Breaking Barriers California

This session will review the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence and Santa Clara County Office of Education currently developing Toolkit for development of school-based and school linked health education programs.  The presentation will focus on how to begin by building shared leadership, with a particular emphasis on how leaders in county agencies can use this Toolkit to to do just that. We look forward to discussing how we concretely move integrating children’s systems forward and what tools exist in the field to support us all.

The number of initiatives across California seems to be multiplying. Teachers are asked to implement many different, but similar, projects and programs. School leaders are struggling to get their staff excited about these new requests, while districts weigh the costs and benefits of making one more ask for one more initiative. How can leaders across various levels of the educational system "turn down the white noise" and support folks working most closely with students to implement holistic practices so all learners can thrive? 

The El Dorado County Commission for Youth and Families is using a collaborative leadership approach to break down systemic barriers  and create durable changes. In this session, you'll learn how the Commission brings together community voices to make decisions and plan strategically, on how to align systems and better serve youth and families.

The Commission's success comes from a dedicated, blended leadership team that saw the potential for real collaboration. With strong support from elected officials, agency leaders, community members with firsthand experience and youth, the Commission has built a foundation of widespread support and trust. This collaborative leadership has been the key to pushing the work forward and overcoming past challenges.

This session will walk you through the processes and outcomes of this shared leadership model, showing how working together leads to innovative problem-solving. You’ll come away with insights on how to build the groundwork for sustainable system change—ensuring that in El Dorado County, families can easily access the services they need to thrive.

For more information about the Commission's current efforts, visit El Dorado County Commission for Youth and Families. To learn about how the Commission got started, read The Bellwether Report. 

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The Decoded campaign is a collaborative initiative that bridges the gap between behavioral health and public health departments across California, fostering shared goals and leveraging resources to address youth substance use. Originally launched as Cannabis Decoded in 2018 by the County of San Mateo, the campaign has expanded to provide reliable, factual information related to substance use and mental health, as well as resources for young people and their trusted adults.

In this session, we’ll discuss how a key feature of Decoded is the active involvement of youth in shaping the campaign. Through youth-led councils and advisory groups, young people provide essential insights that ensure the campaign resonates authentically with their peers. Decoded employs innovative strategies such as edu-gaming, grassroots outreach, and healing through art programming, creating engaging, non-judgmental conversations about mental health and substance use. Grounded in radical trust, Decoded meets young people where they are, fostering authentic dialogue without relying on fear or shame.

The conversation will continue with the afternoon session, "Cross-County Collaboration & Innovative Strategies."

Children, youth, and young adults across the nation have been experiencing significant mental health and substance use challenges – a crisis that was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and led the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) to declare a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health. This crisis also led the United States Surgeon General to issue an advisory on ‘Protecting Youth Mental Health.’ 

To address this crisis, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) created a priority focus on child and youth behavioral health as part of the 2023-2026 SAMHSA Strategic Plan. In this plan, SAMHSA recommends responding to the urgent needs of children, youth and families through a tiered public health approach that emphasizes wellness, prevention, early intervention, along with treatment and recovery services. The goal is to expand access to effective interventions and match each child with the right service at the right time through a comprehensive and integrated system of care.

For this session, Dr. Blau will highlight the need for ‘Seismic Shifts’ to transform the system and improve outcomes. These seismic shifts include integration across child-serving systems and the scaling of systems of care, expansion of school-based and school-linked behavioral health services, the implementation of mobile response and crisis stabilization services, expanding workforce capacity and increasing access to services and supports, reducing health disparities and promoting culturally appropriate services, and incorporating the use of evidence-based interventions and measurement-based care. Dr. Blau will also discuss the role of technology to support the behavioral health of children, youth and families, including the impacts of social media, and he will highlight the importance of leadership to bring about system improvement. 

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Are your educators grappling with the challenges they face with a growing neurodiverse student population? Do they feel overwhelmed by the learning and behavioral health needs of their students? 

Children’s Health Council (CHC) set out on a journey to find a way to streamline getting needed expertise to every educator. We think that new technologies, like AI, can help us do that.

Pairing trustworthy resources with AI can put that expertise in every educator’s hands by providing actionable insights and practical strategies for the challenges that educators face every day.

CHC has been providing learning and mental health services for students and families in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 70 years and is now bringing that expertise to educators on a national scale. Along with a coalition of trusted partner organizations, we are providing easy to access resources that are specific to their situation, their students and their classroom through the power of AI.

