 here at Davis Media Access for another episode of In the Studio. I'm Autumn Lab-A-Reno. I'm your host today for this episode. We're talking about some exciting and possibly life-changing services coming to Davis for folks who need to access them. My guests today are Yolo County Supervisor Don Saylor, who covers the Second District, and Nolan Sullivan, who is the Service Center's Branch Director for the Yolo County Health and Human Services Agency, and welcome to you both. Thank you. So we're here today because I'm on your email list, Don, and a couple months ago you sent out some exciting news that people are going to be able to access various county health and human services here in Davis, and that hasn't happened before. So let's start there. How did this come about? Well, Autumn, I think you are aware we have a building at 600 A Street. That's right between the Senior Center and Davis City Hall. That's a county building. Now, this building was constructed 40 years ago as a courthouse. Overflow court space was what it was needed. Over time it's housed a number of different functions, including the City of Davis print shop and a child program, computer lab, training room, and it's housed the two county supervisors who live in Davis. Well, for years I've been working to try to have that be more robust as a service center for health and human services. 215,000 people in Yolo County, about 68,000 of them live within the city limits of Davis. So if one of the people in our community, in the Davis community, needs to access county services for CalWorks or the food nutrition support program called CalFresh or MediCal or mental health services, they were having to travel to either West Sacramento or Woodland all this time. So something kind of came about, this whole combination of events. A couple of years ago, we were able to relocate the child care center, the child care payment activities that were happening in the building. The city space consolidation freed up a good share of the building at 600 A Street. And we were working to establish a teen transition age youth program, a drop-in center for mental health consumers who are adolescents at the building. And as we started working on this, we realized we had some mental health services funds that needed to be spent this year. And we had access to a fund called the Intergovernmental Transfer Fund, which is essentially a reimbursement based on subsidies for medical care for low-income people. We get money back after we've spent it, a little bit of it back. And then with some county general fund, we pieced together and we're remodeling that building at 600 A so that we can have a service center. And this is much like one we did in Winters, about a year and a half, two years ago. Now the people in Davis starting in July, we'll be able to come to 600 A Street and be able to fill out applications for eligibility for MediCal foods and CalFresh, the SNAP program. Talk to people about employment services, the array of activity that they used to have to go to Woodland for. And so I'm really excited about this additional service. And from my personal experience, it's not just Woodland, it's way out in Woodland. It's way out on Cottonwood when I was caretaking my mother and I had to deal with in-home health services and MediCal application and all that. I had to go to Woodland and I found myself wondering at the time, couldn't this be done in Davis? So thank you to the supervisors for pulling all those threads together and helping make that happen. Well it turns out there are 10,000 people in Davis who would access the service that we know about and probably even more if they had easier access. Right, because transportation is a barrier, time off from work, time off from caregiving and all of that. So Nolan and Don's email outlined all kinds of services that are going to be provided there and I'm hoping you can kind of fill in some of those. Yeah, we're really excited. It's going to be basically the same services we offer in Woodland or we offer in West Sacramento or to some extent in Winners, but it's going to be here in Davis. So it'll be just right up the road. Basically we will do full-scale MediCal, CalFresh and CalWorks applications so folks can come in and apply for any of those programs. So for those of you don't know, MediCal is low-income health insurance or health insurance for folks that are disabled. CalFresh is the same thing as food stamps and that's low-income food assistance for folks, which is a vitally needed program in the county and we're growing kind of off the charts. And then CalWorks is what's called cash assistance for needy families. So that gives them cash assistance, gives them some food supports and health insurance all with the assistance of employment or self-sufficiency kind of as the end goal there. So we'll be able to support those three primary programs which are Yolo County's biggest programs and then we're going to have a whole gamut of mental health and women and children services as well. So we're building what we call a wellness center, which is a drop-in day center for adults with developmental disabilities to receive therapy or kind of just work with their peers or kind of do a peer counselor support. We'll have the same mental health clinic we've had for the last couple of months to years kind of operating the same services there but we're expanding those to the tape population like Don talked about, which we're really excited about for Davis. And then we'll continue our WIC services too. So WIC is Women, Infant and Children's. We love our acronyms in government. And so that service assists either pregnant moms or new moms get supports in terms of breastfeeding or formula or food supports. So kind of like you said, we send people down the road to go to Woodland or to West Sac and folks will be able to access these services in their own backyard. The other thing that a lot of folks don't know is once you get on these services, typically there's like a one-year recertification period. So not only do we make you come down and apply the first time, you have to come back every year to recertify. So hopefully this will save many miles on Davis residents' cars or getting to Woodland or bus trips or whatever and we'll have it like Don said at 600 A. And I'm here to tell you, I like to think I'm pretty savvy. That Medi-Cal application was daunting and I really needed the help of a case worker to kind of help me work through it. So I was very grateful for that. So 10,000 people in Davis roughly who can access these services, how do people find out about these services and how are they maybe referred to your department? You know, it's a great question. I think it's kind of accidental right now honestly at this point. One of the projects that Don has kind of started over the last two years though is there's a huge student hunger epidemic across the whole state in the country. But UC Davis in particular. So we looked kind of a while back at CalFresh numbers across the entire county and UC Davis, based on census data, has some of the lowest participation rates in CalFresh in the entire county. The county is actually one of the lower counties in general too. So we're trying to get those numbers up. So we've been actively recruiting students at UC Davis to try and get them on to CalFresh and working with the Interfaith Rotating Shelter and kind of trying to get folks to use these benefits. We've got a great partnership with the food bank. So we really try to get the word out anywhere and everywhere we can. We're accessing social media now and kind of we have an online presence. But it's kind of one of those things where you don't really know until you need it. I would say with the medical insurance or Medi-Cal, typically what happens is providers refer to us to folks to us. So you're either in the emergency room