I do record clearances 3 to 4 times a year. That's why I use my my bar card for now. To, uh, to just help people move on with their lives. In. In most of these folks are people who have, like, a petty theft charge, a misdemeanor, a DUI from 10, 15, 20 years ago. I'm not saying these are not bad crimes, but they're not bad people, and they've they've moved past it. And they but they they let it linger. They let it affect them. They let it affect how they see themselves. They they live with shame every day. And when I clear their record, they cry the happy tears and then they ride off into the sunset and they never see me again, which is just fine because if you have to see me again, maybe something happened.

(Interviewer) What compelled you to pursue law school?

Power. I wanted to be a lawyer because to me, it signified power. And when you grow up not having any power, not having any voice, clearly seeing that your parents don't have any power, which just kind of does something to a kid's mind, Right? Like your parents are supposed to be your protectors, the ones in charge. They always know what to do. And very early on in my childhood, I realized I could not define my parents in that way. They were struggling with their own, their own battles that I had to be a part of because I spoke some English, more English than they did. So for me, I always thought that if I had the right words, I could unlock the solution. If I said the right things, I can convince the other person that we were in the right. We know it's not that simple. But I used to watch Law and Order to mimic the words of the lawyers, try to, like, hold myself like that. And then to me, just represent the power, you know, from seeing lawyers on TV to seeing lawyers in the courtroom. But the real journey was, you know, looking around my environment, who had the power. You know, to me, landlords had the power, right? Managers had the power. The boss at work had the power. The gangsters and the the the neighborhood had the power. Then when the cops come, they have the power. When we go line up outside of court to go sit in and a hearing. If you've ever been to the Hall of Justice every morning, that's a long way out the door. People are there to appear for their cases, whether it be DUIs, petty theft, assault, battery. You know, it's it's a criminal court.

So when you're standing in that line waiting to go in, you see wives, you see moms, you see dads, you see grandmas, you see aunts and uncles. You see kids; they’re with their parents. You know, they're like people didn't have child care or, you know, for whatever reason, the whole family's there. Like, you see all types of generations and folks getting like you'll see the sheriff's deputies trying to maintain order, right? They’re like stand a straight line, remove all metals, put everything in the tray. Walk, walk, walk, Go, go, go. Right. So it's like direction orders, orders. So, you know, you really clearly feel you have no power there. Then when you sit in the courtroom, and you see the lawyers walk in, everyone gets out of their way. They're the only ones that get to talk. They get to talk to the judge. Clearly, the judge is power. So for me, there are so many different experiences. To me, lawyers had power. They had power through their words. They had power through their position. I didn't quite understand where it came from because I didn't know enough about law or that world. But you know what? I would love to be a lawyer. And, you know, for a long time in my childhood that didn't seem like an accessible and attainable dream. And and when I transferred to Berkeley and continued to, you know, when I went to community college, then went to Berkeley and was like increasingly, you know, doing well at school, feeling really empowered, I was like, you know, I can do this. So I applied for law school and got in.

With ICAN, number one, I didn't know that you can get paid to organize community, so that was like, amazing for me. Number two, it, it helped me understand a lot more about the challenges that our community was experiencing. Um, I had this preconception that the problems or the challenges or the lessons or the issues that we were dealing with as a family, was in the past. But there's still a lot of families today then and now who still faced with language accessibility, faced with housing insecurity, faced with food insecurity, faced with cultural cultural conflicts, faced with having to navigate a system that's not making itself very easy to understand. So ICAN, it was like the next step, right? So it was really amazing. Working at the nonprofit side and working with state legislator, seeing two sides like both sides of that advocacy relationship.

