Rooted In Community: Strengthening the Bay Area’s Safety Net

Findings from interviews with safety net providers across Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Solano counties, gathered between January and July 2026.

A regional report prepared by California Coverage and Health Initiatives (CCHI), funded in part by the California Wellness Foundation

READ THE REPORT

Who We Heard From

Alameda County Homeless Action Center ↗ Alameda Health Consortium ↗ Aliados Health ↗ Asian Health Services ↗ Bill Wilson Center ↗ Center for Excellence in Nonprofits ↗ CHI Community Health Initiative ↗ CocoKids ↗ Code Tenderloin ↗ Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto ↗ Community Solutions ↗ Contra Costa Senior Legal Services ↗ Drug Safe Solano ↗ Healthier Kids Foundation ↗ Immigrant Child Health Partnership ↗ Innovative Health Solutions ↗ National Health Care for the Homeless Council ↗ Partnership Health Plan ↗ Progress Foundation ↗ Ravenswood Family Health Network ↗ San Francisco Community Clinic Consortium ↗ San Mateo County Health Coverage Unit ↗ SANE-SART ↗ Santa Clara County Housing Authority ↗ Santa Clara Family Health Plan ↗ Senior Coastsiders ↗ Swords to Plowshares ↗ Telecare Corporation ↗ TGI Justice Project – Miss Major's Black Trans Cultural Center ↗

Regional

Priorities

Strengthen existing systems. Build shared referral hubs.

Shift power toward community and grassroots organizations.

Lower contracting barriers and strengthen oversight.

Fund existing collaboration, not competition.

California Health Interconnectivity Initiative · Bay Area

Bright spots: where coordination is already working

Across Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Solano counties, safety net providers are sustaining coalitions, shifting from competition to coordination, building shared data infrastructure, and grounding their work in community trust. Filter by category, or click any model to read more.

24 models

Coalitions and shared tables

Alameda County Recuperative Care Learning Network

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Since 2025, ACRCLN brings together service providers, hospitals, managed care plans, and other community partners in homeless services and health care to share best practices and work through data sharing, patient referrals, and authorizations, aiming to bolster payor-provider relationships and improve access to recuperative care.
Coalitions and shared tables

South County Thrives

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Santa Clara Family Health Plan led a community-based participatory assessment across South Santa Clara County, engaging more than 650 residents and over 20 partner organizations. A Partnership Spectrum exercise helped participants see they had been competing rather than coordinating, leading to a shared work plan stewarded by the Gilroy Foundation as backbone organization.
Coalitions and shared tables

Napa and Solano Health Access Assistors Coalition

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A twenty-year-old coalition of about 40 organizations spanning health, government, schools, hospitals, faith communities, and legal aid. Monthly meetings now draw close to 60 people who use the gatherings to refer clients and share updates on Medi-Cal and other programs.
Coalitions and shared tables

Healthy Marin Partnership

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A multi-sector collaborative that conducts a community health assessment every three years to drive a Community Health Improvement Plan, currently prioritizing access to care. Two standing working groups, on workforce development and on access to care and coverage, bring recommendations to the broader partnership.
Coalitions and shared tables

San Mateo Health Coverage Coalition

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A coalition of enrollment assistors and partners that the San Mateo County Health Coverage Unit has facilitated since 2002, meeting every other month with county agencies, CBOs, health plans, and clinics at the table.
Coalitions and shared tables

Drug Safe Solano

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Starting with judges, recovery providers, and faith communities, this coalition has spent nearly a decade pushing for services, securing opioid settlement dollars, and organizing Solano County's first state-of-the-art residential treatment facility, now under construction in Fairfield. It has grown into a three-county network with counterparts in Alameda and Contra Costa.
Coalitions and shared tables

San Francisco Community Clinic Consortium

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Supports San Francisco's community health centers and FQHCs with a shared table to coordinate with each other, a unified voice with city departments and health plans, and a place to work through contract payments, workforce, and coverage retention. Also runs community health worker training that feeds the local healthcare pipeline.
Coalitions and shared tables

Alameda Health Consortium

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This consortium of community health centers recently used grant funding to partner with community-based legal organizations on outreach and education for the undocumented immigrant community. Member clinics and community resource centers reported more people coming in for Medi-Cal renewals and new applications as a direct result.
Coalitions and shared tables

Destination Home Dinners

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Informal dinners hosted by Destination Home bring CEOs of housing nonprofits together to eat, talk, and get to know each other outside any formal agenda, building the personal relationships that help leaders see each other as collaborators rather than rivals for the same grants and contracts.
Coalitions and shared tables

