Programs and results
What we aim to solve
Safe & Sound is a children's advocacy organization working to prevent, stop, and ultimately end child abuse locally in San Francisco and reduce its prevalence regionally. We believe every child should grow up safe, protected, and loved. We're taking a stand to make that a reality.
Our programs
What are the organization's current programs, how do they measure success, and who do the programs serve?
Children & Family Services
Our Children & Family Services offer compassionate care in the moment of crisis and over the long-term, helping children and families overcome barriers and thrive. The Prevention Center’s direct services reach approximately 800-1,000 families annually, providing therapeutic childcare, early interventions, mental health services, case management, emergency needs support, a 24/7 telephone crisis line for parents, and intensive support for families with children exposed to violence. Recent annual achievements include:
• Therapeutic Children’s Playroom. The Playroom served 612 children and parents, providing free therapeutic care visits, assessments, and early interventions. Visits were also provided to families participating in scheduled activities such as an early literacy group, parenting education, family dinners, and a parent-child observation class.
• SafeStart Program. The Prevention Center leads this citywide collaborative program to reduce the effects of violence on young children, providing support to families with children age 0-6 who have been exposed to domestic or community violence. Collaborative members provided intensive case management to 226 families impacted by violence and trauma. Additionally, SafeStart staff provided community trainings about the impact of violence on children, reaching 105 service providers and 121 parents across the city.
• Counseling and Crisis Support. The Prevention Center’s counselors provided free and low-cost individual counseling and mental health services to 214 parents and children. Additionally, our Family Support Center provided drop-in crisis counseling, support groups, educational workshops, and family-bonding events to 377 parents and children. Of parents participating in counseling services, 85% of those with very young children demonstrated lower levels of depression, anxiety, and stress.
• TALK Line (415.441.KIDS). Counselors handled 14,182 calls from parents and caregivers in crisis, and provided ongoing, round-the-clock counseling and support to 278 families. The Line operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
• Integrated Family Services. In the coming year, we will expand an innovative pilot program to provide intensive support to high-risk children and families, with the goal of improving protective factors. We describe this in detail below.
Community Education
The Prevention Center’s Community Education programming reaches into the community, building a safety net of awareness about child abuse and child safety. The agency’s Child Abuse Council promotes ongoing public awareness, systems improvements, and coordination in San Francisco and throughout the region. Recent annual achievements include:
• Child Safety Awareness. Our Child Safety Awareness program educated 6,331 elementary school children in 301 classrooms, and 625 parents, providing vital safety skills and tools. Lessons are taught in English and Spanish. 95% of participating children demonstrated post-training knowledge of important safety rules.
• Professional and Community-Based Education. Through our Child Abuse Council, we trained approximately 5,000 mandated reporters to ensure that the people entrusted with protecting children are fully able to identify and report suspected abuse. After our training, approximately 85% of child-serving professionals said they were more likely to report suspected abuse.
• The Child Abuse Council also develops policy and best practices regarding child abuse cases, including work with the Family Violence Council to produce the city’s Comprehensive Report on Family Violence (to download a copy, please visit http://www.sfcapc.org/press_room/in_the_news/).
• We have partnered with CIR and the 10-county coalition of Greater Bay Area (GBA) Coalition of Child Abuse Prevention Councils to launch a regional Enough Abuse Campaign to raise awareness about child abuse issues. The Prevention Center has taken the lead on assessing and adapting Enough Abuse materials, and has begun to distribute the materials throughout the city. We had a campaign "soft launch” in April 2013 to coincide with national Child Abuse Prevention Month, including an invited appearance at a sold out San Francisco Giants game to speak with the public and distribute materials. The 2-year campaign officially launched in January 2014.
Strategic Partnerships
Building linkages among key strategic partners improves our citywide and regional response systems and protects children, helping to ensure that no child slips through the cracks of the system. In this work, the Prevention Center uses the Collective Impact model to effectively harness the expertise and resources of multiple, public-private partners to work toward shared objectives. Research shows that successful collective impact initiatives typically have five conditions that together produce true alignment and lead to powerful results: a common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support organizations such as the Prevention Center. More information about the Collective Impact model is available here: http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/collective_impact
The development and launch of the new Children’s Advocacy Center of San Francisco (CAC) is the premier example of our strategic partnership work using the collective impact model. Children’s Advocacy Centers are child-friendly, accredited, multidisciplinary facilities that are proven effective in treating and supporting the most vulnerable and at-risk children and families, harnessing child protective services, law enforcement, legal, and medical and mental professionals. Every major city in the U.S. has a Children’s Advocacy Center. Now, finally, San Francisco has its own CAC. The need is great:
• By our estimation, fewer than 10% of the children in need in our community receive social and emotional services from professionals trained to deal with trauma, toxic stress, and the effects of child abuse—and too many do not receive any social and emotional healing services at all.
