The ACTION Council has for many years been a convener of community leaders, funders, service providers and service recipients to assess the critical issues impacting Monterey County. These assessments have led to the formation of new organizations, programs and alliances, such as Community Oral Health Services, the Nonprofit Alliance for Monterey County, Girls Incorporated of the Central Coast and the Family to Family community-based foster care initiative. We focus on systems change rather than filling gaps in services, so that new, more effective means of service delivery are initiated, resulting in a shift in the way the community responds to its needs.

Our current long-term project, Pathways to Safety, will result in both a new direction in the county’s response to allegations of child abuse and an integrated network of services that are responsive, accessible and sustainable.

Pathways to Safety is an early intervention and prevention initiative designed to keep children safe at home and out of the child welfare system. It is a community-based response to the first signs of family problems that might endanger children. Pathways to Safety provides a systematic way to engage families to help them identify and access the specific services they need, while providing them with personal guidance and support to stabilize their lives.

The Department of Social and Employment Services receives close to 5,000 calls each year to report suspected child abuse and neglect. Less then 20% of these referrals reach the legal threshold for abuse, making it impossible for the county to intervene. Pathways to Safety offers a community response to families experiencing stress by connecting them to service providers to help ameliorate the impact those stressors have on themselves and their children.

Our research for this project revealed that families face many barriers to accessing services: cost, lack of transportation, shame, language, long waiting lists, lack of knowledge. Pathways to Safety is based on the premise that, as a community, we all bear responsibility for the safety of children. This responsibility includes ensuring a prompt response with appropriate services that are available, respectful, culturally sensitive, convenient and affordable. For families to successfully engage in and benefit from services, those services must be offered in their neighborhoods, in their languages and at times they can attend – not during work hours.

Many services were identified as critical to meeting families’ needs: mental health counseling, parent education, substance abuse treatment, domestic violence services, job training, teen services, affordable health care, respite and child care, and affordable housing.

Other research conducted by the ACTION Council demonstrated that most community agencies were at capacity: they would have difficulty accepting more clients without an increase in staff and funding. At the same time, most agencies reported they expected an increase in service demand. Given these facts, referring thousands of new families to existing services through Pathways to Safety would put a severe strain on the communities’ capacity to serve them.

Thus, a major focus of the ACTION Council is to conduct organizational assessments to identify technical assistance needs of traditional and non-traditional service providers and offer training and mentoring in specific areas of need, such as program development, organizational and board development, fund development and financial management, and outreach and marketing. Assessments are done with individual agencies and in large community “open space” forums. At these forums, community members and service providers work together to identify strategies for meeting the needs of children and families. The goal is to help create a sustainable network of community services that would benefit not only the families referred through Pathways to Safety but the larger community as well.