Local-Level Advocacy

CAYEN Local Advocacy

Alt. text: Image of Tehama County TAY Action Team in a breakout planning session.

While CAYEN as an organization focuses primarily on state-level advocacy, we empower TAY across the state to get involved in local mental health advocacy efforts and activities. CAYEN provides several methods for supporting transition-age youth in local advocacy including:

Providing resources to support local advocates and helping them understand local structures, effective advocacy, and strategies/methods that are successful.

Connecting interested TAY with their local policy planners and MHSA coordinators.
Providing resources for agencies, policy planners, and mental health workers about effective strategies for engaging youth in high-level meetings and policy discussions.
Promoting cross-agency and cross-country learning through sharing practices that TAY says work.
Providing information to county mental health directors on key policies and programs that benefit transition-age youth.

Hart's Ladder is a tool that we use to work with adults to ensure that we can move from being manipulated, decorated, and tokenized in decision-making spaces to being empowered to lead and share in decision-making processes. CAYEN provides trainings to support youth and adults that utilizes this concept to set up successful and sustainable youth and adult partnerships across the state of California.

Examples of Decision Makers

City Council

“The City Council is the governing body of the City...and enacts ordinances subject to the approval or veto of the Mayor. It orders elections, levies taxes, authorizes public improvements, approves contracts, and adopts traffic regulations.”
MHSA Coordinator

Mental Health Services Act (MHSA) Coordinators "coordinate and provide program services and oversight for the MHSA Plan,” as well as “frontline program planning, oversight, clinical direction, training, and evaluation” for such programs. Source
School Board

“School board members are locally elected public officials entrusted with governing a community's public schools. The role of the school board is to ensure that school districts are responsive to the values, beliefs and priorities of their communities.” Source
City Manager

City managers, sometimes known as city administrators, "are the hired executive officer of a municipality who works outside of the political realm to keep operations running smoothly." Source
The City Administrative Officer (CAO) of Los Angeles, in particular, "provides internal and centralized services to the Mayor, City Council, and City departments. The CAO is the financial advisor to the Mayor and City Council" Source
Mental Health Commissions

These commissions advise the Board of Supervisors and the Director of Mental Health “on various aspects of local mental health programs” to “review and evaluate the community’s mental health needs, services, facilities and special problems.” Source
Board of Supervisors

The Board oversees most county departments and programs and annually approves their budgets; supervises the official conduct of county officers and employees; controls all county property; and appropriates and spends money on programs that meet county residents’ needs. Source