One of the most important services Encompass provides is Substance Use Disorder (SUD) treatment and counseling. Our qualified and licensed staff help members of our community struggling with drug or alcohol dependencies recover and get their lives back. Encompass’ Alto Counseling Centers located in Santa Cruz and Watsonville provide trauma-informed SUD counseling, supporting clients to identify and achieve their goals of harm reduction, sobriety, medication assisted treatment, legal follow through, mental health linkage, medical needs, and more. They help clients sort out life stressors and determine what part substance use plays in them. Our counselors are trained professionals with knowledge of substance misuse and its impact. They offer in-person or counseling via Telehealth and provide coordination with clients’ medical providers and with their families, when needed. With therapy and support, our Alto team strives to make positive changes in the lives of our clients. 

Every August, the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) sponsors National Health Center Week (NHCW) to celebrate and increase awareness of America’s 1,400 Community Health Centers. National Health Center Week is an opportunity to highlight the commitment and passion of Community Health Center staff, board members, and supporters who make it possible to provide quality healthcare services to more than 30 million patients across 14,500 communities annually.

We are so happy to highlight the important work of our Unsung Heroes at Encompass – the Finance Team! Their dedication and attention to detail keep our operations humming and make sure we are allocating all of our donations, contracts, and grant money effectively. If you have made a mid-year donation to our agency, we sincerely appreciate your generosity. As a non-profit, we depend on your donations, as well as government and private grants to continue to serve our Santa Cruz community. 

We are proud to report that Encompass formed a Racial Equity Workgroup earlier this year. Our Racial Equity Workgroup (REWG) is a staff-led effort dedicated to cultivating an organizational culture that promotes equitable pay, hiring practices, and thresholds for growth within the agency. We recognize that diversity at all levels of our organization is not only an asset to our agency, but also to the communities we serve. Our REWG is another example of our Encompass values in practice: resiliency, equity, kindness, and compassion.

As we celebrate Juneteenth this month, we would like to shine the spotlight on our Racial Equity Workgroup staff members and the goals and plans for the group in 2023 and beyond. Special thanks for their commitment to our community and a more diverse, inclusive work environment.

We are so proud of our Encompass Families Together program! Families Together is an innovative counseling program that provides home-based services to Santa Cruz County families. The primary objectives of the program are to improve safety, child development, and family relationships. Our counselors work with parents, caregivers, and children to prevent child maltreatment and promote social and emotional well-being. 

Families referred by Santa Cruz County Family & Children’s Services or CalWORKs are assigned a therapist who helps families with parenting strategies, child development, and parent-child attachment, and can connect families with other community resources such as substance use counseling, interpersonal violence services, and early education support.  

Here’s an in-depth profile featuring our awesome Families Together Staff. We appreciate the support and services they provide to families across Santa Cruz County. To learn more about the Encompass Families Together program, please visit our web page. 

We are thrilled to share that Encompass Community Services has been awarded a $9.36M grant to support the development of our new, state-of-the-art Sí Se Puede Behavioral Health Center in Watsonville.  

The award is part of the Department of Health Care Services’ (DHCS) Behavioral Health Continuum Infrastructure Program (BHCIP) Round 4: Children and Youth grants. As announced by Governor Gavin Newsom’s office on December 8, this round of grants includes $480.5M in awards to 54 projects aimed at improving California’s behavioral health infrastructure for children and youth.  

BHCIP funding will allow Encompass to significantly expand Santa Cruz County’s substance-use disorder treatment capacity for transition-age youth (ages 18-25) and families. Specifically, the project will allow Encompass to add 7 new residential substance-use disorder treatment beds, as well 106 annual outpatient treatment slots for transition-age youth and families.

This treatment capacity expansion project is the cornerstone of Encompass’s larger effort to develop a state-of-the-art behavioral health campus in Watsonville that will deliver equitable treatment to nearly 1,300 community members per year.  

