For years, California has attempted to patch its child and youth behavioral health crisis with short-term fixes that just layer on more programs and gamble with both educator and student success. Traditional child-serving systems—across education, health care, child welfare, and the justice system—frequently operate in silos. Consequently, families are forced to act as their own care coordinators, navigating a complex and disconnected maze of bureaucratic rules and funding streams while youth continue to suffer.

This June, that narrative fundamentally shifts as the Transforming Together (T2) initiative culminates its three-year demonstration phase. Rather than marking the end of a program, the close of the current funding cycle represents a critical milestone in building deep structural coherence across the state.

Integration and coherence offer a superior, high-support alternative to the fragmented status quo.

Coherence is a mindset and collective approach that consciously addresses silos and bias in public systems, aligning them around shared priorities to ensure equitable outcomes for all students. Education First has spent years helping clients use this approach to build stronger relationships, craft shared visions, and create cultures of continuous learning, and the T2 initiative is a powerful substantiation of this work in action. The T2 model provides a structured pathway for counties to build an integrated Ecosystem of Care where shared leadership, shared goals, shared data, and shared financing replace isolated programs. By removing the barriers that have long sidelined comprehensive care, California is finally building a sustainable, coherent system centered authentically on the youth and families it serves. This ensures a true “No Wrong Door” approach—meaning that young people and their families are seamlessly connected to the support they need, regardless of where they first enter the system, transforming care navigation from a difficult puzzle into a responsive network.

Achieving this required a massive, three-year systemic effort to merge historically disparate worlds: the health care system, the justice system, social services, and public education. Led by the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools (SBCSS) in partnership with the California Health and Human Services Agency (CalHHS), this groundwork involved intensive collaboration supported by Education First, Breaking Barriers, and Mathematica. To guide this work, Education First facilitated the Collaborative Leadership Working Group (CLWG)—an advisory body of cross-sector experts—while the broader initiative partnered with four demonstration counties: Alameda, Fresno, Humboldt, and Imperial. Together, these groups tested and shaped strategies to ensure that two major state investments, the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI) and the California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP), work in tandem rather than at cross-purposes. 

Through this work, we gathered critical lessons. We learned that building coherence is a journey, not a destination. Because relationships and mindsets are the foundation of this work, they take time to build—you have to go slow to go fast. We also learned that our current systems are simply not designed for this level of integration; driving true coherence is a massive challenge that requires dedicated support at every level, from state policy down to the classroom and the doctor’s office. Above all, this work has underscored that youth and families must be placed at the center of the ecosystem—for real. Authentic engagement requires moving away from designing “services for” communities toward co-creating “services with” them.

This movement is built for scale and sustainability. Because the T2 initiative was designed as a three-year incubation project, the focus has now successfully shifted away from external, time-limited pilot funding toward local ownership and capacity-building. Through the development of an implementation guide, Transforming Together: Building an Integrated System of Supports, local Integrated Leadership Teams (ILTs) and Executive Advisory Committees (EACs) are already utilizing concrete tools—like asset inventories and cross-agency MOUs—to build whole-child ecosystems  across their own counties. As these integrated systems take root statewide, California will possess a scalable, state-supported solution to behavioral health fragmentation that prioritizes lasting infrastructure and authentic youth and family voice over stopgap measures.

This milestone in California demonstrates that with the necessary political will, it is possible to bridge the traditional silos of health and education to create a system designed to promote true coherence and long-term sustainability. Collective action is a powerful lever to transform a system, but it requires committed leadership and shared goals. Our work to bring research, policy, practice, and community voices together shows that this model is not a temporary fix, but a scalable and durable solution. By investing in trusting relationships and deep structural coherence, California is setting the standard for a future where youth and families no longer have to fight the system to get the care they deserve.