Sharing Brings Hope campaign starts with community

L.A. Unified Interim Superintendent Megan Riley opened the 30th Sharing Brings Hope Consolidated Charity Campaign benefiting The L.A. Trust and 10 other nonprofits. 

Nearly 100 L.A. Unified and local charity fundraisers joined the 30th anniversary Sharing Brings Hope Leadership Breakfast February 2, 2022, on Zoom.  

L.A. Unified Interim Superintendent Megan Riley welcomed participants to the event, which kicks off the campaign’s 30th consolidated campaign running now until April 22. Other guests included, Kelly Gonez, LAUSD board member representing District 6, and Angela Padilla, board president of FundaMental Change. Hilda Solis, chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, delivered pre-recorded remarks. 

“This campaign fills in the gaps,” Gonez said. “It helps lifts up our L.A. Unified families.” The event ended with an emotional and unscripted appeal from District 1 Board Member Dr. George McKenna III, who said the campaign has always been driven by “faith, hope and charity and above all, love.” 

The annual campaign benefits 11 nonprofits supporting the Los Angeles Unified community, including The Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health, the Asian Pacific Community Fund, Brotherhood Crusade, Creating Healthier Communities, EarthShare California, Kathryn Kurka Children’s Health Fund, LAUSD Employee Sponsored Scholarship Fund, United Latinx Fund, United Negro College Fund, United Teachers Educational Foundation, and United Way of Greater Los Angeles. 

Despite COVID and quarantine, the campaign raised $250,00 in 2021 and hopes to raise $300,000 during the 60-day campaign. There are two ways to give: one-time contributions by cash or check, or payroll deductions. Visit the Sharing Brings Hope website to contribute or learn more.

Learn more or donate

The L.A. Trust Year in Review: 2021 was a time of action

Last year was a watershed year as The L.A. Trust expanded its scope and capabilities to address key concerns like the COVID-19 pandemic and youth mental health.

Last year The Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health and its partners built on the lessons of 2020 to take action on the converging crises facing L.A.’s schools and communities.

As the virulent delta variant took hold, The L.A. Trust launched a COVID-19 Youth Task Force and  joined a broad coalition of agencies, healthcare providers and nonprofits countering vaccine disinformation and urging vaccination against the coronavirus.

The L.A. Trust convened the healthcare and education communities to address the growing mental health crisis among students and young people, hosting our first Youth Mental Health Collaborative in conjunction with L.A. Unified.

Student engagement remained a top priority of The L.A. Trust despite the quarantine, as Student Advisory Board members met online at our Y2Y Student Health Summit and Student Health Summer Learning Academy. As students, teachers and Wellness Center clinicians returned to campus, we went back to school with them, hosting educational events and resuming in-person student engagement on suicide prevention and other issues.

The L.A. Trust expanded its role as the backbone of L.A.’s student health community by convening educators and healthcare providers at its Wellness Network Learning Collaboratives, expanding its Data xChange initiative and launching a new tool for school-health center integration.

A year of growth

The L.A. Trust started the school year in October by adding eight new staff members. Board President Will Grice of Kaiser Permanente said, “This is the biggest growth initiative in The L.A. Trust's 20-year history. These new team members will allow us to expand policy development, advocacy, prevention education and student engagement.” 

Officers, board members and staff of The L.A. Trust unpacked issues of equity, diversity and inclusion at a special online meeting in May. Intersectionality expert Dr. Nooshin Valizadeh led the discussion, which was designed to foster thought exchange; define racism and understand its history and impact; and to name, challenge and change racial biases. 

Moving event

The pandemic did not stop The L.A. Trust Salute to Student Health, an in-person and online gala honoring former L.A. Unified School Superintendent Austin Beutner and Dr. Lynn Yonekura, community health director at Dignity Health California Hospital. More than 200 healthcare providers, educators and civic leaders were moved by the event, and more than $200,000 was raised to support The L.A. Trust mission.

The L.A. Trust started the year by convening our Oral Health Advisory Board  and observing Children’s Dental Health Month with a social media campaign and round two of Operation Tooth Fairy, which distributed nearly 60,000 toothbrushes and oral healthcare items.

We also observed School-Based Healthcare Awareness Week Month in February, joining our partners at the California School-Based Health Alliance in advocating for greater funding and awareness of this critical healthcare system.

“Our SBHCs are more critical than ever,” said Maryjane Puffer, executive director of The Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health. “Supporting these centers has been a core part of our mission since our founding, and it’s important we redouble our efforts during this incredibly challenging time.”