Center for Excellence in Nonprofits (CEN)

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CEN treats connection as a core part of helping nonprofits operate more effectively. Rather than waiting for collaboration to happen organically, it actively brokers relationships across the sector, bringing organizations together that might not otherwise find each other.
Coalitions and shared tables

Stanford Immigrant Child Health Program (ICHP)

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ICHP works to collaboratively develop and promote community-embedded models of wraparound care for immigrant youth and the providers who serve them. Its Community of Practice engages providers across education, mental health, medicine, law, and social services, building Medical-Legal-Education partnerships primarily focused on San Mateo County.
Coalitions and shared tables

Contra Costa Senior Legal Services and CSLAC

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Contra Costa Senior Legal Services co-founded the California Senior Legal Aid Coalition (CSLAC), a new statewide network meant to address fragmented coordination among senior services, connecting legal aid organizations with each other and with other sectors.
Coalitions and shared tables

SANE-SART Human Trafficking Task Force

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Serving Solano, Napa, and Marin counties, SANE-SART recently helped launch a Human Trafficking Task Force with buy-in from the sheriff, police chief, district attorney, and local NAACP chapters, already helping reduce the barriers survivors face across three counties that previously had little formal coordination on this issue.
Targeted partnerships

Swords to Plowshares Veteran Support to Self-Reliance pilot

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A three-year, $25 million California pilot that adds mental health, occupational therapy, peer support, and other onsite staff inside existing permanent supportive housing for aging and high-acuity veterans. The model is designed to work for other housing populations too, not only veterans.
Targeted partnerships

TGI Justice Project Monday Spa Wellness Program

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Through its Monday Spa in Mill Valley, TGI Justice Project offers Black trans community members holistic wellness services as part of a broader wellness department that includes nonwestern modalities and connects people with mental health providers.
Targeted partnerships

Progress Foundation and Mentis shared staffing

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For three years, Progress Foundation and Mentis shared staff, including a supervisor and clinical team, to run a joint short-term crisis case management program in Napa County. Each organization kept its own staff, but a shared program supervisor oversaw both teams, giving clients exceptional continuity of care.
Targeted partnerships

Asian Health Services and the Law Foundation

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A long-running legal aid partnership where Asian Health Services connects immigrant patients to legal help so they can keep their coverage, avoid public charge problems, and untangle costly enrollment errors, including education sessions with notarios so families could enroll in coverage without fear it would hurt their immigration case.
Targeted partnerships

Healthier Kids Foundation dental access in South County

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To address the shortage of dental appointments for kids in Gilroy and Morgan Hill, Healthier Kids Foundation partnered with an FQHC that holds a clinic slot and sends a mobile dental van to South County, and worked with the school district to train teachers to spot dental needs and connect families to care.
Targeted partnerships

Innovative Health Solutions Lunch Buddies Bistro

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A free congregate meal program for older adults built on partnership: community centers donate kitchen and dining space they'd normally rent out, and a local partner covers food transportation, giving older adults across Solano County a place to eat well and connect.
Targeted partnerships

Alameda County Healthcare for the Homeless

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Behavioral health bridge housing and medically enhanced interim housing programs run across multiple sites by different provider organizations, coordinated through a shared referral process. The programs have closed a longstanding gap for people who are too medically or psychiatrically fragile for a regular shelter bed.
Targeted partnerships

Senior Coastsiders coastal meal delivery

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Serving older adults along the geographically isolated San Mateo coast, Senior Coastsiders' commercial kitchen prepares fresh meals delivered to older adults on the coast. A South Coast partner organization picks up frozen meals and delivers them along with wellness checks to reach isolated older adults the team would not otherwise be able to serve directly.
Data and referral infrastructure

Aliados Health Center to CBO Data Exchanges

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Aliados, the regional association for 17 community health centers, is connecting individual health centers to community-based organizations using shared data tools from BluePath Health and the Connecting for Better Health Coalition, starting with pairs that already had the technology and working relationship in place. Current pilots include a medically tailored meals referral and data-sharing project.
Community outreach and engagement

Code Tenderloin Night Navigation

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A street outreach team that runs nightly in the Tenderloin and SoMa, picking up where most other services stop. Staff, many with lived experience of homelessness and substance use, connect people with physicians using on-the-spot telehealth visits and with shelter through San Francisco's Department of Public Health, and co-run the annual Overdose Summit with Tenderloin Housing Clinic and DPH.
Community outreach and engagement

Code Tenderloin Joy to the City

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A year-end community event that last year drew roughly 18,000 people and hosted 40 community tables, where partner organizations signed people up for services and connected with the community in multiple languages.