can be connected to. So with that, we will continue to make sure that we're moving forward a very bold strategy that has been tested, that has been true and has been proven to be effective for our children and families.

In moving forward with Coordinated Care of Children and Families, very long title to say, we can do it. We can do it if we do it together. We can do it if we take a village. I want to thank you all for your participation, your expertise, bringing forward your stories and making sure that we can move this work forward.

I will continue to remain deeply committed to making sure that we have an opportunity to reframe the way that government does its work to eliminate poverty for everyone, and that we will do so in a way as our panelists shared, that is connected, that is data informed, that is flexible, that provides a true function of government, that breaks down silos and brings us all together. Because at the end of the day, we are here to serve people.

And people don't care if we are in the health agency, in the CDCR, in the Department of Children's Services. They only care that they are getting the support that they need. So I thank you for your time. With that, we will move on to public comment. As a reminder, the call in number for the hearing is (877) 692-8957 and the access code is 1315437. We will start with any witnesses in the room who would decide who want to give any testimony.

I think we're limiting public comment to two minutes, so please go ahead and form a line at the microphone there and then we'll move on to public comment over the telephone line.

Thank you. As you're coming up to the mic, you can give your name, affiliation, and a brief comment. No more than two minutes.

Hello. Good afternoon. My name is Ferreira. I am from Venezuela. I am with my daughter here. Very grateful. I'm a mother and a leader with Promesa. I am very happy to be here in this state, in this city, San Francisco, with Promesa. I have received so much support: housing, employment, food, and mental health.

I'm asking for you to continue providing help to this community. They have helped me to be a strong mother with my daughter. And publicly, I like to thank them for everything that they have done and helped me and my colleagues. They continue being stronger and continue helping us, and they continue having these type of programs. And honestly thank you.

Gracias.

Good afternoon. We are part of the Committee. My name is Tabiana, I am from Venezuela. I've been here for two years here in the United States. I am 16 years old.

I am here on behalf of the PROMESA program, The Mission. Yeah. This summer, I had the opportunity to be with them and working. And I found out, and I was very proud that they take into consideration of us, the young people. They take our comments, our stuff into consideration. I feel very proud because I learned things that I thought that I would never learn.

Like food banks, taxes, how to do our taxes. How to help people get homes that really need them. And that's where I learned that us young people have a voice and how we can help other people as well. This is like a job for us young people. And be able to build this with other young people as well and give information to the community.

That us young people also have a right to work. I know that this experience is going to help my future and I know that in a couple of years I see myself. In two years, I will be a psychologist. Thank you.

Gracias.

Good afternoon, and thank you, Assembly Member Bonta for your leadership in this space. My name is Mike Espinosa, and I'm the Executive Director of the Children's Movement of Fresno. Here on behalf of the Fresno County Cradle to Career, we're making "It Takes a Village" a reality. In Fresno County, people are out of their silos, collaborating, sharing data and coordinating resources, including community and settling priorities and decision making is also a huge part of the work.

And the Children's Movement of Fresno works hand in hand with Fresno Cradle to Career to ensure that community voice is front and center. The Fresno Cradle to Career Partnership includes 72 Member organizations across 10 sectors and connects education, health, housing, county and city, local governments, local business, community based organizations and more. We are learning in real time that when we work together, we can do so much more than any one of us can do alone. I can share a couple of examples.

First is the COVID Equity project launched in 2020. In the immediate response to the pandemic, the partners include the Fresno County Department of Public Health, the University of California San Francisco Fresno Campus, and more than 18 community based organizations organized into three coalitions immigrant and Refugee, African American and Persons with Disabilities. Each coalition, using community health workers recruited from among the communities they serve, provided language specific and culturally respectful outreach, education, testing, contact tracing and quarantine supports.

After launching in July 2020 and operating, the new system was plug and play ready for vaccine distribution to hard to reach populations in early 2021. As a result of the work of the COVID Equity Project, Fresno county had the highest vaccination rate in the San Joaquin Valley, 32nd in California. Among farm workers, Low income residents and mostly those of color received quarantine and isolation support in the amount of more than $1.6 million by November 2021.