or it's a nursing home and they assist with the application process there. And then CalWorks, you know, again, that's kind of a hidden gem as well for a lot of our low-income families. And that's the one I'm probably most excited to bring to Davis because we don't have that resource here for needy families. But we have the ability to provide housing, to provide food, to provide shelter, to really help these families and kind of get back on their feet. And they're hard to find, especially here in Davis. So I'd add just a couple of things. There's the website for Yolo County, YoloCounty.org. A person could drill down to Health and Human Services and find a lot of the information about contacts. If anybody has a question and they can email my office as well, and that's DonSailor at YoloCounty.org or look us up on DonSailor.org and we'll help you find and help you navigate where you want, where you need to go. There's an array of activities that the county is engaged in. And one of the things that I'm kind of interested in as we move forward, we have a homeless response coordinator. So if somebody sees somebody, if a resident sees a homeless person who they think needs some help, they can contact us and some of Nolan's colleagues do appear as their social workers who come in and talk with the folks and see if we can find them. So there's a little bit of intake that happens kind of assessment. Yes. And especially if it's a family, we have a we have a grant stream that allows us to put folks in emergency housing for homeless families. So if you see somebody who needs some support and it's a whole family or one parent with some children, then we can help them in a better way. So once we have this presence at 600 A Street, I think we're going to be able to link and connect much more effectively with the network of nonprofit providers already in Davis. And one last one last point for now is that in addition to the service center, the offices for Yolo County Supervisor Jim Provenza, representing district for myself, representing district two will still be in the building and assembly member Aguiar Curry's office for the district is also in this building. So it'll be a place where people can come to ask for help in solving any number of problems. Right. And you folks have the best staffs around. Your staffs are always so responsive. So hats off to them as well. Worked with many of them over the years. And CalFresh, you and I have been in their talk. You've been in here before we talked about food scarcity and what a problem it is. And people don't stop to think, you know, if you're in Davis and kind of inside the bubble, you don't sometimes stop to think that there are people here who are going hungry. And there are lots of people in Yolo County who are going hungry. So about one in four adults in California and in Yolo County as well as food insecure and for children, it's higher. It's close to one in two, well, it's one in five adults. One in five and one in four. Which is heartbreaking. Shocking. And oddly enough, and it defies our stereotypes, UC Davis students are one of the largest underserved populations in Yolo County for accessing food support programs that they're eligible for. So what Nolan referred to is we now have eligibility workers from the county embedded in student financial aid office and in the health center office. That's excellent. And that's really, this first in September, when school started back up this year, we had a real wave of students coming forward and that's that's new and it's really a lack of awareness. Your question about how do people find out about programs that they're eligible for, that's an ongoing issue for us. Programs like this, thank you for doing this. It allows us to get a word out. We create materials and websites and so forth, but it really depends on. Well we'll continue to support this conversation on an ongoing basis via social media and our channels and public service announcements and all of that, so happy to help with that. Before we run out of time, I want to hear a little bit more about the youth component that you mentioned earlier and the wellness center. So if you kind of touch on this a little bit more. Right I will and I want to touch really quick on the employment center too because I completely spaced on that. So basically we have some pretty innovative new TAE programs and so TAE is Transnage Youth and so kind of depending on which program you're talking about, that's usually somewhere in the ballpark of 16 to 26 and basically we have some pretty amazing staff now that provide amazing counseling services and group services to this population. So we'll actually have a hub here in Davis that they can use and kind of operate out of the wellness center and so the wellness center probably takes up maybe a third of the building. It's a pretty good size of 600 A Street building so it's just it's going to have an inviting physical space where folks can go if they're having some trouble, if they need to see someone that they need, you know if parents need some support, if you know others need support or groups like NAMI or other groups want to meet after hours, it's just going to be that kind of central hub for those services. There's currently one in Woodland and there's currently one in West Sacramento and they're operating a couple days a week and they're fantastic. Does this include emancipated foster youth who are aging out? Absolutely and that's one of the bigger targets here in Davis. We have quite a few emancipated foster youth and active foster youth kind of in that tape bracket here in Davis. So we'll have a heavy focus for supporting those groups. An employment center. Employment centers that's one of the other important pieces of my work too. So we actually it's going to be a small employment center but it's going to be mighty. So we are going to have basically all of our employment centers in New York County. We've got one in Woodland, we've got one in West Sac and one in Winners currently. Davis will have its own employment center with a designated employment specialist. We work with local employers to find the freshest job postings, to find the freshest recruitments and really pair local job seekers to those jobs. And so what we'll be doing there is we'll have computers for doing resumes for job search for kind of upgrading skill sets. We'll have an employment specialist that can link folks to programs and revenues and different funding streams to help them upgrade or kind of get different jobs. And we'll also have some employer outreach where we're trying to work with employers in Davis to kind of fill their employer needs. So we want to be that one-stop shop for employers and for candidates looking for jobs and whether or not you meet our program criteria we have something for you. So we want to encourage anyone looking for employees or any employees looking for work to come into the center once we have it up and running. It's going to be pretty fantastic. That's really good news because people often don't know where to start, how to get those, you know, access to those resources, how to get computer time, you know. So I think that's really phenomenal work. We are about out of time. I told you it would go quickly. I want to thank you both for coming in and chatting with us today. And as I said, we will continue helping you get the word out and and trying to reach the people you need to reach to come in and use these services. For now we've been talking in the studio about some upcoming health and human services that will be available in the newly remodeled county building at 600 a street starting by July 2018. And lots of good news coming for Davis residents who need a little bit of help. Thanks for tuning in and be sure to check us online at dctv.davismedia.org for a full archive of our programs. Great. Thank you.