about two hundred fifty thousand clients every day we administer a variety of services we have our child welfare department that's everything related to foster care so investigations placement adoptions all house within one of the departments in the agency we have our adult aging and medical services department they do adult protective services in home support services the area agency on aging which provides a repair riot of senior services throughout the county and we've also house our medical program which i think will talk about a little bit later in an album i look at the mission statement is our mission is to promote the economic social world being of individuals over all we are at an agency that is here to serve we are the safety net for the county so folks who are hungry who have no place to live or who are in need a financial support employment support our agency is equipped to provide those services for me personally i've always wanted to help i mean that just sounds you know it sounds kind of cliche cliche as a rule but really i'm here to serve  i started out really interested in african american boys and what was happening with them in third fourth grade in the educational system and it broadened from there looking at what was happening to our families in the african american community and been in impoverished the safety net where they are provide a multitude of services for every age group so we serve zero to one hundred and older if that if they exist the you feel that the mission of social services come in last this is your empathy and compassion may take a different kind of direction of a probably even stronger wish and how you feel about that from just talking to you i think you know when i look at the staff that work within social services i think we all have something that brought us to the work and what brings us is the desire to help those who are neediest and i think my staff have to display in i have a lot of compassion for people who are in need and to do that every single day it's it raises a lot of personal issues i mean for some of us you know helping someone who is in need of food can also can also be very close to home many of us have family members who are in the same situation so i think just as an as an agency that we struggle sometimes with our own personal experiences with with poverty and with you i mean i have you know a typical family structure mom dad siblings who are their parents whether or not their parents are actively involved in their lives certainly can very i would say that i was raised by my dad i'm a stepmother my dad is a very strong influence for me certainly my grandmother was another very strong influence for me a hard worker you know taking this and so i think a lot of my values are entrenched with the upbringing that i had and the support that i had from my family but certainly i would say if my dad were here he would talk about me bringing home i would constantly bring home people that i thought were in need if i had a friend that needed something to my house they would come so i think for me even an early age i was taught and embrace the idea of giving impacts so many people you're right i would say you know being a leader in in a large organization is much more challenging than i think i even expect specked it certainly you know i came to this work thank you but i was going to change the way that government interfaced with families and communities and have found myself kind of a part of government and often on the defensive end as i'm trying to change things i certainly can't do it without strong staff i can't do it without a strong executive team they're there to kind of carry out the mission what was most important was to establish very early on our goals and our objectives what we plan to do we have three primary goals within the agency it was all around customer service improving customer service collaboration and ensuring that we were collaborating with the community but also communication when i came in i realize not many people knew what social services did what we as an agency what were we there to provide and not only within the community to people not know but even within the agency were so large that from one department to the next people didn't know staff didn't know what the other departments were providing so improving our that what we did probably within the first few months of my taking on the agency director position was a stablish in priorities it's all too often given to the breadth of services that we provide it's very easy to get distracted because the need is so great and so we establish three priorities straight to strategies the first was around health care reform we knew it was coming and we knew we had to change the way we did business to be able to implement such a huge reform effort the second was around workforce development the idea that folks come to social services for assistance it should be temporary our role is to move people through the public system off of public assistance into something that makes them self's self reliant and  have income that self sustaining sufficient self sustaining so finding jobs helping people get employment became our second strategy and the third one which really came out of my days in child welfare was around fatherhood and the way that we worked with mindy in general particularly men of color and how we promoted the presence of male role models and fathers in the lives of children in their families not necessarily promoting marriage but making sure that both parents were involved and aware of what was happening within a child so that the outcomes for children in our community were much better we've seen and we know from research that when you have both parents involved children do better in school they're less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system so how is an agency did we contribute to the presence of men in the lives of their families and ensure that they received equitable and and fair services when they came to our agency for assistance  our agency and not everybody who comes to our doors needing assistance is coming with the intent to commit fraud there are lots of roles or lots of regulations and oftentimes if folks make a mistake it may fall under the category of fraud so they get a job a temporary job for thirty days or you know for three months so they're bringing they have income but they're also receiving a public benefit i would argue that there are some that may not realize that that could be considered fraudulent so there's the mal intent is not there and then certainly there are a small minority that have learned how to work the system but we have a fraud unit  we go through and do quality assurance and quality control on our cases we try to educate our staff so that we're not it's not just about controlling who gets benefits the reality is that people come to our doors we are there to serve and that should be the the first thing that we consider is the service and then on the back we have anough controls in place that we can alleviate folks from slipping down that slippery slope of fraud and the reason why i brought that up is because the whole different issue of poverty is changing and folks are on the borderline maybe have extra job and then you know they're too rich to be poor and too poor to be rich address the health care reform activity that needed to happen and we tried to consolidate where all of that activity would occur so that we had a single manager overseeing that the process we put kiosks in our waiting rooms  one of the things that we