Hi, I am Katie Heatley, CEO of OUTREACH. Anne Winthrop, who is the Program Manager for the Guaranteed Ride Home Program, is out on maternity leave. She is the proud mom of Claire Elizabeth Winthrop. I will be filling-in on the "Transportation Matters" electronic newsletter.
News:
1. Santa Clara County SSA and the Valley Transportation
Authority (VTA) should be very proud of the Guaranteed Ride Home
Program. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC,) nominated
OUTREACH, who operates the County's Guaranteed Ride Home Program,
for an Award for Merit. Award winners were chosen by a six-member
jury panel from nearly 50 other entries. MTC will highlight the
County's program in a publication called Transactions and will
make a video to show at the awards ceremony. At this time, SSA,
VTA and the County, wish to thank each of you receiving this newsletter.
It is through the daily work directly with the CalWORKs customer
that the real service gets done! OUTREACH now has over 1,000 CalWORKs
participants enrolled in our program and is providing approximately
1000 rides per day. OUTREACH thanks you for supporting our efforts
to enroll and inform CalWORKs persons. We hope that our transportation
efforts are enhancing your efforts at job training, placement,
appointment attendance, etc. The Guaranteed Ride Home Program
has been allowing rides for other CalWORKs types of appointments,
such as housing, in order to help your customer succeed with the
services you are offering towards self-sufficiency.
2. SSA, OUTREACH and VTA are working on a proposal for demonstrating
child transportation for CalWORKs and low-income children. This
grant is due to MTC (cite above) in September. We are soliciting
input from child care providers, educators, SSA, CalWORKs staff,
transit staff, nonprofit service provides and dozens of other
entities. We will include our project summary in the next for
your input and SSA will be sending out a notice of a Transportation
Advisory Meeting to be held in September to review what has been
done since 1998 (the original Santa Clara County Welfare-to-Work
Transportation Plan) and what should be done in the future for
CalWORKs and low-income transportation. Please join in the dialogue
through email or attend in person when the date and time is sent
out in the near future.
3. VTA has commissioned a study on community transportation focused on the needs for senior, low-income and MediCal transportation in Santa Clara County. This study is underway and the findings will be shared when the draft is completed.
If you have any questions about the content of this newsletter or ideas to share, please email me at Katieh@outreach1.org