The Brief

Karla Carrillo had to keep telling her story over and over. With her newborn daughter in tow, she told her story of domestic violence to case manager after case manager. She was looking for housing, child care, and work.

Some case managers referred her to people at other organizations and some referred her to newer case managers as staff turned over. While some were helpful, many of her conversations did not lead to any actual services or follow up.

“I had no issue if someone was willing to hear, but I'm like, I'm telling my story just kind of for nothing,” she says.

After moving out of one shelter and celebrating her daughter’s first birthday in a motel, she managed to secure a spot for temporary housing at the shelter Upward Bound House.

Carrillo’s experience — knocking on multiple doors to find services and getting turned away before getting help — is common. Parents in crisis often have to navigate a patchwork of services from multiple organizations and agencies that don’t share client information with each other. Parents have to decode the requirements of each program to see if they are eligible. As a result, many people do not get services they are qualified to receive. For some, this could have long-range effects, with things like unstable housing leading to child welfare cases.

In response, a group of organizations in South L.A. has been working to create a one-stop shop for families. Partners for Children South L.A. (PCSLA) (the acronym is pronounced “PEACE-lah”) created what they call the Early Childhood System of Care, a collaboration of 42 organizations that coordinate closely to refer families to services within their network. Having served more than 10,000 families over the first 10 years, PCSLA’s “no wrong door” approach provides lessons for serving families in other high need neighborhoods in L.A. County and beyond.

Representatives from 42 organizations get together monthly to discuss the needs of families they serve.

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Stefanie Ritoper

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LAist

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At monthly meetings, point contacts from each organization brainstorm particularly tricky cases together, explain eligibility requirements, and share resources.

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Stefanie Ritoper

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LAist

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How it works

Bringing together a bunch of service organizations and getting them to collaborate is no easy task.

“I'm gonna be honest and say that when I first started here, there were a lot of folks in the community who didn't believe this could work,” says Lisa Bray, executive director of PCSLA. “One of the major things that I heard was, ‘You're never going to get South L.A. service providers to partner. They're too territorial. They're comfortable working in their silos.’”

But Bray was determined to make this vision a reality. She made the case that collaborating didn’t put organizations into competition with each other for funding. Instead, joining was a win-win. Each organization would have access to the services of the other organizations in the network, which meant better outcomes for families and therefore, better leverage for each organization when seeking funding.

The System of Care started out in 2012 with seven organizations, some of which shared a common funder, the Atlas Family Foundation. Today the network includes 42 organizations, with more on the waiting list. Though eight of the organizations receive a small grant for their participation, most participate because they are committed to the shared mission.

The best place to see this collaboration in action is at one of its monthly “case conference” meetings. In November, close to 40 people are packed around a long table in a conference room at Homeless Outreach Program Integrated Care System (HOPICS). They are “primary care coordinators,” or case managers, from across the network, and the conversation moves around the room.

Each person talks about the clients they are serving and asks questions to other organizations in the room. What’s the next step with a client who is on the verge of being evicted? Can a child who’s a citizen get child care and food vouchers even if their parent is undocumented?

The room spends some time discussing the case of a grandmother who cares for her daughter’s child. She needs housing for the child, but she doesn’t have custody. Without custody, she can’t even park her car at HOPICS-run “safe parking” sites overnight.

It’s a lively discussion. People from opposite sides of the room ask clarifying questions about the case and offer resources from their organizations.

At another point in the meeting, someone in the room reviews the four federal criteria that constitute the official definition of homelessness. “Couch surfing,” or staying temporarily at someone else’s house, doesn’t count. People around the room react audibly.

Angela Barron of Homeless Outreach Program Integrated Care System (HOPICS) fields questions about clients at the monthly meeting. Housing instability and homelessness are issues that have been coming up more frequently at these meetings.

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Grisel Morales, PCSLA program director, says that the System of Care secret sauce is the trust that people have built with each other through these in-person meetings. “It allows folks to be comfortable to ask those questions. Like, ‘Hey, I don't understand. Why are these folks eligible? Why are these families not eligible? Why were they declined?’”

Another side benefit of so many organizations collaborating is that gaps in the systems become clearer, and organizations can step in to fill them. When there were multiple complaints that there weren’t enough child care slots for families, PCSLA and Crystal Stairs developed a short-term child care subsidy project to give 28 families access to child care while they were on the waiting list.