So yeah, I guess I keep on pursuing things that are like conflicting, right? So, so working at the legislative office, like we were regularly receiving advocacy letters and efforts and meetings with community groups trying to push new policy forward and seeking funding or seeking opportunities to grow or to have investments in their organization or their grassroots efforts. Right? At the same time, I was spending time with the grassroots effort, and ICAN and ICAN was really special to me because, well, for many reasons. One of the first reasons, one of the big reasons, like the job that I had there, was to put on the family, the Family Empowerment Forum. And it was a new concept to a lot of our Vietnamese Americans, like why would we spend a day together on a Saturday at a high school going to these different workshops? Right. And we're bringing in organizing the guest speakers and having promoting getting people to sign up and people come, making, you know, making sure that the workshops are crafted in a way that was going to really be beneficial to us. And one of the workshops, I think this is like left a lasting impression on me about, you know, how much culture, competency and language accessibility is so. --how how critical it is to making sure that people get the services they need. There was a workshop on domestic violence, but we couldn't call it domestic violence. All the elders were saying, you can't call it that. It's shameful. They'll overpower people. It won't. It won't make people come right. And I'll say, What else can we call it? We're talking about violence in the family and how to get past that. Then one of the other elders goes, call it thuận vợ thuận chồng. It means happy wife, happy husband, family harmony. So it was, we named and rebranded it as the Family Harmony Workshop, and I sat in that workshop. It started with communication, division of Labor, How do we resolve conflicts or disagreements, where a type of disagreements in your household, what are like positive ways of resolving disagreements? What are bad ways of resolving disagreements? And that's when we got into violence and violence prevention and what's right, what's not right, and and what could be damaging to you, your physical and emotional health. And so so that was that was like my biggest I think, one of the really standout memories I had from working with ICAN, just understanding my community. so much more, and understanding that I know so little. There was more to learn and and um the, the only shame is my preconception that maybe these problems were part of the past, but they're still very much real here. So if anything that just told me that I had maybe I had, no, I had become more privileged in my state than I realized in I need to check that and remember that. And how do we still maintain a connection to our community and to be able to leverage off what I know, what resources now I'm connected to, to make sure that that it's available to our community members, and to our families as well. Yeah. Yeah. And ICAN put me on the Vietnamese radio for the first time, so I was really bad at it. Hopefully I can make them proud now. Yeah.

So I still I saw I did a interned at the public defender's office. I then got a job. So my different legal experiences include, you know, working in a for a small firm with contracts, you know, working on contracts, working on employment law. Then I got a fellowship with the Legal Aid Society Employment Law Center. Now it's called Legal Aid at Work to set up the Vietnamese American Workers Rights Project at the Catherine George Alexander Law Center. That's a whole lot of words. So I got to host a worker's rights clinic, legal clinic for Vietnamese-American workers, because that was a population of high need, but not a lot of service, a lot of a lot of education in that area. So I think working in public interest law, you start where you start, you can't help but start paying attention to policy and helping to like try to influence that and try to shape that. What it would look like to make the delivery of services easier, better and more meaningful, right, with better outcomes. And then my friend Cindy Chavez ran for office, a volunteer in her campaign. She won and I asked her to, Can I come work for you? Can I work on policy with you? And specifically, can I work work with you on some key things that I really cared deeply about, like language access, like building the Vietnamese American Service Center. But essentially it was how do we make government work better? Um, I was I've, I've been intimately aware of what happens when government doesn't work, when it's not accessible, when it doesn't help a situation where it can make a situation worse. Right? I've also seen when government really does work in and, it works in the outcomes and things go as scheduled and people have some order in their lives. They know they can rely on this program. They know that the that Cal Fresh will be reloaded on their EBT card every month so they're able to have money to go buy groceries. They know that that there are supports. You know, when government works, it really works and it really makes a difference in people's lives. So I got a chance to work with someone who I really feel is an innovator in the space. So and so here I am ten years later, it's my 10th year anniversary.

(Interviewer) Woo! Well, also, you talked about language earlier. Yeah, but I just want to make the connection between the work that you did with legal Aid, which means workers rights, and also the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement. Yes. Do the two cross? I mean, they're one cross-pollinate to the other?

They all kind of cross-pollinate to each other. So after. So let's see. I can I can I just go over my county career a little bit? Yeah. So I came to work for Cindy, for supervisor Cindy Chavez to serve the residents of District two. And I want to just talk a little bit about District two. So District two is, is this the geographically smallest footprint in the county, in the counties… So in our county, Santa Clara county, we have five districts and each district is divided up evenly by population. So, you know, sometimes it's the numbers, 300,000, 400,000, 500,000. Right now we're at 500,000. So every every district has approximately 500,000 residents. That's how we carve out the district. So some districts are really large because it takes that much geographical footprint to have 500,000 residents. Our district is very small. It doesn't take very you don't have to go very far and to East side and in downtown to to reach 500,000 residents. So we're the most densely populated. The the the the majority of our county's clients are live in District Two. The the majority of nonprofits located in the county is is based in district two. So it's a it's a district that covers like I mentioned, Eastside, Downtown, Little Saigon, Capitol Expressway. That's where we most visibly see the the the housing crisis, the the human suffering of the unhoused. That's where we see the floods, the roadways not working when we have a big storm. That's where we see a lot of challenges. Right. So we have there's a lot to do here.