• Each year, at least 600 very high-risk cases in San Francisco should be fully investigated and receive intensive services.
• Currently, only 300 vulnerable children each year receive best-practice forensic interviews and supportive services.
• Of those, only 50 of the most high-needs children receive high-quality on-site, and evidence-based social and emotional healing services.
• When our CAC opens, 100% of children in need of best-practice interviews and other services will receive services on site, or will be connected to partner services in the community. All children will be connected to needed services focused on promoting healing and lifelong success.
To achieve the long-held dream of creating a CAC in San Francisco, the Prevention Center worked with public and private partners across the city to raise funds, develop programming, and launch an integrated CAC to provide coordinated and intensive services to the most at-risk children in our city: children who have suffered abuse, neglect, or exposure to violence.
CAC co-locates with the Center for Youth Wellness and CPMC’s Bayview Child Health Center, and opened doors to begin providing forensic interviews and other services in early 2014.
Where we work
External reviews

Videos
Our results
How does this organization measure their results? It's a hard question but an important one.
Number of groups brought together in a coalition/alliance/partnership
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Related Program
Strategic Partnerships
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Increasing
Context Notes
We will facilitate strategic partnerships and collective impact to improve the city support for families and the abuse response network.
Number of eligible clients who report having access to an adequate array of services and supports
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Population(s) Served
Family relationships, Ethnic and racial groups, Social and economic status
Related Program
Children & Family Services
Type of Metric
Outcome - describing the effects on people or issues
Direction of Success
Increasing
Context Notes
Supported by our Children & Family Services (CFS), families will increase stability, access to basic supports, and other Protective Factors against abuse and adverse experiences.
Number of clients who self-report increased skills/knowledge after educational program/intervention
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Related Program
Community Education
Type of Metric
Outcome - describing the effects on people or issues
Direction of Success
Increasing
Context Notes
Our Community Education programming will promote increased knowledge and skills to recognize, report, respond to and prevent child abuse.
Goals & Strategy
Reports and documents
Download strategic planLearn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress.
Charting impact
Four powerful questions that require reflection about what really matters - results.
What is the organization aiming to accomplish?
Child abuse is a complex problem, an invisible epidemic that happens more than you can imagine. We must recognize child abuse is not somebody else's problem.
We see a future where childhoods are sacred and every child is safe. In 50 years, we will end child abuse in San Francisco and reduce its prevalence in surrounding communities.
What are the organization's key strategies for making this happen?
Safe & Sound's 5-year Strategic Plan created a detailed blueprint for the agency to increase reach, improve services, and reach its strategic goals. Every child deserves a safe and healthy childhood. Our ultimate goal is to protect children from child abuse and neglect—in other words, to stop children from ever getting harmed. We implement a public health strategy to prevent abuse:
1) providing comprehensive, round-the-clock supportive services directly to children and their families, targeting families in crisis and the most vulnerable in our community;
2) educating the community at large—children, caregivers, child-serving professionals, and the public—about safety issues; and
3) creating and maintaining strategic partnerships across education, health care, law enforcement, social services, and the private sector, to advocate for systems improvement and increase to coordination to strengthen the safety net for children.
Safe & Sound focuses its impact on all children at-risk for abuse and neglect who live in San Francisco, with a greater emphasis on children newborn to age twelve. The rationale for a deeper focus on younger children is that current data shows that child abuse and neglect disproportionately impacts younger children. Fortunately, the prevention of child abuse and neglect can have far-reaching impact throughout a child's life. A focus on serving younger children and their families also draws on the deep experience and expertise that the Safe & Sound has developed in its many years of programming. Safe & Sound will continue to monitor this focus and will adapt to changes in demand or in Safe & Sound's expertise. Safe & Sound continues to remain committed to serving any child and family in crisis.
