First 5 Sacramento moves forward with participatory grant making; county announces separate CBO partnership effort

First 5 Sacramento staff and consultants reported on phase-one work to design a participatory grant-making process that will allocate roughly $4 million to BIPOC-led or -serving organizations, and county officials described a parallel CBO partnership initiative that will direct additional capacity-building resources to small community-based organizations.

Stephanie McLemore Bray of Touchstone Leadership Group summarized outreach done in September and October to recruit input from organizations that had not received First 5 funding in recent years. "We sent out 272 invitations and got an outstanding response rate — we were shooting for 10% and got almost 20%," McLemore Bray said, noting that assemblies included dinner, childcare, and stipends for participants.

The community assemblies prioritized panel recruitment criteria the consultant described as: lived experience and community knowledge; representation from grassroots, nontraditional organizations; geographic diversity across Sacramento neighborhoods; cultural competency; and inclusion of youth members. McLemore Bray said the design recommendation is to recruit up to a 15-member deliberative panel with at least three members aged 16–24, provide onboarding and training on deliberation and decision-making, and pay stipends, transportation and childcare to reduce participation barriers.

Staff will report back to community stakeholders during a virtual session on Feb. 26, 2025, and aim to identify and onboard the panel in April. The panel will then make awards during a later phase of the participatory grant-making process.

Separately, county staff detailed the Sacramento County CBO Partnership Initiative, an effort that grew from a board-level request to use federal and local funds to shore up nonprofit capacity after COVID. The county had previously set aside $7.2 million (initially ARPA funds, later reallocated to general fund) for the initiative and staff said there is a broader pipeline of support estimated in the slides as $9 million for capacity-building and grant opportunities. The county contracted with Sacramento State’s Institute for Social Research to complete a landscape analysis, and staff said the work revealed that small CBOs face barriers navigating county systems and lack formal capacity-building resources.

County and commission leaders described a two-pronged county approach: cohorts that would provide 6–12 months of capacity-building support plus a small implementation grant, and smaller self-directed grants for single needs (for example, an audit or a refrigerator for fresh produce). Staff said the county’s Health and Racial Equity Unit will lead the effort.

Commissioners asked about language access, alternate members for the deliberative panel, and evaluation resources. McLemore Bray said the project team is identifying an evaluation partner with expertise in equitable, culturally grounded evaluation methods. "We will identify an evaluation partner who understands how to evaluate participatory models that are community designed and community led," she said.

The participatory grant-making design and the county CBO initiative were presented for discussion; no formal commission action was required at the meeting.