Celebrating a Decade of Progress
For the past decade, the LA Center for Strategic Partnerships has worked at the intersection of public and private systems to strengthen collaboration, promote equity, and improve outcomes for children, youth, and families across Los Angeles County.
TIMELINE
Our History
This interactive, visual timeline highlights select initiatives and defining moments in our history. It does not seek to show the whole scope of our work but instead to illustrate both how the Center’s work has evolved and how our collective efforts grow over time to significantly impact the well-being of children, youth, and families.
The Center for Strategic Public-Private Partnerships launches, with Kate Anderson as inaugural director. Initially created by a Board motion as a three-year pilot project of the Office of Child Protection, The Center initially focuses on three child welfare-related priorities: Prevent children from entering the child protection system; recruit and retain resource families for foster youth; and support transition-age youth.
Year 1 initiatives focus on building relationships, finding alignment between philanthropic and County priorities, and adding strategic value where it is most needed to ensure impact. Examples:
- Upfront Family Finding: The Center secures funding for evaluation of a pilot program to find and engage family members of children in foster care. With time and evidence of success, this approach becomes business as usual across all DCFS regional offices.
- Home visiting: The Center coordinates a Board-directed plan to align and expand the County’s multiple, disparate home visiting programs for caregivers with young children. Ten years later, a joint referral system helps many more families quickly find best-fit services in their area.
Building on decades of youth and community organizing, a Board Motion calls for transformation of the current youth justice system through youth development, diversion, restorative justice, and community engagement. During the next 5 years, The Center supports this effort in myriad ways, including youth and community engagement, evaluation, and legal support. The County’s youth-led efforts lead, in 2022, to the creation of today’s Department of Youth Development.
In response to a dire shortage of foster homes, the Center partners with First 5 LA and The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation to launch Foster Together Network, a collective impact effort to make sure kids receive the care they need. Today, this active coalition includes multiple County departments, foster family agencies, community leaders, parents, and former foster youth, all working together to tackle the child welfare system’s greatest challenges.
A Board motion directs DCFS to work with The Center to create a countywide faith-based engagement strategy. The motion also asks DCFS to explore the creation of a centralized, faith-based engagement office to coordinate and track all DCFS faith-based partnerships and collaborations.
One Roof LA begins. The Center plays a key role in bringing L.A. partners to the table for this nationwide initiative to prevent family separation due to housing concerns.
Within 7 years, One Roof LA will transform the County’s housing landscape by bringing a Housing First mindset to DCFS, fostering a culture of collaboration among historically siloed agencies, and helping partners to generate more affordable housing options, greater access to those options, and more robust support services to help keep families and youth stably housed.
In recognition that Black mothers and their infants are dying at rates many times the LA County average, the Center teams up with the LA Partnership for Early Childhood Investment and the Department of Public Health to launch the African American Infant and Maternal Mortality Initiative (AAIMM), which aims to eliminate these unacceptable disparities and advocate for healthy and joyous births for all Black women.
Facing a backlog of thousands of families waiting for licensing approval so they can care for their relative children detained in foster care, DCFS seeks philanthropic support. With private funding, a Board motion, and The Center’s streamlined contracting capacity, DCFS is able to hire A Second Chance, a nationally recognized expert in kinship caregiver certification, to help the agency build a new “gold standard” resource family approval process and clear the backlog in a matter of months.
The Center completes its Strategic Development Plan. In its new form, the Center for Strategic Partnerships expands its scope beyond child welfare to include all Board Directed Priorities, but with a “common thread.” With key stakeholders’ help, The Center lands on four interdependent priority areas: Child and Family Well-Being, Youth Development and Empowerment, Health Equity, and Economic Security.
During the pandemic, Center staff reports daily to the County’s Emergency Operations Center to provide real-time support for COVID response efforts, including isolation beds for people experiencing homelessness, “hot spots” for remote students, iPads allowing quarantined patients to connect with loved ones, emergency tents to accommodate hospital overflow, and emergency child care for first responders.
The DCFS Community Analysis Dashboard, launched by Foster Together Network’s Data Workgroup, brings together data for the first time on how the volume, location, and attributes of resource families compare with the needs of LA County children in foster care. This new service allows DCFS and its partners to make more targeted and strategic investments to improve care and keep youth closer to their homes and neighborhoods.
When the federal government grants billions of dollars in flexible funding to local governments for COVID recovery, The Center helps ensure LA County’s American Recovery Plan funds are spent equitably and reach the hardest-hit communities. The technical and logistical support provided through this process to smaller, grassroots organizations gives birth to evolving initiatives with the same goals.
As disparities in COVID vaccine rates become apparent, The Center teams up with the Department of Public Health to provide grassroots grants to faith-based organizations, supporting dissemination of accurate information by trusted messengers and community-based vaccine clinics in underserved areas.
LA County launches the country’s largest Guaranteed Income program with significant support from The Center and philanthropy for everything from implementation to evaluation. The same year, The Center stands up a Guaranteed Income Coordinating Council to bring together learnings from Guaranteed Income programs across LA with an eye toward reshaping the very narrative around race and poverty. The Council was adopted by the Poverty Alleviation Initiative and continues to this day.
Philanthropy and the County share the goal of sustaining the multitude of skilled community health workers that supported their neighborhoods during the COVID pandemic. Center partners support a series of studies, including one by the Alliance for Health Integration and one by Vision Y Compromiso, whose findings lead to a 2025 recommendation to stand up a Community Health Worker Consortium.
The Center identifies and contracts with consultant support for County and philanthropic community leaders, as they design and establish a Leadership Table and Executive Committee to advance a coordinated plan to end homelessness throughout the region.
Foster Together Network launches the Youth Mentoring Nexus, with start-up funding from the Hilton Foundation and investments and partnership of 3 County departments. Guided by youth with lived experience in child welfare, the Nexus brings together a wealth of expertise in mentorship best practices and youth mobilization, with the goal of ensuring that every systems-involved youth has a robust network of community connections to support them in their careers and personal development.
The Center provides consultant support for the County’s Mandated Supporter
Initiative (MSI). After California passed new legislation that codified the important
distinction between neglect and poverty-related challenges, the MSI pilot-tests new training and decision-support tools to ensure medical, school, child care,
and other professionals understand what the law requires and how to make
equitable reporting decisions that prioritize child safety while reducing
inappropriate reports.
Building on lessons learned during the COVID pandemic, The Center is once
again a key player in helping to ensure wildfire relief funds quickly reach
those who need them most. With partner SoCal Grantmakers, The Center
provides a common table for funders to learn together, align priorities, and
streamline efforts. The Center’s role in wildfire relief will prove to be a “tipping
point” that leads to ongoing support of the County as it responds to other
human crises throughout 2025 and beyond.
In response to a board motion directing the County's CEO to create a
dedicated office for faith-based engagement, the Office of Faith-Based and
Neighborhood Partnership is launched under the Center umbrella. Originally
scheduled for fall, the launch was moved up to January to support bringing
faith partners into the County’s coordinated wildfire response.
The Skid Row Care Campus opens its doors. This one-stop neighborhood center offers access to essential resources, including restrooms, showers, laundry facilities, a harm reduction drop-in center, community respite beds, and trauma-informed health and social services. A Center-hosted briefing in 2023 helped the County raise tens of millions of philanthropic dollars to make this vision a reality.
In April 2026, The Center celebrated its 10th anniversary. The occasion was marked by a gathering at Gloria Molina Grand Park on April 30. The date was officially recognized by a Board of Supervisors motion sponsored by Supervisor Hilda Solis.