Finding family services is hard. How South LA built a one-stop shop for people with young kids

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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Stefanie Ritoper

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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.”