Behavioral Health Services at Davis Street Community Center

For more than 27 years, Rose Padilla Johnson has worked at San Leandro, California’s Davis Street Community Center, one of the state’s largest comprehensive family resource centers. Rose Padilla Johnson serves as CEO of the facility, leading the center in providing vital resources, such as childcare, family services, and healthcare, for San Leandro residents.

Along with medical and dental services for low-income residents, Davis Street Community Centers offers several behavioral health services for individuals in need. Regardless of immigration status or insurance, the Davis Street Primary Care Clinic provides low-cost counseling for individuals dealing with depression or anxiety, stress, or substance abuse, as well as crisis intervention in case of emergency.

Behavioral health services are available to children as young as age three, as well as adolescents and adults. Experienced mental healthcare providers utilize a number of modalities to help clients develop tools for improving relationships and making positive choices. When a client’s needs lie outside their scope, they can refer to wider community resources.

Poverty Brings Inequities in Long-Term Health

Rose Padilla Johnson, the CEO of Davis Street Community Center, has served the San Leandro, California organization for almost 30 years. Her extensive background in social service work and fundraising has enabled her to understand and address the needs of the area’s lower-income families for food, healthcare, childcare, and employment resources. At the center, Rose Padilla Johnson of San Leandro oversees a budget of more than $10 million, in service to thousands of Alameda County residents a year.

Well over 1 million of California’s children live in low-income communities, representing about 13 percent of children in the state. This brings numerous problems stemming from a lack of resource equity, including health disparities that can last a lifetime.

These issues particularly affect children of color, Latino children, and Native children, with all these groups between five and seven times more likely to grow up in low-income neighborhoods than white peers. Among the disparities that affect children in these communities is lack of access to affordable, quality medical attention, lack of access to nutritious food, and exposure to environmental toxins.

As inequity-related deficits build-up, they result in disproportionate numbers of people of color developing chronic diseases, putting them farther behind others in the ability to build well-paying careers and to raise their own families in safety.

Davis Street’s medical, dental, and behavioral health clinics aim to address some of these inequities, and its childcare centers and family support programs additionally work on leveling the playing field early to help ensure greater lifelong health and resiliency.

Nutrition Classes Help Families with Low Incomes Prepare Healthy Meals

Since 1991, Rose Padilla Johnson has leveraged her experience in developing innovative social services to grow the Davis Street Community Center in San Leandro, California, into a central destination for local low-income residents and immigrant families. Among the many services the San Leandro-based organization provides under Rose Padilla Johnson’s direction, one is a series of Nutritional Cooking Classes that teach principles of healthy eating and food preparation.

Studies conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture and other authorities have highlighted an important point: when recipients of supplemental food access receive classes in nutrition, they tend to make healthier grocery purchasing choices. Thanks to the Davis Street Community Center program, class attendees have learned techniques of selecting and preparing budget-friendly, appetizing, and healthy meals.

The program takes place in Davis Street’s own Demonstration Kitchen, facilitated by a credentialed nutritionist. It draws on supplies donated by the center’s own food pantry, and participants learn how to stretch their dollars, and to select the most nutritious offerings from local food distribution centers. They also learn how to change their families’ lifestyles in order to support healthy practices and avoid or address malnutrition and obesity.

The classes have produced numerous success stories. One such case is a man with type-2 diabetes who lost 10 pounds after his spouse brought home new information from the classes. The man’s blood sugar levels also began to correct themselves as a result of his improved diet.