There's a lot of work and requires a lot of discipline, a lot of study, a lot of innovation and just constant grind to like making things better. And our policy here is that our most vulnerable have access to their most basic needs, our most vulnerable are able to have an opportunity to pursue education, to pursue work, to pursue a career right then that will lift up the rest of our community as well. When our most vulnerable is able to thrive, it means our whole community will thrive. That is the policy that we adopt here.

So I worked with Cindy for a few years and in 2000 I worked, I worked for came to work for in 2013, and in 2016, I took a personal leave of absence to to run the Measure A the 2016 Measure A Housing Bond campaign. It was a campaign that we won. Every told us we weren't going to win it because it requires a two thirds vote. So 66.67% of the population of all of Santa Clara County had to approve this measure for it to pass. So up until then, all the measures that were similar to this, all the housing bond measures that had been put on the ballot, had failed, even though they reached 50%, 60%, 63%, my waking nightmare was at 65% rate. So close. But they have all failed. So this is the one that made it and it resulted in $950 million of of of funding for, to build supportive housing, long term permanent supportive housing, short-term housing, interim housing, shelter beds. And then it draws down annually $2 billion worth of federal and state funding in services for our residents who are housed in these units. So that's what we did. And then after that, right when I was running the campaign, I also got pregnant. So I had a baby. I was a I was I was pregnant and running the campaign. So after the campaign was done then I was on maternity leave. And that's when then Supervisor Dave Cortese and Supervisor Chavez put forth the policy to create a county-based Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, and then it was approved by the board. Now we need to staff it. So when I came back from maternity leave, you know, Cindy, Dave, other leadership in the county thought that this would be a really good fit for me, and I felt that way, too. It takes my policy experience with my legal background, my work and the labor employment law, workers’ rights community, my relationships in the small business community; kind of puts it all together into one and we created the first county based Office of Labor Stats Enforcement here and starting here in the county.

Since then, the office has other offices have opened. So Santa Monica… and I'm sorry, San Diego, San Diego and San Mateo County both launched their own Offices of Labor Standards Enforcement using our model. Yeah. So so that's what we do. It's a the office offers it has uh it has two arms. One is that we do direct enforcement. So we we you know, we work with our state and our federal partners. So existing labor violations, like their final orders of violations, are even issued by the court through administrative hearings. We don't do any adjudication. We just enforce existing. So there's a real crisis right now in the state of California where there's all these orders from court that says, hey, employer, you're in the wrong, worker, you've been wronged. Employee now owes the worker this amount of money and unpaid wages and unpaid overtime and other violations. Right. But there's no, there's very limited enforcement of of those orders. So we know in California that there is that there's numerous orders that still remain unpaid. So our office helps. That's our enforcement arm. We make sure that these existing adjudications are fulfilled. So workers and that's really about making workers whole. Right? You worked all these overtime hours, you work these hours. But then for whatever reason, through intimidation and through lack of understanding, through duress, through threats of deportation, through through all types of situations, right now, they don't have money, but that's money that they've earned for. So we use our permitting powers and our enforcement powers here at the county to make sure that those those those payments are made.

