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First 5 Yolo outlines Welcome Baby/Road to Resilience expansion and shift to external funding
Summary
First 5 Yolo told the Board of Supervisors it has merged Welcome Baby and Road to Resilience into a countywide maternal‑infant program, is expanding Medi‑Cal billing and now draws nearly 80% of its revenues from funds other than the original Prop 10 tobacco tax.
First 5 Yolo gave the Yolo County Board an annual update June 3 on a five‑year strategic plan, major countywide programs and efforts to stabilize funding as Proposition 10 tobacco‑tax revenue declines.
"Nearly 80% of First 5 YOLO's annual revenues are now external to our Prop 10 tax allocation," Executive Director Gina Delighten told the board, describing a deliberate strategy of competitive grants and billing to sustain large countywide programs.
Delighten said First 5 now centers its work on three multi‑year, countywide initiatives: Welcome Baby Road to Resilience (a combined maternal‑infant health home‑visiting and clinic‑based model, about $3 million annually), Help Me Grow (early childhood mental health screening and referral, about $1 million annually) and Quality Counts (early‑learning quality improvement, roughly $300,000 annually). She told supervisors nearly $23 million in external funding was secured over the last six years and identified Partnership Health, UC Davis and state grants among key partners.
Delighten described steps to increase Medi‑Cal reimbursement, including billing for the community health worker benefit and planning to transition Help Me Grow toward enhanced care management (ECM) billing next year to offset declining Prop 10 revenues. She said First 5 secured a five‑year Office of Child Abuse Prevention grant and has negotiated inclusion of Welcome Baby components in state grants to improve sustainability.
Delighten and a Welcome Baby nurse, Marissa, reported early outcomes from Welcome Baby and Road to Resilience: high acceptance among eligible families (a 79 percent historical acceptance rate for Welcome Baby visits), higher postpartum and well‑child visit rates for participating families compared with county averages, and examples of early intervention connections (jaundice detection cited by a pediatrician as a possible life‑saving intervention). Supervisors asked for more city‑level breakdowns of results and for continued work on Medi‑Cal billing capacity.
Board members praised the program’s reach but pressed for details on long‑term funding and billing strategies. First 5 said it will continue pursuing Medi‑Cal reimbursement and other grants, and will return with more granular data and updates on billing and sustainability.