Based on Fresno County's result, a state RFP was issued to support more development of this type of community health worker network model. This work represents the return on investment that Emerald Evans of Grayson in child Poverty referenced in her comments earlier today and also indicate direct savings to the local hospital systems in Fresno County. The second example is a collaboration to improve literacy rates for our foster youth. We call it the Foster Youth Network improvement community.

We are leveraging state funded continuous improvement teams in the education sector to help lead this work. This collaborative project has a high level of access across sector coordination.

Participants include Fresno Unified School District, Fresno County Department of Social Services Fresno County Juvenile Dependency Court, District Attorney, Probation Department and the Public Defender Fresno County Superintendent of School's, Foster and Homeless Education Services and Literacy content coach court appointed special services multi community based community based organizations who provide support specifically for foster youth and of course, foster youth themselves. The early data on school stability and chronic absenteeism is remarkable and literacy improvement is positive. The project is being scaled in 202324.

Our county DSS seeing the tremendous benefit benefits bringing everyone in the foster youth system together, is now helping to Fund the work with title Four E federal dollars. None of this would be happening in Fresno without C two C weaving it all together by building trust and relationships across sectors, collecting and connecting data and creating the platform to launch innovative ideas. Thank you.

Thank you.

Chair Bonta. Thank you for being a champion, for cradle to career and the Promise Neighborhood model of helping the whole child, whole family, and whole community thrive. My name is Greg Keplerley. I'm the CEO of Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County, where for the last 14 years, we were inspired by Jeffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone and President Obama and the expansion of promise neighborhood to create our own.

Neighborhood based strategy called the Franklin Mckinley Children's Initiative, which is a collaborative of 30 organizations, including the Franklin Mckinley School District, Santa Clara County Office of Ed, the City of San Jose, the county 30 nonprofits, businesses and foundations. The beauty of it is, when families come into places like Educare or the community centers, they have no idea which organization they're talking to or helping them.

All they know is they're getting the help that they need and in the time that they need, in the way that's respectful and caring. The beautiful thing about what's happening now is the families themselves are co designing the solutions. When we started, the mom said, we want our kids to be safe going to and from school. We want them to get a quality education. And by the way, we want to learn English and be able to get our own jobs.

And then we wrapped our arms around the community, and the community is leading us. So I invite you to come to San Jose, come to see Santee, and you can see a thriving, promising neighborhood. Thank you.

Thank you.

My name is Anna Aviles. I am a parent leader at San Francisco, and I also work for Mission Promise neighborhood. I was actually a client prior to being a staff Member there. And I truly believe in the work because look where I'm at. Standing in front of you all and continuing to advocate not for just my children, but all the children in the State of California, because we know that they all deserve to reach their full potential and work in collaboration.

And it starts in the prenatal stages, right? Families being informed, knowing what to do, how to do it, especially for those families that don't have family Members in their community. But we are your family, right? And so, prior to being I was extreme, in poverty, lived in below market rate housing with my mom. Now I can say that I am the one that brought Jahaira and Daviana.

And it's just so powerful to see that the resources that I receive, I'm handing it off and I'm sharing it with them. And then they're able to come and speak their truth, their voice. And yes, our youth and our families are the center of the work that we do. And the work that we do is because of them and with them. Not for them, but with them. Right?

And so co creation with our youth, co creating with our families and having them lead the way, it's extremely important. And I feel that if we continue to listen to our families voices because they're the experts of their lived experiences, not us. And so just continue to bring that up. And thank you all for the work that you're doing here.

Thank you. Thank you. We will move now to the phone lines. Operator, is there anyone on the line wishing to speak?

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, if you do wish to make a comment, please press 10 at this time. Again, it's 10. And give us just a moment. Here we'll go. First to line number 12.

Hi, am I line number 12?

