Meet Oscar Flores, Home Visiting Program Manager at First 5 Monterey County
First 5 Monterey County was established in 1999 after Proposition 10 was passed by California voters in 1998, adding a 50-cent per pack tax to all tobacco products. The initiative provides funding for programs serving children from the prenatal stage through age 5 and their families – critical years for childhood development.
Locally, in California’s Monterey County, the mission of First 5 Monterey is to enrich the lives of young children by advocating for their needs, including their parents, extended family members, caregivers, and child care providers who all play pivotal roles in helping to prepare young children for lifelong learning. “At times, that means serving the parents, not the children,” says Oscar Flores, Home Visiting Program Manager at First 5 Monterey. “The science really tells us that when we’re thinking about young children, it’s about supporting the caregivers who then support the children to develop in optimal ways.”
Another core focus of First 5 Monterey’s work is strengthening connections between existing service providers and county agencies. “We hear directly from families we serve that while their intent is to work closely together, there’s often gaps in that collaboration and communication,” says Oscar. “Part of our work is to fund services, and currently, we fund both care coordination services and home-visiting services, and we serve around 400 families.”
For example, Southern Monterey County serves a large population of indigenous Mexican families who mainly work in agriculture. “We’ve had examples where they are referred to a doctor, but the doctor doesn’t have folks that speak indigenous languages — we do, which is where we come in and offer support,” says Oscar. “Or if there’s a special health related need that was missed because of the lack of cultural attunement or support. We make sure that that family doesn’t fall through the system’s gaps.”
First 5 Monterey focuses their services in zip codes where there are the largest gaps in care and where they notice the systems in place may have missed critical opportunities to serve the people that live there. “We’re really working hard to connect the dots,” explains Oscar. The organization has three primary areas of focus – the first being a champion for early childhood, the second, connecting the different systems, and the third is healing-focused, being driven by connections with people and fostering those relationships. “To us, that means that we can’t just tell a family to go somewhere and then expect them to go if there’s no trust.”
First 5 Monterey is positioning itself to provide Community Health Worker (CHW) services under Medi-Cal. As part of this transition, Frist 5 Monterey engaged with the Intrepid team to conduct a privacy and security risk assessment, to establish a robust privacy and security infrastructure to support the exchange of protected health information under Medi-Cal Phase two of Intrepid’s work is about to begin and will focus on implementing the privacy and security recommendations identified through the assessment, preparing First 5 Monterey for their transition to providing CHW services through Medi-Cal.
“It’s a process for us to be able to leverage public dollars but really when we analyze the work, most of the families we’re serving are in the Medi-Cal system,” says Oscar. “Hopefully, my work is helping to create systemic change. It gives me hope to be able to form this partnership where we’re going to be helping families that are already part of the Medi-Cal health system so that we can bill for the things that we’re already doing and support them to fully engage in all of the healthcare system pieces of things.”
Oscar has been working with First 5 for nearly 12 years and the ability to connect and support local families but in a way that works for them keeps him inspired. “Often there is bureaucracy in many things, and within my work, I try to not create systems that aren’t helpful,” says Oscar “I love to hear how our services impact families, hearing those stories of our partners connecting with a family and that family trusting enough to share with them is really deep – that’s just beautiful to me.”
To learn about First 5 Monterey County’s impact on the community it serves, visit first5monterey.org. To learn more about Intrepid Ascent’s service offerings on California’s TA Marketplace contact:calaim-ta@intrepidascent.com