And we have a 100% win record every order that we've ever pursued has been paid in full. Yeah, Yeah. And so that's the enforcement arm. And then the other arm is community engagement support case management. So what does that mean? That means for small businesses, we provide free education and counseling and also provide legal counsel. So we have a whole attorney network that we pay for. It's the legal advice line, The OLSE Hotline. You call that number, you choose your language and an attorney who speaks that language, answers the phone, has a conversation with you, whether you're a worker or a business owner. The point is, everybody needs to comply, right? And so then if more assistance is needed, then you're referred to a worker's rights clinic or you're referred to a case management organization. So we have partnerships with multiple nonprofits and community by community. Right. Who's who does a case management, does a workshops, does a training, we do free trainings and workshops for business owners, small business owners who can't afford large H.R. departments or legal counsel to guide them. We provide that service for free, and that's an investment in making sure that good businesses is doing the right thing. We level the playing field for them so that businesses, you know, bad actors are not profiting and putting good business out of putting good businesses in a bad situation. We make sure that workers are paid what they're owed, what they worked for. They receive that they know their rights, that they're able to advocate for themselves. You know, coming from a family where my parents worked, minimum wage, their whole jobs, trying to set out on their own, try to create, you know, opportunities for themselves. Right. I know that at the end of the day, your your job is your money. True. But it's also your dignity. And we want to protect that dignity and honor that.

So in 2020, this thing called COVID comes and just like changed the whole world, right? It's just like global trauma. And so I think um very early on we were still hearing just news of it is still felt like a far off problem until it wasn't. And I remember on a on my birthday, one of the deputy county executives gave me a call. I thought he was calling to say happy birthday. No luck, he was calling to say that we need to report to the COVID 19 Emergency Operations Center on Monday. I was like, I don't know what that is. They said, Oh, you know, I think you'll have a good time. Last couple of weeks, maybe a month at the most. I don't know exactly what you're doing, but they the the, the team agreed that they need you there. I think I just said, send me in, I'm fine. You know, like, I think up until that point one of my because my life has always been like going in blind to so many situations and having to try to figure out a way to fix it that it became it's become second nature to me now.

So they just send me in and we'll go, and so on Monday we show up and then there's a long line after we check in for our assignments and they go, Oh, you're, you're in management. And so I still don't know what I'm supposed to do. They send me that you wear this emergency vest, you're assigned to this the section. And then so I was assigned to the Public Information office. And so our unit was is responsible was responsible for making sure that information about COVID, COVID resources, support resources, the latest news, delays, data, information, all of it. Right. Was made timely and clear and accessible to our residents, our population; did not know exactly what that meant at the time, but yeah, it all came to a head because now at the UN that day, that Monday on March 16th, 2020, we were told by our leadership that you know where we're going to set for a press conference in an hour. Betty, you're in charge and we're going to announce a shelter in place order. And when they said that, I think no one really knew what that meant. And then and then they said this is a big deal, shelter in place means we are shutting down the county. So then now, now I started sinking in. So it felt scary. It was hard, but we went into the press conference, and we very quickly realized our deficiencies in communicating. We didn't have a language access unit. We didn't have an immediate way to turn around information that was like that was easy to understand. And this is a time where everybody needs information from our food service providers to our janitors, to our health care workers, to the to our moms and dads, the grandparents, the childcare, everybody in our community needed to know what was happening.

So, like, for me, the the nightmare was like having a situation where the head of the household didn't know what was happening. And then because then that would translate to the kids not knowing what was happening. That's a very confusing and scary time for all of us in the county equally so. So we yeah, so I went into the PIO, we stood up a language access unit where we, we, we took from our own workforce. I was stalking people on Facebook, anybody who had language skills, anybody that had production skills, like they were activated as an accessory or service worker and the POW. We set up a call center that had a hotline that operated seven days a week so that if anybody just had questions, just call us, we will be redirect you to the right person. We had everything was done in five languages, the five threshold languages of the county, English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Tagalog. So and then and then we had capability to provide more translations as it was needed. But those were the five threshold. We immediately like set up new contracts with media, ethnic media that we've never engaged with before to make sure that they were also delivering our message. And they were huge. You know, they were huge partners in this. They they delivered the message. They were timely that we're at every press conference. We made sure we got the information out. But I spent a year in the emergency operations center doing all that. We also like part of my job, too, was also to help stand up the Community Health and Business Engagement Team CHBET. That's the acronym or should SH-BEY if you want to get fancy, but that was also our boots on the ground team. So we had at its height, we had 130 plus community health workers taken from community who spoke the language. Understand the neighborhoods, you know, to go door to door in full PPE gear, basically asking people, do you need food, ko you need period products, or you need medicine? Do do you need a sign up for Cal Fresh can I help you? Sign for Cal Fresh? Have you been tested? Let me get you a test right now. Have you sign a free vaccination? Let me make that point for you. So we were sending people to buy census track, we were able to identify where the highest rates of of of of COVID cases were.