Come and be among the first to see the latest prototype of this exciting new resource that is currently in development! It’s the expertise you want and need at your fingertips. With Ellis, all you do is add information about challenges you are facing with students, and you’ll receive valuable, practical strategies and insights you can use from trusted, expert resources.

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The Steinberg Institute is a leading independent nonprofit committed to advancing bold behavioral health public policy solutions. Our vision is for all people to have access to quality care—when, where, and for as long as they need it. Over the past 20 years, the Mental Health Services Act (MHSA) has infused billions into California’s mental health system, transforming countless lives. Yet, despite more than doubling behavioral health spending in the past decade, access to care has stagnated, and meaningful outcome tracking remains elusive.

Proposition 1 and the Behavioral Health Services Act (BHSA) aim to change this. As stewards of the original MHSA—guided by the vision of our founder who championed the original legislation—the Steinberg Institute is dedicated to ensuring the success of these transformative initiatives. Through our Vision 2030 initiative, we advocate for systems that not only track meaningful outcomes but also deliver programs proven to reduce incarceration, hospitalization, and homelessness. Equally critical is our focus on strengthening California’s behavioral health workforce, ensuring they are empowered to support our most vulnerable communities.

As the state of California makes unprecedented investments in behavioral health transformation, it's clear that all partners working in behavioral health (public and private) will be needed to ensure success. This discussion will explore the opportunity to partner collaboratively around shared goals in Proposition 1 and the BHSA. The session will identify strategies for engaging key collaborators, identifying key outcomes, and working together to improve the lives of individuals living with behavioral health conditions.

The Decoded campaign is a collaborative initiative that bridges the gap between behavioral health and public health departments across California, fostering shared goals and leveraging resources to address youth substance use. Originally launched as Cannabis Decoded in 2018 by the County of San Mateo, the campaign has expanded to provide reliable, factual information related to substance use and mental health as well as resources for young people and their trusted adults. Through cross-county collaboration, Decoded enables public health systems to share resources and extend their reach, optimizing funding by creating a unified campaign adaptable to each county’s unique needs.

In this session, we will explore the importance of cross-county collaboration and the innovative ideas that have emerged from the Decoded campaign. Examples include utilizing an Office of Traffic Safety grant to develop a harm-reduction cannabis DUI campaign and implementing the Healing Through Art initiative for youth in schools. Participants will learn how various counties have effectively adapted materials, demonstrating the power of shared resources and collaborative efforts in addressing youth substance use. This session will emphasize how working together enhances the reach and impact of prevention and education efforts across California.

The conversation is a continuation of the earlier session, "Youth Involvement in Building the Decoded Campaign."

Collecting data is not enough! Leveraging data and information across systems is how we coordinate care and fund services for the whole child. With a focus on IT solutions and centering student data protection and privacy, this learning session provides participants with the opportunity to join a multi-disciplinary panel as they take you on their journey of making this REAL. In this session, you will hear where they started, where they are now and the questions they are still grappling with as they implement a school-based countywide Data Warehouse, Electronic Health Record System and their efforts to co-join data across county child serving agencies. Whether you are a County Office of Education, Technology Company, Community-Based Provider, County Behavioral Health or representing another child serving entity, join us as the panel shares “their” emerging story, facilitates a collaborative discussion with you and provides resources that might help you on your journey to Shared Information.

As education and health unite services and supports for children and youth, this session is designed for stakeholders across agencies to gain a better understanding of the Health Insurance Portability and AccountabilityAct (HIPAA) and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and their application, particularly in the context of educational settings. This session will dive into some of the commonly asked questions in school-based and school-linked health programs governed by HIPAA and FERPA and discuss scenarios pertaining to current implementation. Please come join us as we learn to effectively break barriers to expanded care and support for California’s children, youth and families.

Speakers:

• Elizabeth Estes, Executive Director, Breaking Barriers California; Clinical Professor of Public Policy, McGeorge School of Law

• Rebecca Gudeman, Senior Director, Health National Center for Youth Law (NYCL)

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Background: Through Children’s Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI), CalHHS aims to inspire systems change by strengthening opportunities for partnership and building foundational elements for more coordinated efforts across the children and youth behavioral health ecosystem. 