did anticipate is that we would have more residents of alameda county coming through our doors and not all of them actually need to have a face to face interaction with that with a staff person and so pie putting in  key making sure that our website was up and running that people could do things either through the website or coming in and using our kiosk so that it was self service would move folks through our process more efficiently worked hard to get a whole new the win which is another richer thank you thank you you can also go through their websites actually do some of our applications online as well or so all of that is you know we know that people are more tech savvy so they don't necessarily need to come into the office and certainly we're still there and available if folks want to come into the office we are continuing to try to improve just the look and feel of the waiting rooms you know moving people through more timely more efficiently  we've hired more staff one of the things that we found over the previous fiscal years is that we've had to reduce the number of staff or we haven't been able to hire just this last year the board basically accepted a recommendation from the agency to hire a little over two hundred additional staff and that also would help with the increase in your of residence and one of the things i might add you know we did our initial estimates last time it was here we talked about just the number of people that we anticipated would be eligible for medicare we were anticipating you know about fifty five thousand of them newly eligible we actually into at the end of the day ended up with close to eighty thousand wallie eligible so our estimates were on the low side and certainly the addition of staff has been helpful there have been some technology glitches before state level and elsewhere and we continue to work through that but we've been working through trying to make our system more efficient  we've done some asset building workshops so we've started to add in financial literacy classes for clients or trying to talk with folks not just about getting a monthly benefit from the agency but really how do you begin to to build a savings how do you do credit repair how do you work towards not only getting a job but actually having some money in the bank and what does that mean to save and how do you create your own wealth we have put farmer's markets at our buildings now again the idea looking at food access and introducing residents to healthy food providing employment opportunities through a wage subsidy program so that employers actually get fifty percent of their wages subsidized if they hire our cow works and clients so there's been a lot of i think new initiatives a new programs that we've put in place over the last probably over the time lately are usually things that are related to work so we have several reports that have just come out the most recent i hate to say this but my bedside reading right now has been an evaluation or general assistance program and so that becomes my f in terms of mentors previous directors my colleagues around the state oftentimes i'll talk with them the previous agency director has continued to be an ear for me just to kind of get to see what was done in the past and you know kind of kind of frame where i may want to move a particular program or recommendations that may come forward certainly the county administrator says i'm ready she has been i would say a  strong role model for me you know a female woman of color i think she works twenty four hours a day but certainly has been there when i've needed to just kind of vent or just figure out what's a stronger relationship with behavioral health care services why don't we approach your services from them from them for mental health assessments and for alcohol and other drug services for our clients i think we are getting better at assessing mental illness and coming up with programs and and services for folks so that they can not only get the assistance that they need but it helps us better assess what we need to do for them i'm not everybody is employer right now so when they come in in need of coward services i think trying to find ways to stabilize them including therapeutic services again you know drug treatment if necessary housing assistance all of those things become critical to make someone job ready the soft supports once someone does get a job when someone does find employment the saw supports to help them sustain that for folks who have been out of out of the workforce for any length of time and going back in can be an adjustment and i think we've gotten better at recognizing and understanding that and not blaming the client for not doing well but understanding that there's a process that we need to support in order to ensure their success so i w don't really have a choice in the matter so that certainly helps the affordable care act almost forced the agency to to move in a different direction but i certainly think that our board of supervisors and the county administrator understand the challenges of just the finances how we spend our dollars the dollars that are needed to make change certainly they have supported the recommendations that i've come forward with and understand that there isn't a need to hold ourselves accountable we are putting in more outcome measures within our contracts and so we're holding our contractors more metrics yes i'm holding our contractors more accountable for the dollars that we're providing them and all of that has have your one of the things that we continue to get better at because we're not we're not all the way you're there yet but what we continue to get better at is how we utilize the data that we have to make decisions about where to spend money into how to how  to better serve our clients certainly how to provide the supports that are necessary within our staffing structure and all of that i mean comes with with a lot of thought we use our results a results based accountability structure  how much how much are we doing who's better off you know could we do it better i mean those are the kind of the things that we're looking at every contract now as we move forward and we have you know over two hundred  through every single one systematically trying to answer those questions and put metrics within the body of the contract and we hold folks accountable to but that then means we have to be collecting the data it's i will say one of the things that we have struggled with is what we're collecting and are we asking the same questions you know you could ask a question and use the data in so many different ways so we have to be very clear about what we're asking for sometimes it's not just a matter of how many people got served it's how do you get the information about how well they were served and that can be qualitative it's not necessarily quantitative so those become part of the discussions that we end up having  knowing that our agency as large as it is is committed to serving the community and that we're committed to serving the community in the best possible way we are a huge bureaucratic agency lots of red tape as perceived but certainly we are here to break down barriers to find ways to better serve our community to ensure that residents of alameda county not only have their basic needs met but anything that we can do that  inhance is the community within which we live because we're all a part of this community is better off and that that i guess would be the final word that i would have well you know i think the mission statement holds true