Gov. Gavin Newsom visits to help open new hub for north Orange County homeless services

Excerpted from the Orange County Register

By Tess Sheets

"In an unassuming single-story building, tucked between the YMCA and Providence St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, a new “unified command center” is where north Orange County officials and service providers will collaborate on addressing some of the biggest challenges in the region and the state.

The HOPE Center – where Gov. Gavin Newsom stopped by on Thursday to see officials cut the ribbon – was created as a hub for the North Orange County Public Safety Collaborative. The group includes 11 cities that have joined forces to provide services to address homelessness, youth violence and re-entry for formerly incarcerated people.

Although for years, California lagged behind on creating a strategy to address homelessness, Newsom said, the state has made great strides in the past few years, and the HOPE Center (an acronym for Homeless Outreach and Proactive Engagement) is an example of that progress.

'I’m extraordinarily enthusiastic about what the state has done over the last number of years to seed real reforms and real strategies, and to support novel programs like this that are all about data, all about outcomes,' Newsom said.

The collaborative started in 2017 as a task force of six cities hoping to bring a regional approach to problems they’d all been dealing with on their own. State Sen. Josh Newman brought in an initial $20 million in state funding to get the task force off the ground, and it grew to include most of the cities in the northern part of the county.

An additional $15.8 million has been allocated from the state since 2021, along with $5 million in federal funds and another $500,000 from the county."

Read the full article here.