And we sent these men and women and individuals into those places, and they went willingly. And so to me are incredible heroes, just like health care workers, just like everybody who served in this operation. These folks willingly went into neighborhoods where they knew the assignment was, hey, we have the highest spike of COVID cases here. We're sending you in. You can go door to door. You're going to talk to people, and you can figure out what they need. You get that to them. And they did it joyfully. They did it willingly. They did it with commitment. So that was just like one of the many operations that we ran during during COVID. And the language access unit that we stood up there is now a permanent operating procedure at the county. So the language processing unit moved out of the EOC into the to the Division of Equity Social Justice. It lives there now and I know that it can only grow and we're going to help it grow from the policy perspective, from where we stand, where we sit at the Board of Supervisors, we help make sure it grows and becomes stronger every day. And because languages change. Emerging community, there's always an emerging community. Different language needs change over time and we have to be flexible with that.

(Interviewer) And so you also mentioned the Division of Equity and Social Justice, you also play a role there to.

I was, yes. So I was the interim division supervisor, which meant that I oversaw the whole division and I was it was an to be with them during the transition. So it was after the emergency. Well, during the emergency operation center (EOC), I was also deployed to the Division of Equity and Social Justice. So I spent I had like one leg in the EOC world and one leg and the ongoing services that the division had to had to continue to deliver because that division is like the I feel like it's the activist division of the county. It's the innovative division of the county. It's the community division. They were still operating at full speed on full capacity and making sure that, you know, one of the initiatives relaunch under Supervisor Chavez's direction leadership was the period products, right. We knew this is one example of the work they were doing. We knew that that there were many individuals in our county who experienced period poverty and they were getting their period products from their school nurse from very much like so many of our student families were receiving their food, they relied on the school meal program to have three meals a day. There were also individuals who relied on the school supply of period products to have that. So one of the things that the office did that I helped facilitate was create this distribution plan of $1,000,000 with the period products throughout the whole county to make sure anyone who needed it had it. We were still we had the Girls Commission out of the Office of Women’s policy.

We were not going to let that go because we knew that that youth, young students were further isolated now because schools were shut down. So it was a priority for us to keep the the the the Girls Commission still going. So we just went from in-person meetings and workshops to now virtual to be able to give them that that level of engagement. We were still doing Intern and Earn that's another program that that I helped Supervisor Chavez launch here at the county where we provide paid internships to our foster youth because that's what they asked for. It wasn't something that we came up with. It was we met with Foster youth; they said that here's what we need. We need a new we need a foster youth resource center that's designed for us, centered around us, our experiences and becomes a hub for us to come to when we need a safe place or we need food or we need resources or advice. We don't need jobs. We need job advising. We need a network. We need a job, a career network. We need to we you know, and I don't blame them, right? We don't we don't want to spend the summer working at McDonald's. We want to spend the summer working at the county organization, interning in an office setting, because for them, that's what success was. You know, they were watching other kids through their family networks to be able to have access to these things. They don't have that family network. They don't have that that that that that level of support. So we you know, we create this Intern and Earn program where we'll place you in internships, at nonprofits, at universities, at district offices, at the county and we will pay for it. You get the experience, you build your resume, you build your network. And then for me, full circle is when we hire them back into the county, and that's when we come to hiring those of lived experience who have experience. Again, like I have when government works, when government doesn't work, and being very committed to making sure it works all the time for everybody.

Yeah, so we did. We kept all that going because it was critical and we can, you know, we, we can let that go if anything was more important. Now in, for example, the Office of the Office of Immigrant Relations, which is also part of the division, are nonprofits that serve immigrant populations. They were they were calling the Office of Immigrant Relations. They weren't calling the EOC, they weren't calling the executive leadership. They were calling the Office of Immigrant Relations to help find solutions to the challenges that they were seeing in their community. To get out information that was correct and accurate for those who were afraid of what was happening. How does that affect my immigration status? How does that affect my family's process if I sign up for help or if I access these resources? So and they were helping us with our messaging, right? We had to make sure that when we were putting out messaging for free vaccinations, free health care services, right. We were saying that no immigration status needed. Right. Because people we knew, that there were people who were purposely not accessing these critical services because they were for fear of the consequences of what may happen to them.