“Encompass has long dreamed of building a bright, new behavioral health center in Watsonville to reduce barriers to treatment and make personalized, high-quality behavioral health care accessible to everyone in our community,” said Encompass CEO Monica Martinez. “This award provides the vital investment needed to break ground on the project next year and brings us significantly closer to realizing our full fundraising goal.”  

November is Native American Heritage Month - This year, Encompass honored Friday, November 25 as "Native American Heritage Day,” by observing the full day as an agency holiday. Encompass made this commitment because we believe that observing the Thanksgiving holiday with no acknowledgement of the intolerance, conflict, and oppression that is deeply rooted in its history – and in the history of our nation – is actively perpetuating oppression. Renaming and observing the day after Thanksgiving is a small step we can take as an agency to call out injustice.

Simply put, Encompass is committed to listening deeply, bearing witness, and *taking action* toward racial equity at every level of our organization. We want to deeply appreciate Encompass’s Racial Equity Workgroup for strongly advocating for this holiday and for their ongoing work to drive agency-wide change. 

Earlier this month, Encompass gathered with community partners, leaders and guests to celebrate the grand opening of the Thrive Hive, Encompass’s drop-in resource center for transition-aged youth (TAY) ages 15-24!

Simply put, Encompass is a health equity organization. We believe that everyone in our community should have access to the high-quality care and resources they need and deserve to live a healthier, more fulfilling life. That is exactly why we prioritized building the Thrive Hive.

With this center, we can significantly expand the number of youth we serve and expand the services we offer to meet the unique needs of TAY individuals in our community. Most importantly, our TAY program team worked tirelessly alongside the individuals we serve to create a trusted, welcoming place for youth to come together to build community… and truly THRIVE.

The center is designed specifically to meet the unique needs of TAY individuals in our community, including those experiencing houselessness and those who are, or have been, involved in the foster care or justice systems. Most importantly, the resource center will serve as a trusted, welcoming place for youth to come together to build community.  We are honored to have worked alongside the TAY individuals we serve to identify and incorporate the following resources into our new center: 

• Computers and flexible classroom spaces to host programming on key topics like motivational interviewing, resume-building, job readiness, applying for higher education and to conduct mock job interviews 
• Laundry facilities and showers 
• A cozy living room and flexible recreational space to offer health and wellness programming, such as meditation and creative expression classes 
• A fully stocked kitchen where staff can support youth in preparing warm, healthy meals 
• Case management services to establish rapport and trusting relationships and delivery of direct services assistance 
• Therapeutic services, for those who qualify

Our October staff highlight is the Data Analytics and Reporting Services (DARS) team. The DARS team is responsible for helping track, analyze, and report on data for our agency. Though it is easy to see the importance of our frontline staff, there are many teams behind the scenes that Encompass could not survive without and DARS is one of them. Data collection and analysis is a huge part providing high-quality healthcare. We need information to qualify and quantify how well we are doing for ourselves, our funders, and our clients. DARS spends countless hours designing data tracking software, pulling data for funding opportunities, and answering questions that help us better serve our community. This team does so much to keep our agency growing and thriving and we are so grateful for their amazing skill and dedication.

We are thrilled to share that Encompass has been awarded another three-year accreditation from CARF International for our integrated behavioral health programs for mental health and substance use disorders!

CARF’s Three-Year Accreditation decision represents the longest duration of accreditation given to an organization and demonstrates Encompass’s substantial conformance to the CARF standards, which prioritize delivering quality services that focus on clients’ specific strengths, abilities, needs and preferences. In order to receive a Three-Year Accreditation, an organization must put itself through a rigorous peer review process and provide evidence to a team of CARF surveyors in a multi-day survey visit that the programs and services we offer are measurable, accountable, and of the highest quality. 

“Maintaining our CARF Accreditation is not easy, and it is not a requirement. Encompass chose to pursue CARF Accreditation because we believe the people we serve deserve high quality, person-centered, evidence-based services that meet CARF’s stringent standards,” said Encompass CEO Monica Martinez. “The CARF Review Team reviewed our services against more than 1,400 performance standards to make their determination, and we are honored that our programs earned re-accreditation.”