How working together impacts families

At Upward Bound House, parent Karla Carrillo started taking a life skills course, which happened to be a pilot program that PCSLA was running. There, she met PCSLA executive director Liza Bray, who agreed to personally take on Carrillo’s case.

Tapping into the System of Care, Bray connected Carrillo with a child care spot at Southwest college through Crystal Stairs and speech therapy through the South Central Los Angeles Regional Center for her daughter. Through Upward Bound House’s permanent housing program, Carrillo was able to move into her own two-bedroom apartment with a short-term rent subsidy.

Each step has been a struggle. It took months for Carrillo to find an apartment, especially one close to her daughter’s daycare and speech therapy, because landlords were not open to taking a Section 8 voucher. After becoming licensed in phlebotomy, she started to get some work in this area and has also worked with nonprofits, including developing a survey for L.A. County parents with California Latinas for Reproductive Justice’s Youth Parent Council Group. These gigs aren’t yet enough to pay the bills, though.

Still, Carrillo is in a much better place than she was just three years ago, and feeling hopeful. “Finally able to have our own room [after] the past three years, just being unstable, not having that — it's really nice,” she says.

Through Partners for Children South L.A., Karla Carrillo has been able to access various services, including child care (through Crystal Stairs), early intervention services (through HACLA Regional Center), short-term rental subsidy (through Upward Bound House), emergency financial services, and more.

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She’s also seeing her daughter’s speech improve dramatically with the help of therapy. She says her daughter began singing along to songs. “Then she could start singing the song more by herself. And then she learned that, ‘Wow, people sing about animals. You know what? I like animals.’”

While Carrillo connected directly with PCSLA, Morales says that typically clients don’t even know that PCSLA exists. Instead, if everything in the System of Care is running smoothly, they just remember their primary care coordinator and the different services they received.

At the case conference meeting, Andrea Barron from HOPICS is the person in the room fielding the most questions from other organizations. Many families in South L.A. are struggling with housing instability and homelessness. “So, as you see, I always come prepared,” she says.

Barron says that while she supplies the network with housing information, her clients have also benefited from her connections with other organizations. “My clients that are homeless want to work,” she says. “So connecting them with child care. They don't have anyone to watch their babies.”

She shares that one of her clients, currently in a shelter, was able to connect to the WorkSource center and is actively looking for employment.

Lara Holtzman, vice president of legal and program services at Alliance for Children’s Rights, is part of an organization that serves broader L.A. County. She says that when they are helping clients who don’t live in South L.A., it’s a lot more work. “We end up doing a lot of research to try and identify appropriate resources, depending upon the needs of the client. But then we're starting from scratch. It's just about cold calling and then trying to make those connections.”

Grisel Morales, project director at Partners for Children South L.A., works closely with all of the 42 organizations to make sure everyone is working toward a shared vision.

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Collaboration requires commitment

Joining the Early Childhood System of Care is a commitment. Each organization that joins also agrees to have three staff members involved — a staff member in charge of the day-to-day case management, someone in senior management, and the CEO.

Holtzman was part of the early conversations to design the structure of the System of Care. She says that it was no small feat to get multiple agencies, all with their own work cultures and systems, to agree to a process. “That sort of agreement, like we're going to contact the client within 72 hours, was a big thing to say to everyone. Like, can we all agree to this?”

Morales, who coordinates the program, onboards new organizations in a day-long bootcamp and then is a constant presence, providing monthly reports to each organization on referrals and providing technical support when needed. She jokes that she feels like she is a staff member of all 42 organizations. Clients sometimes see her at multiple organizations and have to ask: Wait, where do you work again?

One thing Morales says she’s learned is that it’s key for all of the organizations to have a shared mission. They need to be open to shifting the way they work, which is hard if they are not on the same page. But, she says, “If there's an organization that is committed, then there's nothing we can't do.”

Challenges that the program faces

Despite its successes, the Early Childhood System of Care is not without its challenges.

For one, it’s hard to find the right technology solution that works for everyone. Though all organizations in the network use one centralized data management and tracking system to share data and send referrals to other organizations, it doesn’t always fit seamlessly into each organization's workflow. In some cases, organizations have to enter information about a single family into multiple software systems. HOPICS, for example, also uses another system that connects with other South L.A. housing organizations. PCSLA recently received funding to update this system and better integrate with other organizations' systems.