Yeah. So around the same time the Vietnamese American Service Center, which has been in development since 2013, was nearing the final stages of construction. So then and we you know, it was the first time the county had ever built such a center. And the easiest way to describe it is a cultural center, community center and health center. All hybrid into one because the county's job is not to build community centers that that is actually that is something that we're not supposed to do at all. That is like a parks and rec, city like center city operations. So cities build community centers, cities do recreation, cities do safety, public safety. We do overlap of that. But we are in the business of building health centers and service centers, which up to this point has been very sterile, very government right. And we wanted to build something that celebrated culture, celebrated community. So maybe you're coming there for a story time, a backpack distribution, a karaoke night or this nutrition program. But then we are you know, you are in an environment that is all about health services and well-being for the family, making that extremely accessible, making it safe for people to be able to be there for a culture program. But then people say, hey, I'm having some trouble at home. Can I talk to someone about it? Kind of like in an open camouflage, right? So it was about creating safe spaces for people to access critical services. So we were, you know, doing something brand new means a lot of, you know, trial and error. And then so at some point in 2021, I was brought in to be the project manager for the Vietnamese American Service Center.

So I got to I got to get to everybody's business. I got to get into construction. I got to get into program design, worked with the health team and some really cool work with the architects. So the architect is Thang Do. I hope I'm going to cry. He put he's passed on [chocking back tears]. This was his last project before he passed away and now there was a lot of resonating themes where he talked about this was a homecoming for him back to his community and his identity. He had been he had he is he had been a very successful architect, but he acknowledged that it took away from his Vietnamese roots and culture and community that he wanted to be a part of, in the vast was the perfect melding of that of that for him, his architectural skills, his profession, his roots, his community, his home. Right. And he built this incredible facility that doesn't look like a government building. We did not want it to look like a government building. People are so shocked, like this is a county building? Yes, it's beautiful. It's organic. It's a dynamic. The outside, the exterior of the building has different shades of green panels, which is supposed to represent bamboo. So in Vietnamese, we have a saying, sau lự tra làng, and it really means that it goes back to our tradition of building villages behind bamboo forests. Right? So bamboo is a natural protector and natural barrier against the elements, hostile forces. So here we wrapped the building in this bamboo motif to signal to our our clients, our guests, our neighbors that behind these walls is a community, a village, a safe space. And that was his projection of that was his vision of the project. And so he put his heart and soul and he placed little designs throughout the whole thing. But I got to work with him. I got to work with the whole team. And we got this we got this baby (claps) to come to final completion of construction and got it to grand opening.

And today, as of right now, this moment, you could walk into the to the to the building, say that I, I need mental health support and they will, no appointment needed, we're not going to ask you if you have insurance. We just know that you're in distress. So you need emotional and mental support right now. They will they will triage you. They will interview. They will put you, they will talk to you on the spot and take you to the second floor to see a clinician that speaks Vietnamese or Spanish or English or whatever language that's needed there. It's culturally Vietnamese that the language access policy there is trilingual, it's English, Vietnamese and Spanish as a language access place. All the signs are in three languages. All the staff offerings are available in those three languages- with the language access hotline if we need to have more translation. But it's a beautiful building that is meant to represent home, home here in America. And it was very emotional. I remember the day I stood outside the building as they hoisted the Vietnamese American Service Center sign up and see the awning, and I had never seen the term Vietnamese American written in that way, displayed in that way, carried in that way, and a beauty and a building this beautiful building that I had never seen anywhere else, that that pays homage to the diaspora, to the refugee experience in every single way possible.

Yeah. I should give yall a tour! Yes. Yeah.

Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was in them. And that was where I really got to apply my experience as a mom, right? Like, I mean, like initially, the original four floor plan of this center only had one lactation room, so. No, no, we need one on every floor. And then in the lactation rooms we had like the tech team was really was, was, was confused, not pushing back. But they're just like, oh, why do you need a phone line in the lactation room? I was like, well, if a mom is is in the room to lactate or nurse her baby right. And potentially she may be in a dangerous situation at home. This may be one of those rare opportunities where she's in private and she could safely make a call for help. So we have the resources guides, different services that you can dial out for, so little things like that, making sure that everything not just language but services is accessible to people in a safe in in compelling way.

