As a result of the 2024 passage of Measure I, a voter-approved countywide sales tax dedicated to maternal and child health and early learning and care in Sonoma County, First 5 Sonoma County was able to administer early investments in 2025 ahead of their new strategic plan. One of these early investments was to develop and launch a countywide Early Relational Health Consortium that would address a consistent theme heard over the course of First 5 Sonoma County’s most recent strategic planning process: the need to create more coordinated systems of care that promote early relational health and reduce the burden on families trying to find and access support for their children and family.
This Consortium is intended to build bridges across health care and community-based partners, and collectively strategize about how to build upon existing assets in the county for a coordinated continuum of care. VIVA was engaged to design and help launch this Early Relational Health (ERH) Consortium, to develop a roadmap to guide the Consortium’s collective efforts.
The design of the ERH Consortium began with convening a small Design Team of partners from both health care and community-based organizations to provide thought partnership and ideation. Informed by the Design Team’s input, VIVA developed a proposed approach to launching the ERH Consortium with the aim of building cross-agency partnerships to address the immediate needs of families and develop the infrastructure for a coordinated continuum of care.
The ERH Consortium kicked off in November 2025 with 25 partners coming together and mapping the experiences that many families of young children who are living on the margins in Sonoma County experience between pregnancy and age 3. In this meeting, partners shared the pain points, assets, and opportunities that they saw to address some of these experiences that may negatively impact early relational health and prioritized the three areas where they would want the Consortium to focus its efforts. VIVA then facilitated three subsequent meetings with the Consortium to dive deep into these three priority areas and develop strategies and measures of success for each.
Family voice was also central to this work. VIVA facilitated focus groups with Sonoma County parents of children ages 0–5 to understand their firsthand experiences navigating developmental, behavioral, and medical services, the findings of which are captured in the Early Identification and Intervention Family Focus Group Report.
The outputs of each of these sessions informed a draft roadmap that will help steward the Consortium’s ongoing collective efforts to promote early relational health across sectors and create an integrated continuum of care. The most immediate outcome of this work has been the new relationships that have formed and the greater awareness of programming and resources in Sonoma County to better support warm handoffs and appropriate referrals between agencies.