Read our 2021 Mission Report to learn more

Generous grant-makers support students and The L.A. Trust

Generous multi-year grants from leading foundations and agencies will help support L.A.’s students and sustain and expand the work of The L.A. Trust.

Throughout 2021 funders continued to show their wisdom and generosity through grant-making and interest in the work of The L.A. Trust. Several grants were for much-needed general operating support, including a two-year investment from the Weingart Foundation and one-year grants from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation and The Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation.

We’re very grateful to have received first-time grants for general operating support from The Carol and James Collins Foundation, The Green Foundation, and Good Hope Medical Foundation. The Samerian Foundation made a first-time grant to our Student Mental Health Initiative, and a Dignity Health award allows us to continue into year three of their Cultural Trauma & Mental Health Resiliency Project.

Mental health engagement

We reconnected with the William M. Keck, Jr. Foundation, which is now funding our mental health student engagement work. And we continue to partner with FCancer to work with students on cancer prevention efforts, particularly around the HPV vaccine.

Some grant-makers sent us equity surveys this past year, adding to the deep feeling that we’re all working together to address racism in our city. As we continue to mobilize while remaining flexible around student needs and school mandates, we pause to recognize how grateful we are for all the ways that so many groups, from family funds to large institutions, lend their resources to the pursuit of healthcare equity and accessibility for all students.

‘We are in a moment’ — policy experts discuss converging student health crises

The L.A. Trust Student Health Policy Roundtable met for the first time last month to address healthcare issues affecting L.A. County students and their families.

An invited group of leaders in children’s health and student wellness assembled at the kickoff meeting of The L.A. Trust Student Health Policy Roundtable, online December 8, 2021. They discussed the urgent need to work together to find new solutions to the converging crises affecting student and community health. 

The purpose of the roundtable, funded by Cedars-Sinai, is to “establish a forum where cross-sector leaders can advance a shared policy agenda for school-based healthcare and student wellness in Los Angeles County,” said Gabrielle Tilley, senior policy manager for The L.A. Trust. 

Participants came from the public and private sectors, including the Children’s Partnership, the Community Clinic Association of Los Angeles County (CCALAC), Helpline Youth Counseling, Kaiser Permanente, L.A. County Departments of Public Health and Mental Health and Office of Education, Planned Parenthood Los Angeles (PPLA), L.A. Care and UCLA. Ana Perales and Toyomi Igus were present from The L.A. Trust board of directors. 

New opportunities

Maryjane Puffer, executive director of The L.A. Trust, said, “We are in a moment of great need.” She cited ongoing harm from the once-again surging coronavirus, numerous, interconnected health crises, and long-standing discrimination and racial disparities. 

Along with the challenges, Puffer noted major opportunities, including increased public awareness and political will, federal recovery funds, California’s budget surplus and new spending on youth, education and mental health, especially the $4 billion California Youth and Behavioral Health Initiative. 

Puffer said it was time to follow in the footsteps of The L.A. Trust’s original policy roundtable, which helped create a school healthcare model designed to integrate primary, behavioral and oral healthcare at L.A. Unified Wellness Centers. “There were five LAUSD Wellness Centers at the time (2008), but their efforts were not always uniform.” 

Puffer said The L.A. Trust Data xChange is a key component to finding policy solutions that will take a holistic approach to student and community health concerns and “make our schools a center of well-being.” 

Foundations

Tilley noted that 32 partners representing 21 organizations were interviewed prior to the inaugural meeting. Representatives included the Advancement Project, the Children’s Defense Fund, Children’s Law Center of California, CSHA, Children Now, the Community Coalition, CCLAC, Children’s Partnership, Essential Access Health, Inner City Struggle, PPLA, and L.A. Unified and the L.A. County Board of Education, Board of Supervisors, Office of Education and Department of Public Health.  

Common challenges cited included lack of collaboration and integration, labor shortages, school leadership turnover, student and parental consent for services, cultural competency, funding, referral and billing processes, punitive disciplinary policies and a need to focus on the “whole child.” 

Interviewees cited major opportunities for improvement, including major investments in schools and mental health, school-based health centers (SBHCs), community schools, peer advocacy, student and community engagement, reinvestment of policing dollars, universal free school meals, and early intervention with the 0-5 population. 

Participants listened as Taaliyah Tucker, a former member of The L.A. Trust Student Advisory Board at Washington Prep, discussed the challenges faced by her fellow students, including COVID, quarantine and mental health.  

“Mental health is really important right now,” she said. “Kids say they’re fine, but they’re not fine. You have to read the signs.” 