And, of course, the biggest challenge is that this solution operates within broader systems that put families in crisis in the first place. Bray says that for the System of Care to move beyond being a Band-Aid solution, it requires legislative change. “We've got to have more funding coming down from the federal level, the state level, the local level, to really infuse into these local efforts.”

Her dream for the Early Childhood System of Care is that it will eventually be able to connect with larger governmental agencies like the Department of Mental Health, Department of Public Social Services, and Department of Children and Family Services so that all these agencies can collaborate.

Liza Bray, director of Partners for Children South L.A., says that one of the biggest lessons from this effort is that there is power in partnership.

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Could this work in other L.A. neighborhoods?

South L.A. is currently the only neighborhood with this type of collaboration between service providers — but maybe not for long. PCSLA is currently surveying other neighborhoods in L.A. County to understand community needs and identify other neighborhoods that might want to implement a similar model.

“There’s power in partnership,” Bray says. “ I really want to have service providers in other areas see what we've been able to do in South L.A. and know that it's possible. Working with vulnerable populations, it's our responsibility to be innovative and to find new strategies that are going to allow us to serve our families in the most effective way possible.”

After copper wire theft left the Sixth Street Bridge in darkness for years, the city of Los Angeles has hired a Pasadena-based engineering firm to restore the lighting, a move aimed at improving safety for Boyle Heights and the surrounding neighborhoods.

City officials contracted Tetra Tech to relight the bridge, which has been plagued by copper wire theft since its opening in 2022. The outages have frustrated residents and commuters who use the bridge to walk, run, bike and drive between downtown LA and the Eastside.

Aging infrastructure, copper wire theft and delayed repairs led to nearly 2,000 streetlight service requests in Boyle Heights in 2024. Nearly seven miles of copper wire have been reported stolen from the Sixth Street Bridge.

Tetra Tech began working on the project’s design in January and is scheduled to restore the wiring to all lights along the bridge, including along roadways, barriers, ramps, stairways and arches before the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games come to Los Angeles that summer, according to a Feb. 18 news release from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s office.

The firm – which was selected by the city’s Bureau of Engineering – will fortify the pull boxes, service cabinet and conduits to protect against copper wire theft. Tetra Tech will also install a security camera system to deter vandalism and theft.

“When our streets are well-lit, our neighborhoods feel safer and more connected,” Jurado said in the news release. “The Sixth Street Bridge plays a vital role in connecting Angelenos between the Eastside and the heart of the City.”

Jurado – who pledged to look into fixing the Sixth Street Bridge lights when she was elected in 2024 – said the partnership with Tetra Tech “moves us one step closer to restoring one of the City’s most iconic landmarks as a safe, welcoming public space our communities deserve.”

According to officials, the total contract value with Tetra Tech is $5.3 million, which includes work on the Sixth Street Bridge as well as the Sixth Street PARC project, which encompasses 12 acres of recreational space underneath and adjacent to the bridge.

The PARC project will make way for sports fields, fitness equipment, event spaces and a performance stage. PARC’s grand opening is anticipated later this year.

Because the work for the PARC project and the bridge is connected, the Board of Engineers recommended using the existing PARC contract with Tetra Tech to ensure completion ahead of the 2028 Games, officials said.

The cost for the design work on the bridge alone is roughly $1 million.

On Thursday, Jurado announced that her streetlight repair crew had restored lighting and strengthened infrastructure for more than 400 streetlights across her district, including Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, and El Sereno. Next, they plan to tackle repairs in downtown L.A.

For the last 70 years, the  27th Street Bakery hasn’t just been the go-to place for people who want to spend less time in the kitchen — it’s become a staple in South Central, providing jobs and security for people living in the neighborhood.

The bakery is Black-owned and in its third generation as a business. It’s co-owned by sisters Denise Cravin-Paschal and Olympic gold-medalist Jeanette Bolden-Pickens, as well as her husband Al Pickens.

“My grandfather employed a lot of people around here as he was growing his business and so have we,” Cravin-Paschal told the LA Local. “They feel that this is a safe place to come. We have the respect of being here for 70 years and so we enjoy it.”

