How Bay Area Nonprofits Are Supporting Families During Stressful Times

This story originally appeared in the California Health Report. 

When Raya left Oakland in 2020, she was pregnant with her daughter, had little money and nowhere to stay. Raya, whose last name has been omitted for safety reasons, had survived domestic violence and needed a safe place for herself and her child on the way. She made her way to San Francisco, but navigating the support systems was confusing and bureaucratic.

“I often had to move through these systems without clear guidance, consistent information, or real advocacy from caseworkers,” Raya said. 

“That experience shaped the way I show up for families today.” 

Now, Raya is a parent lead for Family Service Alliance, a coalition of over 40 nonprofits that works to end child abuse. Every day, she helps families find housing and other support – providing the kind of guidance she wishes she could have had when her life was uprooted. 

As federal health programs shift and immigration raids continue, the alliance is stepping up its work to help families and prevent abuse, which can increase during times of stress, according to Pegah Faed, CEO of Safe & Sound, one of the members of the alliance. 

”We need to really take a step back and take a look at what we are doing as a society to ensure that no one is living in poverty,” Faed said. 

For over 51 years, Safe & Sound has served San Francisco by trying to connect families there with the resources they need to raise healthy children. They’ve done this by providing parent services, community education classes, and fundraising at the local and state levels to keep supporting the work. 

The nonprofit’s mission is to stop child abuse by addressing poverty related issues like housing and food insecurity, access to health care and mental stress that put a huge strain on families. The nonprofit is doing prevention work at a time when the Trump Administration and federal lawmakers have slashed funding for child welfare and public health services.  

Federal lawmakers passed the One Big Beautiful Act this past July, which includes significant changes to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. According to a report by KFF Health News, the Congressional Budget Office released a cost estimate which shows the bill would cut the federal Medicaid program by about $793 million, and would result in an increase in the number of people who are uninsured. The bill would also reduce spending for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, by approximately $290 billion over a 10 year period.

Safe & Sound is preparing for the years ahead, and joining with other nonprofits who are doing the same. “ I think San Francisco is a place that has always been ahead of the country in terms of innovation and I think that applies to this type of work as well,” Faed said. 

Safe & Sound also took part in the All in for Kids Incubator Program, which provides funding to children’s advocacy groups. The organization used the program to fund its  Communities of Care Project, an effort to unify practices used across the city’s family resource centers using what’s known as the Five Protective Factors framework. “ This really is about strengthening the infrastructure that allows family resource centers to deliver effective strength space service to families,” Faed said.

When Raya first arrived in San Francisco, she stayed at a shelter in the Bayview Hunter’s Point neighborhood. Later, Raya received a subsidy for a studio apartment in the Tenderloin on Geary Street.

Pulling from her own experiences, and her work helping families, Raya recently created a shelter housing training program that teaches parents how to navigate San Francisco’s family shelter system, and teaches caseworkers how to empathically attend to their clients’ cases.

Raya focused on what families need most, and made sure the training felt supportive instead of overwhelming. She spent a long time doing street research, conducting informal interviews, and reflecting on personal experiences to ensure the experience was both practical and impactful.

“The process took collaboration, patience, and a willingness from everyone involved to listen, adjust, and learn,” Raya said.

When Dr. Mose Grossman of San Francisco General Hospital founded Safe & Sound, then known as the San Francisco Child Abuse Council, he did so because there were few organizations working on child abuse prevention. The team’s work, Faed said, served as a model and inspiration for a 1989 California law that required every county to create a child abuse prevention council. Those councils are designed to coordinate community efforts to respond and prevent to child abuse. 

Today, Safe & Sound is focused on building and supporting its network of organizations to improve its prevention work. Faed, her staff and the alliance take child abuse prevention seriously because of how dire the stakes are. 

“Ninety percent of our brain is developed by the time we’re five years old, and so you can imagine the impact that child abuse, neglect and trauma can have on early childhood brain development; that has implications for life,” Faed said.

Virginia Moore, a senior policy advisor at Safe and Sound, works behind the scenes figuring out ways to raise more money to help families through their services. Moore studies the way systems are set up and how those systems might keep those same families in poverty, leading to repeating patterns of abuse. Moore referenced a recent Tipping Point survey which shows poverty has increased in the Bay Area, including in San Francisco.

For Raya, using her personal journey to inform her work has been emotionally challenging, but rewarding, she said. Initially, she struggled with how much to share and sometimes felt unsure if her voice would be valued as much as city officials’. 

“In many spaces, parents are invited but not welcomed — asked for insight but not treated with the same dignity as people with titles,” Raya said. “Many of us often feel like we’re taking up space instead of being recognized as equal contributors.”

Raya said that Safe & Sound staff not only encouraged her, but compensated her for her time and empowered her decision-making so she could help produce a quality family shelter training program. 

The work has “opened doors and modeled for other organizations just how powerful and necessary parent voice is in system change,” she said.