Discovering shared values 

Participants broke into eight groups to identify shared values. Issues raised included the importance of Black health, removing barriers to student healthcare and increasing power sharing and transparency. 

“We must make health education culturally competent,” one participant said. Another emphasized the importance of “adventure counseling,” noting that most prevention education is negative or punitive. “It has to be youth-centered or it doesn’t work.” 

A representative of the Los Angeles County Office of Education noted their focus on access for immigrant families, who have been hit especially hard by COVID. 

Puffer said improving the student healthcare referral systems and working with L.A. Unified’s Community of Schools Initiative launched in 2020 should be considered as top priorities. 

Next steps 

Tilley announced that the group will meet again on January 14, 2022. “We will work from the heart, listen actively and assume good intentions.” The main purpose of the body will be to build an agenda that focuses on two or three major policy goals. 

“Much like children’s health needs — the interests of this group are diverse and complex. Identifying two or three shared goals among us is no easy task, but after one meeting it’s clear this collaboration can be a powerful force for policy change,” Tilley said. “This is just the beginning.” 

Grant from W.M. Keck Foundation accelerates Data xChange

A grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation will expand The L.A. Trust Data xChange, connecting health and academic achievement data. 

A two-year, $300,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation is supporting the full build-out of The L.A. Trust Data xChange, a first-in-the-nation data analytics platform that joins confidential and anonymized student health and academic data to advance wellness and success. 

The investment will help The Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health identify health equity deficits and emerging public health concerns; leverage data to pioneer performance and quality improvement practices; direct local-control funding; and design prevention and education programs to meet student and community needs. 

“This generous grant helps us address two critical issues,” said Maryjane Puffer, executive director of The L.A. Trust. “The first is healthcare inequities. The second is the mental well-being of our students. Both of these issues are especially urgent as we recover from the pandemic.” 

Expanding scope  

During the next two years, The L.A. Trust will incorporate primary care and mental health records from additional providers as well as students’ academic, attendance and other health services data from Los Angeles Unified. Community and expert opinion will be integrated into the technological build-out, and communication protocols will be established.  

The grant will support the work of newly hired senior data and research analyst Alex Zepeda and continue the work of Data xChange business lead Patty Anton (principal at Anton Consulting) and her database architect team. 

The new funding will help the Data xChange incorporate clinical records from four newly opened Wellness Centers, community-based mental health providers serving school campuses, and care provided directly by Los Angeles Unified. The Data xChange will also work with specialists to help standardize data elements for mental health records and provide reports to decision-makers. 

“We are grateful to the W.M. Keck Foundation for taking The L.A. Trust Data xChange to the next level,” said Anna Baum, director of development and communications. “Their decision to invest in this important platform demonstrates real vision and commitment to the health of our students and communities.” 

Student health community addresses ‘the new normal’ under COVID

Participants weighed in on what strategies might be most effective in connecting students to healthcare services in the coming year. 

More than 60 members of the Los Angeles student health community — including healthcare providers, Healthy Start coordinators, Los Angeles Unified organization facilitators and board members and staff from The L.A. Trust — discussed student health in “the new normal” of COVID-19 at the Wellness Network Learning Collaborative October 14, 2021 online.

Maryjane Puffer, executive director of The Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health, opened the meeting with a definition of health equity adapted by from a paper from Paula Braveman of UC San Francisco: “Health equity means everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible.”

Victor Luna, organization facilitator for L.A. Unified Student Health and Human Services, conducted the meeting’s ice-breaking exercise and introduced Dr. Ron Tanimura, LAUSD director of Student Medical Services & Medi-Cal Programs.  

Tanimura said the district’s goal in during the ongoing pandemic was “to keep schools as open as normal as possible.” He announced new vaccination and testing deadlines for “all those crossing our threshold more than once a week,” including students. He noted that current protocols had resulted in a “very low” positivity rate of less than 0.12% among the 100,000 tested by the district each week. Tanimura also announced that all L.A. Unified Student Medical Services and Medi-Cal Programs would be overseen by Los Angeles Medical Director Smita Malhotra, a well-known pediatrician and author.

Tested new tool

Luna and Alex Zepeda, senior data and research analyst for The L.A. Trust, shared new results from the School-Based Health Center Integration Tool developed by Dr. Kenny Farenchak in conjunction with The L.A. Trust, L.A. Unified and other partners. It examines areas like outreach, collaboration and integration, rating factors such as,“SBHC conducts active outreach” and “SBHC successfully enrolls students (identified in screenings) in services.” Zepeda and Luna showed pilot test results from several SBHCs, and participants discussed how to use the tool in breakout rooms. Puffer said, “This tool is tested and validated and will support all our work together.” 