The bakery sits on Central Avenue, the focal point of Black Los Angeles between the 1930s and 1960s. As segregation laws were struck down, Black people in LA began to move elsewhere and took their businesses with them. The bakery, though, is still Black-owned and operating 70 years later.

Today it is considered the largest manufacturer of sweet potato pies on the West Coast, the bakery’s website states. Last year, the city and District 9 Councilmember Curren Price Jr. presented the bakery with a plaque that reads: “A Walk Down Central Avenue — A legacy of community: powered by the people and its places.”

It hangs on the wall in the bakery’s lobby along with several other photos and recognitions they’ve received over the years.

“Our goal is to keep this legacy alive and we’re celebrating 70 years of being here in business. We are so grateful to the community,” Bolden-Pickens said.

In celebration of its anniversary, a sign in the bakery says it is offering one slice of sweet potato pie for 70 cents on Saturdays starting this weekend through Oct. 31.

The bakery was a restaurant at first bringing Southern flavor to LA

The bakery began as a restaurant in the 1930s on Central Avenue founded by Harry and Sadie Patterson, according to the family and Los Angeles Conservancy. Back then, Central Avenue was the epicenter of LA’s Black community and Patterson, who came from Shreveport, Louisiana, decided to bring his Southern recipes to life in Los Angeles.

The restaurant later became a bakery in 1956, according to the bakery’s website. Patterson’s daughter Alberta Cravin and her son Gregory Spann took over the bakery in 1980. After Spann passed away, Cravin’s daughters — the sisters who are current owners — took over the family business. Five other relatives also help them out, Cravin-Paschal said.

These days, the bakery is open Tuesday through Saturday each week and the bulk of their customers are other businesses. They serve nearly 300 vendors including convenience stores like 7-Eleven, Ralphs grocery stores, Smart & Final, ARCO gas stations, restaurants and other mom-and-pop stores. Louisiana Fried Chicken has been a customer since 1980, Cravin-Paschal said.

An average delivery today is usually 45 dozen pies and they also ship orders out of state, Cravin-Paschal said.

She also told The LA Local they have six full time employees and most of them have worked for the bakery at least 25 years.

“I like working here, I like the people,” Maximina “Maxi” Rodriguez, a longtime employee, told The LA Local. After 32 years at the bakery, she said she plans to retire in June. “I’m going to miss it.”

Rodriguez said working at the bakery is a family affair for her, too. Her sister, Guadalupe Garibaldi, has worked at the bakery for over 40 years and her niece, Yoselin Garibaldi, is now a cashier and driver.

Patterson’s lessons inspired 3 generations to keep the business running

For Bolden-Pickens and Cravin-Paschal, running the bakery is a labor of love. Both told The LA Local that their grandfather taught them to stay true to the fresh ingredients they use and not to cut corners.

These lessons helped Bolden-Pickens in her life before taking over the family business. She won a gold medal as part of the U.S. 4×100 meter relay team in track and field during the 1984 Olympics.

“What I learned from being an Olympian is that it takes a lot of hard work. I learned that from my grandfather,” she said.

Bolden-Pickens said it hasn’t been easy running the business, but they’ve been able to stay afloat because of the lessons learned from their grandfather.

“I remember during the pandemic, we actually had to go to the egg farm and stand in line for a couple of hours just to get the eggs that we needed,” Bolden-Pickens said. “We use the best spices. We make our own vanilla.”

Cravin-Paschal said after the death of their brother Gregory Spann, who was the main baker for nearly two decades, they struggled for a few years to keep the recipe and taste consistent. But eventually they figured it out.

“We had a little rough spot because we all know the recipes but you have to put it together (correctly),” Cravin-Paschal said. “Now we’re back to the original taste.”

As marijuana use among teens has grown in the past decade, researchers have been trying to better understand the health risks of the drug. Now, a new longitudinal study finds that cannabis use among adolescents increases risks of being diagnosed with bipolar and psychotic disorders, as well as anxiety and depression, years later.

"This is very, very, very worrying," says psychiatrist Dr. Ryan Sultan at Columbia University, a cannabis researcher who wasn't involved in the new study published in the latest JAMA Health Forum.