We're all part of the safety net. Right. And like how do we, how do we share that mission and a more meaningful way because you know, we put so much work into engagement and outreach. Yes. But the audience that we're trying to reach is in your classrooms every day. You know, they're either working on campus, or going to class on campus, or already having seeking resources on campus, like how do we strengthen the safety net to include all of our non-county partners as well?

(Interviewer) Yeah, I mean, if you ever want a partner..

I mean, I totally do. I think that's a constant. I think that's a constant like mission, right? How do we make good government work better? Yeah, make everything better.

(Interviewer) Yeah. Instead of bureaucracies running against each other.

Yeah. Now that. Yeah, that's the, that doesn't work for me. But yeah, the vast the VASC of the still the only facility of its kind in the nation, and we you know I left the VASC to transition back to the office supervisors in for Cindy Chavez to serve as a chief of staff. Um, with the intention of let's build more VASCs let's build more service centers that reflect the community is located in. And it doesn't have to be just the Vietnamese American Service Center. I remember someone telling me once that they didn't work for the county, but they were they were a community stakeholder. And, you know, all opinions are valid. But I remember someone once telling me you need to be careful because now they're all going to want their own VASC And I was like, who are they? You know? And they said, you know, all the different ethnic committees are going to want their own service center that's designed for them, built with them. Like, I was like, Yeah, that would be great. Like if we redefined how we engage, how we deliver services and everything was delivered through service centers located throughout the county that was built in partnership with community like the, the, the service model, the design; everything in that building came after an eight-year communication process where we met almost on a monthly basis. We did surveys. I stood outside Grand Century with surveys trying to get people to answer questions. We did focus groups; we did community engagement sessions. We did every single thing, every way that we can get feedback and input from community. We did it so there's not a single service or program or cultural celebration that that was not directed by community in the service center. And I feel like we could have all service centers look like that. Yeah.

Well, the language access or language access work can continue to grow. I did talk about, you know, the idea of having like all points of engagement or or more points of engagement with the county to look like the Vietnamese American Service Center. That's going to be a shift in philosophy, operations and mission, right? here at the county. I'm hoping to help move it towards that direction. There's still a lot of work to be done. I think people people want good transportation. They want reliable public transportation. There is a lot of investments being made now throughout the country, throughout the state of California, to enhance our public transportation system. I want to be, you know, like I actively you know, I want to be part of that effort to make sure those regional dollars come to the Bay Area and those investments are made here.

So it's very important that the infrastructure of our county continues to be the the continued investment in the infrastructure of our county that continued enhancement of our behavioral health service, our mental health service offerings, making it even more accessible. I think it's incredible that at the VASC you could just walk in right now, say, I need mental health services, I need to talk to someone about my state of mind, and it happens right away. Ideally, that would happen in every situation, right? If someone has come to the point where they're willing to say out loud, I need help, I need mental health help, right? We should be ready for that moment to help them with that. There's still a lot of work to do in prevention across the board. I'm going to say this based on personal experience, professional experience, operational experience. It's a lot harder. It is extraordinarily infinitely harder to to help someone or help a family that's already living on the streets versus helping to make sure to prevent homelessness in the first place. So I think that's what that's like the next phase of our work, right? That's happening right now already. But we need to do as quickly as we're building housing and putting the unhoused into homes. We have to, at the same level of of commitment, of fervor, of of of of a sense of urgency, prevent families, prevent individuals becoming homeless in the first place. Because trust me, it costs 10,000 times more, in terms of labor staff, time, manpower, in terms of healing, recovering, it costs so much more to do that after the fact than it is to just prevent in the first place.

And that could have an across across multiple places like it's about food insecurity, right? It's about housing insecurity. It's about family violence prevention. It’s about mental health services. It’s about it’s about making sure that the kids have the families have childcare. That’s huge. If there is reliable, safe, affordable child care for children to be and, you know, then there wouldn’t be situations where moms had to pull kids out of schools to send them to another school so that they can have an an earlier release time to be able to watch the kids, right or, you know, it’s just it’s this all goes towards family stability and community stability.