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San Bernardino County employees in the Transitional Assistance Department this year collected more than 27,000 food items for those in need to be distributed through Community Action Partnership Food Bank. The county employees take the first week of October — Customer Service Week — to recognize their customers and give back to the community with a department-wide food drive in partnership with CAP Food Bank, according to Gilbert Ramos, director of the county’s Transitional Assistance...

A San Bernardino County jail is expanding the number of mentally ill inmates to be treated inside the facility by behavioral health workers as state hospitals continue to face bed shortages. Up to 96 patient inmates unfit to stand trial and housed at West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga can be admitted into the Jail Based Competency Treatment Program, active at the jail since 2010, under a new three-year contract approved earlier this month. The program offers services similar to...

To see the conference agenda, list of all-star speakers, and to register go to: http://www.theresourceinnovationgroup.org/california-2018-conference/

Please check out our newly organized ACEs Task Force of San Bernardino website! On the left panel, you will see recent posts related to San Bernardino. On the right panel, you can choose an item under the Blog Directory to find out what is happening or related to our specific goals and hence action groups. Just below the Blog Directory are Resources for us to share with each other. I recently added a handout for parents (Handouts), a resiliency-building organizational survey (Survey Tools),...

San Bernardino has focused like a laser on homeless veterans and the results are promising. Yet, while the county successfully housed 781 homeless veterans in less than two years, between 40 and 45 homeless veterans enter the system every month. Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed three housing bills that should help relieve the affordable housing crisis, but there is a high cost. On Tuesday, the Redlands City Council made local progress on this issue when it approved that city's Liberty Lane...

Law enforcement can't combat crime effectively without input from its community, and Michael Stevens aims to help in any way he can. The Adelanto city spokesman recently spoke with the Daily Press about his participation in the "Sheriff's Information Exchange Committee", a group including San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon and several community leaders from throughout the county that meets multiple times a year. According to Lt. Sarkis Ohannessian, the committee, which is by...

The Management Assistance Group (MAG) is one of NPQ ’s go-to sources of information about social justice movements. MAG works with a number of the networks that are moving some of this nation’s most difficult issues. MAG has come to believe there are five elements that are critical to advancing a thriving justice ecosystem. This is the second in a special five-part series, in which MAG and NPQ invite you to contribute to the evolution of what these elements mean in practice. A critical shift...

The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s office has awarded $2 million to community colleges in Riverside, Norco and Moreno Valley to turn around low college-going and high school graduation rates among foster youth. "There have really been no coordinated services that usher foster youth through the secondary school system and transition them smoothly and seamlessly through higher education," said MaryAnn Doherty, director of grants for the three-campus Riverside Community College...

The recently released 2017 homeless count combined with academic research has convinced San Bernardino County to become the first county in the United States to treat unaccompanied homeless women as a special population — a focus that homelessness experts expect will dramatically decrease the number living on the streets. Research looking specifically at unaccompanied homeless women is scarce, said Sofia Herrera, Ph.D, director of the Office for Urban Initiatives at Fuller Theological...

Twenty-one fewer homeless people were found on the streets, in transitional housing and in shelters in San Bernardino County than were counted a year ago, a sign that progress to combat the problem countywide has been firm and steady, officials say. In 2015, there were 2,140 total homeless counted and 1,887 were tallied last year, representing a 12-percent year-over-year dip. Preliminary figures from the 2017 San Bernardino County Homeless Count and Survey, conducted Jan. 26, show 1,866...

The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, like other law enforcement agencies in California, does not routinely check the immigration status of people it comes in contact with. And according to Sheriff John McMahon, residents are safer because of it. “The only time a person in this county’s immigration status is questioned is by ICE, number one, and after they’ve been locked away, arrested and booked into one of our facilities. That’s it.” That means low-level offenders who don’t have...

The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors has awarded contracts to construct two Crisis Stabilization Units (CSU) in Fontana and San Bernardino and two Crisis Residential Treatment (CRT) facilities in Fontana and Joshua Tree. Crisis Stabilization Units are designed to offer voluntary psychiatric urgent care services, for adults and adolescents experiencing a mental health crisis, in a positive, safe, quiet, and calm home-like environment where staff will seek to stabilize an...