Kevin Recinos

CalAIM Community Supports brought new providers into a complex managed care system. Without a structured onboarding process, agencies faced scattered emails, inconsistent training, and no shared timeline — leading to delays and confusion before services ever reached members.

LAHSA manages over $500M in homeless services funding across hundreds of providers. Legacy systems were fragmented — invoices were approved without verification, contracts were executed 82 days after service start, and there was no real-time visibility into grant performance.

Youth homelessness in Los Angeles is disproportionately concentrated among youth of color and LGBTQ+ youth — populations that have historically been failed by systems not designed for them. LA County applied for a $15M federal YHDP grant to build a fundamentally different response.

Over 16,000 Angelenos were living in their vehicles — facing ticketing, towing, violence, and no safe place to sleep. I came to this work not as an outsider. I entered the Safe Parking program as a participant before becoming staff.

The ICMS program at Step Up on Second was scaling fast — growing from 5 to 15 case managers. But training was inconsistent, there was no central reference, and staff turnover was slowing service delivery for some of LA's highest-need clients.