1701-12714

This investment supports Children Now to engage and partner with stakeholders throughout the State of California to ensure young children and families have access to high quality, affordable oral health care services and to advocate for state and local policy infrastructure that supports increased access to oral health care, education, and prevention for all children. Specifically for the 2017 funding renewal, Children Now will focus on convening and/or participate in state and local efforts regarding children’s oral health issues, including the State Office of Oral Health Advisory Committee and Partnership, the Perinatal Infant Oral Health Quality Improvement Project, Dental Transformation Initiative Workgroup, the Children’s Oral Health Workgroup and various county oral health strategic planning processes. Children Now will also convene oral health stakeholders throughout the state, including DentaQuest Foundation grassroots grantees, to discuss oral health priority issues concerning children as needed. In 2017, this will include relevant legislation and budget proposals that impact the Denti-Cal program as it relates to children. Another opportunity to connect more deeply with the grassroots grantees will be when the community oral health plans are released in early 2017. Meeting with them to understand the identified needs and potential policy/advocacy solutions to fulfilling those will be another way in which Children Now could learn from what’s happening locally, but more importantly, help provide some technical assistance and background to the grassroots grantees in case policy change is needed at the state (vs. local) level. Another area of work Children Now plans to further throughout the state is to ensure that stakeholders are sufficiently informed and empowered to contribute to the discussion on how funds allocated for education can be used to promote health needs of students. The recently implemented Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) calls for stakeholders to develop Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAP) whereby local decision makers use the LCAP to help determine what types of student supports are necessary to help students succeed. Finally, Children Now will develop a sustainability plan for the medical-dental pilot in Los Angeles County by providing limited technical assistance, and produce a report about the project to disseminate widely to stakeholders throughout California to support scaling of the project statewide. $200,000 will be used to support personnel time, communications, travel, meeting expenses, and consultant expenses that contribute to the implementation of this project. This proposal aligns with the Oral Health 2020 goal of eradicating dental disease in children and the target of having 85% of children reach age 5 without a cavity.