Yes, you are.

Well, I'm calling today as a mother of four, and I've been listening for several hours now to a lot of information in this hearing, and I could take my comment a number of directions, but since the COVID pandemic has been brought up repeatedly in this hearing by panel experts and lawmakers alike, I guess I'll speak to that particular topic.

California actually had the worst outcomes for children during the COVID Lockdowns of all other states, right down to the longest times that children were denied access to in person education. And frankly, in the process of the disaster that was the handling of the COVID Pandemic in California, it is the children who have been most harmed.

What Californians and California is trying to do is actually not recover from COVID but recover from the COVID policies that have destroyed this state at the hand of elected officials, and that includes you, the Legislature. As a result of these lockdowns and the miserable outcomes for all children, we're now seeing parents participate more and more throughout various communities in California, in public life, at school Board Meetings, and in other sectors that pertain directly to children.

And as a parent of four children myself, I can tell you with certainty that I trust nothing, that you, the Legislature, do nothing. My children are actually being homeschooled at this point because everything you lawmakers touch in California, you destroy. And in no way will I ever agree to you hurting my children any more than you already have.

My husband is actually a public school teacher who is planning to leave the profession because of how public education has been destroyed at the level of policy, at the hands of the supermajority lawmakers and their obeyance to an equally corrupt Governor. A Governor who kept this state locked down for over a thousand days. A Governor who destroyed small businesses, who took parental rights away.

Thank you. Please wrap your comments.

On an experimental EUA vaccine being injected into 40 million people. And this is after the next...

Go to line 13.

Thank you.

Hi, your line is open.

Hi, my name is Marie Caldwell and I'm the Executive Director of Siskiyou Works and also coordinate the Cradle to career for Siskyou County Network as part of the north State Together regional cross sector cradle to career partnership. I'm also part with North State together of the cradle to career California coalition. As part of the 10 counties, we coordinate and align work across all 10 of those counties in the far Northern California region, we involve over 250 partners. We have countless sectors represented.

Cradle to career funding is imperative to ensure deployment of programs and initiatives that directly tackle the pinch points of transition between elementary to middle to high school into postsecondary education, as well as coordinating and aligning that work with English and Math targets at third grade, 8th grade and high school. In addition to that entry point of kindergarten readiness transition, one example of our regional deployment of this type of work is the K 16 Collaborative.

We have four key elements that we are deploying and focused on, which is transition to post secondary inclusive equitable instruction within classrooms, early college credit, and high tech high tech counseling. And this is to support students and families for an upwardly mobile and economic success. Through this system, we've impacted student success. We've seen a 46% increase over the last two years of postsecondary enrollment at Chester College. This is directly linked to our North State. To gather work in Siskiyou County, we've been able to coordinate and align all of the consortium work to focus on career technical planning and an education and career action plan for each student.

So in order to coordinate and help students and families take that next step and ensure our workforce is ready and willing to jump in to help support those small businesses and be part of large economic increases across our region, cradle to career networks can really support that work, ensuring that we're aligning and coordinating rather than duplicating.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for your time.

And currently none further in queue.

Well, thank you so much. With that we will offer just final comments. I want to again thank all of the panelists for coming forward and was also very appreciative of hearing through public comment from Fresno C to C Franklin Mckinley Children's Initiative, which I've actually seen an earlier version of, and here from Siskiyou County as well. We know that there are many place based, cradle to career coordinated initiatives that are happening across the State of California. I'll leave you with this thought.

This last year, we were able to secure $12 million of funding to support promised neighborhood cradle to career initiatives in the State of California. Also this last year, the State of California spent $14.6 billion in supporting our prison system.

When we really think about how we should invest and reallocate our dollars to ensure that every child has the ability to thrive, that every community Member has the ability to have a healthy community, where academic achievement is something that is within the grasp of every individual, where economic development is within the grasp of every family. We have a great opportunity here. I want to thank you all for participating in this hearing. And with that, we will conclude. Thank you very much.