Safe & Sound

Strategic partnerships & policy - safe & sound's strategic partnerships & policy programming focuses on enhancing services for children and caregivers by establishing and strengthening partnerships across the city, and supporting research and policy advocacy at the local, state, and national levels. This includes supporting numerous policies and advocacy efforts that address critical issues including child abuse prevention and mandated reporter reforms. A key aspect of our efforts is leading the san francisco family services alliance, which brings together 40+ frcs and child-serving agencies that collectively support over 50,000 children and caregivers across the city. Through the family services alliance, safe & sound champions investment in frcs and actively advocates for budget allocations that significantly support family services. As a backbone organization, safe & sound plays a central role in the planning and implementation of initiatives like the family first prevention services act (ffpsa), collaborating with frcs and community-based organizations to provide essential upstream support for families and reduce involvement with the child welfare system. Safe & sound is also the backbone agency of the children's advocacy center of san francisco (cac), which facilitated 123 forensic interviews last year, where a multidisciplinary team of medical, mental health, law enforcement, and legal professionals are there to help children and families by providing a trauma-informed best-in-class single forensic interview and referrals to the follow-up care the child and family need to heal after cases of abuse. In 2024, the collective efforts of the team resulted in the engagement of 42 partnerships, and the enactment, adoption, or refinement of 19 agreements, policies, and procedures advocating for trauma-informed systems change to transform the child welfare system into a family and child well-being system that improves life trajectories and outcomes. In 2024, safe & sound's center for youth wellness concluded its work on the trauma-informed aces screening & intervention evaluation (tasie) project, underwritten by hrsa, an agency of the u.s. Department of health and human services, which studied our training model with enhanced learning technology, across several different healthcare settings. This project provided critical information to national healthcare leaders to determine how to best integrate an aces, toxic stress, and trauma-informed framework into pediatric primary care and how to effectively integrate screening and its results into patient healthcare management. The program extended its impact by training and supporting medical professionals, nonprofits, and community leaders in aces screening and effective interventions. Additionally, they collaborated with healthcare networks, drove awareness of the long-term effects of toxic stress, and advocated for equitable access to aces awareness and trauma-informed care through extensive partnerships and resource translation efforts. In 2024, the tasie project worked with 96 providers across 16 pediatric practices to screen 4,736 children across the u.s.

Community education & partnerships - safe & sound's community education & partnerships, in collaboration with the san francisco unified school district, focuses on child safety awareness training for both students and child-serving adults. The program (i) empowers children to advocate for their safety, (ii) emphasizes, to adults, the understanding of responsibilities as mandated reporters and fostering action when child abuse is suspected, and (iii) advocates for necessary changes to the child welfare field. Additionally, safe & sound leads essential services for families with young children exposed to violence through the safe start family resource center collaborative. The communities of care (coc) project extends this work, aiming to prevent child abuse and maintain family strength through a collaborative, evidence-based framework. The coc model incorporates protective factor training and assessments, fostering a data-informed approach to enhance support for families through community partnerships. In 2024, the team provided 3,611 children and child-serving adults with child safety awareness or mandated reporter training and trained 1,319 providers with trauma-informed systems principles. The team also provided trainings and workshops to 2,175 providers across the city to support a city-wide understanding of protective factors, trauma-informed systems, and capacity building strategies.