Gloria Velasquez, organization facilitator for L.A. Unified, said the great challenge facing the district’s student healthcare system was getting students referred to the right provider. She referenced a Student Health and Human Services Resource Guide with comprehensive listings, including hotlines and direct contacts for site leaders.

Results from The L.A. Trust Data xChange showed that L.A. Unified’s Wellness Centers conducted 57,406 encounters with 22,018 patients during 2020-2021, just 2% fewer than the previous academic year, even though many clinics were closed and most students were not on campus. The Data xChange numbers included detailed data by Wellness Center, though direct comparisons between sites are difficult  due to different pandemic schedules, reporting methods and populations. “These numbers demonstrate the vital resource that Wellness Centers represent to students and families during this time of crisis,” Puffer said.

Student mental health

The mental health and well-being of students has gained greater urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Data xChange reported a total of 13,256 student and 2,218 non-student mental health encounters during 2020-2021 at the seven Wellness Centers providing data to LAUSD School Mental Health. “The need to collect comprehensive mental health data is critical,” Puffer noted. “This is just a start.”

Los Angeles Unified is spending $170 million to provide more mental health counselors at schools to help students process the anxiety and trauma of the past year, the district has announced. Students with learning differences and disabilities will benefit from a separate $140 million investment, which will allow staff to quickly update Individualized Education Programs and provide more direct services to students.

Youth are actively participating as mental health advocates. Student Advisory Board members and Adult Allies are collaborating with staff from The L.A. Trust,  Department of Mental Health Community Ambassador Network (CAN), and L.A. Unified on monthly social media events focused on mental health topics, including suicide prevention (September) and healthy relationships (October).

Building bridges at CSHA

Maryjane Puffer provided an overview of The L.A. Trust, including a new organization chart showing eight new staff members, an update on The L.A. Student Mental Health Initiative and several major new grants.

She announced this year’s School Health Conference sponsored by the California School-Based Health Alliance — “Building Bridges to Healthy and Resilient Communities” — which will be held online November 2-4. Members of The L.A. Trust community can email info@thelatrust.org for a promotion code reducing the cost of registration.

Puffer ended her update by reminding participants that CVS had donated a large quantity of hand sanitizers and wipes to L.A. Unified for use by Wellness Centers and others. Complete this form to obtain needed supplies.

The L.A. Trust adds eight new staff for engagement, data and policy

New team members (back row from left): Ifrah Moalin, Gabby Tilley, Taylour Johnson, Noe Rivera, Jasmine Cisneros and Alex Zepeda. Front: Casey Balverde and Katie Melara. 

The Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health has onboarded eight new team members, expanding its scope and nearly doubling its full-time staff to 20. 

“This is the biggest growth initiative in The L.A. Trust's 20-year history,” noted Board President Will Grice of Kaiser Permanente. “These new team members will allow The L.A. Trust to expand policy development, advocacy, prevention education and student engagement.” 

The new team members are Casey Balverde, data and research analyst; Jasmine Cisneros, program associate; Taylour Johnson, program associate; Katie Melara, program coordinator; Ifrah Moalin, health educator; Noe Rivera, senior program manager, mental health; Gabby Tilley, senior policy manager; and Alex Zepeda, senior data and research analyst (previously announced).  

“This is a trained and talented team,” noted Executive Director Maryjane Puffer. Balverde is pursuing her doctorate in public health and worked as a health educator for L.A. County Department of Public Health. Rivera has a master’s degree in applied psychology and more than eight years of experience in behavioral health services. Moalin is an experienced health educator with a degree in public health from Cal State Northridge. Tilley is a former policy advocate for Nourish California with a master’s degree in public policy from USC.

Half of the new team members will serve on The L.A. Trust’s student engagement team: Cisneros will serve as an Adult Ally for Student Advisory Boards at Jordan and Locke High Schools; Johnson will assist SABs at Santee and Carson; Melara will serve the SABs at Elizabeth Learning Center and Garfield High; and Ifrah Moalin will assist student health advocates on the Monroe High campus. They join Program Manager Mackenzie Scott, Adult Ally serving Crenshaw and Washington Prep; Robert Renteria, senior program manager for student engagement and physical health; and Program Manager Esther Yepez, Adult Ally serving Belmont High, on the student engagement team. 

“These investments in student engagement, research and policy mean The L.A. Trust will impact more students, implement more programs and impact policy in new and powerful ways,” Puffer said. “I have never been more excited about the future of The L.A. Trust and the prospects for improving student healthcare in Los Angeles.”