2019 County Innovation Videos & Blogs

Alameda County resident Shanika Pate and her 14-year-old daughter would drive to a new townhouse development every day and pray outside that their application would be accepted.  And when they received the green light to move, their lives started on a new path.

Being a teenager can be a very complicated and difficult period of life. Add the daunting responsibility and fear of becoming a teen parent and life can seem overbearing. That’s where the Orange County Teen Parent Program comes in – to assist teen parents under the age of 18 through the child-support process while also providing the resources to help them succeed.

Prior to joining CSAC last fall, I spent over a decade working for a nutrition education organization where I witnessed the heralded birth of our own workplace wellness program. When an organization employing a dozen registered dietitians and health advocates struggled to keep its employees engaged in wellness, I realized I was about to witness something great when I started learning more about Mendocino County’s Working on Wellness Program.

Yuba County’s 14Forward program for the homeless is a success story. It’s taken a lot of collaboration, creativity, patience, learning, and trust-building since it opened its doors in July 2016 – but the results are evident. The program is taking people off the streets and helping them turn their lives around.

14Forward’s tiny homes made out of modified Tuff Sheds get a lot of the publicity, but the program is much more than that. It provides wrap-around services for homeless individuals who are ready to start a new chapter.

On a hot Thursday afternoon in September 2011, San Diego County was plunged into darkness when a massive power outage hit the region, caused by a grid malfunction across the southwestern United States. The blackout spanned from North County to Coronado and left millions of San Diego County residents without power for over 12 hours.  Power was restored but in the aftermath, County officials learned a lot about the vulnerabilities and gaps in their emergency response plan.

Two special rooms within the Sacramento County Youth Detention Facility are having a strong, positive impact on the residents. They are called “multi-sensory de-escalation rooms,” and the County is the first juvenile detention facility in the United States to open such a program.

These de-escalation rooms provide a safe environment where the facility’s residents can calm down and regulate their feelings without use of force or being put in isolation. This is a skill that can serve them well when they are back in the community.

In a twelfth floor conference room overlooking the serpentine shoreline of Lake Merritt in Oakland, Sarah Church sits down and takes a drink from her reusable, stainless-steel water bottle. Church works for Alameda County in the Office of Sustainability where she and colleague Karen Cook collaborate with the County’s Procurement Department to advance the county’s Sustainable Purchasing Program – an impressive initiative that has grown over two decades to become one of the leading green procurement efforts in California local government.