Strong study design

Researchers analyzed health data on 460,000 teenagers in the Kaiser Permanente Health System in Northern California. The teens were followed until they were 25 years old. The data included annual screenings for substance use and any mental health diagnoses from the health records. Researchers excluded the adolescents who had symptoms of mental illnesses before using cannabis.

"We looked at kids using cannabis before they had any evidence of these psychiatric conditions and then followed them to understand if they were more likely or less likely to develop them," says Dr. Lynn Silver, a pediatrician and researcher at the Public Health Institute, and an author of the new study.

They found that the teens who reported using cannabis in the past year were at a higher risk of being diagnosed with several mental health conditions a few years later, compared to teens who didn't use cannabis.

Teens who reported using cannabis had twice the risk of developing two serious mental illnesses: bipolar, which manifests as alternating episodes of depression and mania, and psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia which involve a break with reality.

Now, only a small fraction — nearly 4,000 — of all teens in the study were diagnosed with each of these two disorders. Both bipolar and psychotic disorders are among the most serious and disabling of mental illnesses.

"Those are the scarier conditions that we worry about," says Sultan.

Silver points out these illnesses are expensive to treat and come at a high cost to society. The U.S. cannabis market is an industry with a value in the tens-of-billions — but the societal cost of schizophrenia has been calculated to be $350 billion a year.

"And if we increase the number of people who develop that condition in a way that's preventable, that can wipe out the whole value of the cannabis market," Silver says.

Depression and anxiety too

The new study also found that the risk for more common conditions like depression and anxiety was also higher among cannabis users.

"Depression alone went up by about a third," says Silver, "and anxiety went up by about a quarter."

But the link between cannabis use and depression and anxiety got weaker for teens who were older when they used cannabis. "Which really shows the sensitivity of the younger child's brain to the effects of cannabis," says Silver. "The brain is still developing. The effects of cannabis on the receptors in the brain seem to have a significant impact on their neurological development and the risk for these mental health disorders."

Silver hopes these findings will make teens more cautious about using the drug, which is not as safe as people perceive it to be.

"With legalization, we've had a tremendous wave of this perception of cannabis as a safe, natural product to treat your stress with," she says. "That is simply not true."

The new study is well designed and gets at "the chicken or the egg, order-of-operations question," says Sultan. There have been other past studies that have also found a link between cannabis use and mental health conditions, especially psychosis. But, those studies couldn't tell whether cannabis affected the likelihood of developing mental health symptoms or whether people with existing problems were more likely to use cannabis — perhaps to treat their symptoms.

But by excluding teens who were already showing mental health symptoms, the new study suggests a causal link between cannabis use and later mental health diagnoses. Additional research is needed to understand the link fully.

'Playing with fire'

Sultan, the psychiatrist and researcher at Columbia University, says the study confirms what he's seeing in his clinic — more teens using cannabis who've developed new or worsening mental health symptoms.

"It is most common around anxiety and depression, but it's also showing up in more severe conditions like bipolar disorder and psychosis," he says.

He notes that mental health disorders are complex in origin. A host of risk factors, like genetics, environment, lifestyle and life experiences all play a role. And some young people are more at risk than others.

"When someone has a psychotic episode in the context of cannabis or a manic episode in the context of cannabis, clinicians are going to say, 'Please do not do that again because you're you're you're playing with fire,'" he says.

Because the more they use the drug, he says the more likely that their symptoms will worsen over time, making recovery harder.

"What we're worried about [is if] you sort of get stuck in psychosis, it gets harder and harder to pull the person back," says Sultan. "Psychosis and severe mood disorders, particularly bipolar disorder are like seizures in your brain. They're sort of neurotoxic to your brain, and so it seems to be associated with a more rapid deterioration of the brain."

Some electric bikes in California could soon require license plates under a proposed state bill aiming to address the rise in electric bike related injuries.

AB 1942 or the E-bike Accountability Act, would apply exclusively to Class 2 and Class 3 electric bikes.

Class 2 bikes can be operated without peddling until it reaches the speed of 20 mph.

Class 3 bikes reach a max speed of 28 mph; motor assist could only kick in with peddling.

The bill would also require owners to carry proof of ownership and would direct the Department of Motor Vehicles to establish a registration process. It was introduced by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan of Orinda in Contra Costa County earlier this month.

E-bike injuries spiked 18-fold between 2018 and 2023, according to state traffic data.

The bill may be heard in committee March 16.