April 2022 Newsletter

Greetings, D4 residents - 

As we settle into spring, I hope everyone is enjoying the (slowly) warming weather, as well as the much needed late season rain. The month of April has also brought significant cultural celebrations, including Cesar Chavez Day, Passover, Easter, and Ramadan. In whatever way your family celebrates, I hope that you were able to spend time with loved ones and experience some seasonal renewal.

This month, the Board of Supervisors received a report back on the Children's Roadmap to Recovery, an initiative on which I led that calls for building out wellness centers at schools, supporting children who lost a parent or primary caregiver due to COVID-19, and building up our early childhood education and childcare workforce. I appreciate County administration's efforts to implement these recommendations, and I look forward to seeing these programs serving the children in our county.

My office held a press conference this past week at the Santa Clara County Reentry Resource Center along with Santa Clara County Executive Jeff Smith, Supervisor Cindy Chavez, and healthcare leaders to discuss substance use disorder treatment strategies. You can read more in my Medium blog post about plans for our county to expand the use of tools which have proven effective for treating individuals, including additional detox beds, a contingency management therapy pilot program in partnership with the State of California to treat methamphetamine addiction, and streamlined processes to connect individuals to services on the day they are ready to accept them.