Purpose/Session objectives: As part of an evaluation of the CYBHI, Mathematica is conducting case studies in nine counties to describe the behavioral health ecosystems that serve children, youth, and families in each county; understand how CYBHI workstreams and other behavioral health initiatives are progressing; and determine how ecosystems evolve during CYBHI implementation. 

In this session, we explore (1) connections and working relationships between child- and youth-serving organizations; (2) spotlight multisector collaboratives; (3) facilitators and barriers to multisector collaboration, which refers to organizations from different sectors working together; and (4) how the ecosystem supports implementation of CYBHI workstreams and other behavioral health programs and initiatives. 

Methods: The case studies include the Network and Ecosystem Experiences Survey (NEES) and key informant interviews conducted with representatives of child- and youth-serving organizations. 

 We asked an administrator from the county behavioral health department or county office of education to serve as a champion for the study. Champions helped identify potential respondents and encourage their participation. They also helped the research team select two multisector collaboratives in each county that support children and youth behavioral health and systems change for inclusion on the survey and interview guides. We completed the first wave of data collection between April and August 2024 and will complete the second wave in fall 2025. We focus on findings from two geographically and demographically different counties in California: Humboldt County and Alameda County.

Main findings: We describe the strength of connections across the behavioral health ecosystems in Humboldt and Alameda County. For both counties, the strength of the connections between organization and level of connection for each organization varied. The multisector collaboratives in both counties have implemented strategies to create a more integrated ecosystem and have made progress to align and integrate systems. 

Conclusion: In the first year of implementation of CYBHI, counties show progress on developing partnerships and building foundational elements for more coordinated efforts across the children and youth behavioral health ecosystem.

Speakers: Ruchir Karmali, Ph.D, Amanda Lechner, MPP, Select County Representatives

Join Breaking Barriers, Monterey County, and CredibleMind at the 2024 Symposium to discover an innovative self-screening and resource referral program designed to address mental health and substance use disorders in community youth and families. This presentation will showcase Monterey County's recent success in reaching underserved populations through broad awareness efforts and an efficient self-screening tool that connects individuals to the appropriate local resources and self-help options.

Validated by a UC Berkeley evaluation team, this program has tripled Monterey County's reach dramatically improving access to care, particularly for populations with unmet needs, such as transitional age youth. The program’s implementation also correlated with reduced costs for the County, making it a sustainable model for other regions.

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This presentation will provide a brief overview of Fresno County Superintendent of Schools' (FCSS) All 4 Youth program. Participants will gain knowledge in Fresno County's continuum of mental health care including the multitiered systems of support. Learn how FCSS is bridging and braiding funding from Mental Health Services Oversight & Accountability Commission (MHSOAC), Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI), Student Behavioral Health Incentive Program (SBHIP), Mental Health Student Services Act (MHSSA), Transforming Together (T2), Department of Health Care Access and Information (HCAI), and District Assistance (DA).

This Learning Session will focus on how to create sustainability by braiding funding from multiple funding sources such as Mental Health Student Services Act (MHSSA), Mental Health Services Oversight & Accountability Commission (MHSOAC), Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI), Student Behavioral Health Incentive Program (SBHIP), , Transforming Together (T2), the Department of Health Care Access and Information (HCAI), and district resources.

Session abstract: Earlier this year, ARPA-H -- a new federal agency, set up to pursue "moonshots" to improve the nation's health -- launched a $100 million population-health outcomes funding mechanism. The "Health Care Rewards to Achieve Improved Outcomes" (HEROES) program offers a $15 million prize to regions who achieve on of 4 transformative goals, such as a 10% reduction in opioid overdoses in a population of 500,000 or more. In this learning session, we'll dig into the HEROES program, its antecedents and enablers in the Pay for Success world, and how similar mechanisms could enable California to reach bigger for the state's children.

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Knowing what funding is available is one piece of the puzzle; navigating (and negotiating!) through the best strategies to leverage available funding fits those puzzle pieces together. With a focus on centering students and building a comprehensive system of school-based behavioral health supports that relies on partnerships, this learning session will guide participants through a facilitated discussion exploring case scenarios where shared financing can get tricky and embracing your partners’ perspectives is critical. Whether you’re a county office of education, school district, county behavioral health agency, or community-based provider, this session will challenge participants to analyze how they approach “their” funding and better understand how to navigate shared financing between partners.