Safe & Sound recognizes that preventing child abuse and neglect requires a comprehensive and child-centric approach, focusing on children and those around them—families, communities, and the underlying fabric of child- and family-serving systems and organizations. We will work across these main areas to nurture children and strengthen families, empower and educate the community, and create strategic partnerships to improve the system of response that protects children at risk for abuse and neglect.
What are the organization's capabilities for doing this?
For more than 40 years, Safe & Sound has been a source of strength, support, and hope for children and families in our community. We lead child abuse prevention in San Francisco 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Each year, our Family Support Center provides a safe place for 600 kids; our TALK Line counsels nearly 1,000 families through their darkest moments; and our safety lessons teach more than 6,000 elementary kids how to protect themselves from physical and sexual abuse and dangerous situations.
Through our services, 93% of parents with the highest needs improved their emotional health, and 76% either remained stable or increased their economic stability to meet their families' basic needs. Our programs make a difference.
However, there is more work to be done to keep kids safe. Safe & Sound has the capacity, expertise, collaborative relationships, and vision needed to achieve our long-term vision of ending child abuse in San Francisco.
• Our data-driven service model will track our work with families and measure our impact on their lives. Rigorous screening tools have transformed how we measure outcomes and refine services. Through proven metrics and analysis, we can identify what works best; share that information with other organizations in a statistically sound, effective way; and elevate child abuse preventions efforts.
• When abuse is recognized, the healing process should begin immediately. Too often, that's not the case. From police officers to case workers, a long list of advocates need to hear the child's story. For the child, the interview process can be extremely traumatic. Until now, San Francisco did not have an effective solution for our most vulnerable children. Our Children's Advocacy Center is changing that. We will ensure that 300 children every year receive the support they need, and tell their story only once—in a child-friendly, safe, accessible, and welcoming space on Third Street.
• We already bring safety awareness lessons to 40% of the public elementary school classrooms in San Francisco. We're in schools every day educating children how to avoid abuse, and training teachers how to spot it; we're in police stations and hospitals working with first responders; and we're in community centers partnering with social workers and counselors to improve treatment services. We will expand this work to reach more community members in families. In 2014, we're launching a multi-year public awareness campaign about how to prevent, recognize, and end sexual abuse. Stopping child abuse takes an entire community. The first step is awareness.
• Since 1987, our historic former firehouse on Waller Street has been a warm, welcoming, hope-filled place for thousands of children and families. To better serve these parents and children, in 2013 we made important renovations—from fixing the roof to sound-proofing the counseling rooms—and we will continue to improve and maintain this important community resource.
What have they accomplished so far and what's next?
Child abuse will not go away easily. Risk factors—including economic disparity and high cost of living—are perhaps more prevalent today than ever, and in our own city the impact is devastating. San Francisco has the highest rate of child abuse in the Bay Area. Every year, 6,000 cases of suspected child abuse are reported, and 10,000 children witness or are victims of violence in their homes and neighborhoods. Thousands more children are at risk.
Changing this will take an entire community. Each of us has an important role to play in ending child abuse. With community support, Safe & Sound will lead the way.
With your support, we will extend our reach, introduce urgently needed services to the city, and improve abuse prevention models. Most importantly, we will transform the lives of thousands of children and families in our community.
Every $1 invested in prevention yields $19 in savings from the long-term societal cost of abuse. Please join us.
Financials
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Operations
The people, governance practices, and partners that make the organization tick.
Connect with nonprofit leaders
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Connect with nonprofit leaders
SubscribeBuild relationships with key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar Pro. Try a low commitment monthly plan today.
- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
- Access beautifully interactive analysis and comparison tools
- Compare nonprofit financials to similar organizations
Want to see how you can enhance your nonprofit research and unlock more insights? Learn More about GuideStar Pro.
Safe & Sound
Board of directorsas of 03/16/2022
Laura Ward
Regional Managing Director, First Republic Private Wealth Management
Term: 2020 -
P. Wayne Osborne
Chief Executive Officer & Cofounder, WAY2B1
Term: 2020 -
Jarrod Phillips
Chief Accounting Officer, Ares Management
Mary Hansell, DrPH, PHN
Director, San Francisco Department of Public Health, Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health
Linda Moore
Retired, Deputy District Attorney, San Francisco Office of the District Attorney
Tina Bou-Saba
Community Volunteer
Chuck Chai
President & Chief Investment Officer, Hillspire, LLC
Erik Edwards
Partner, Cooley LLP
Aparna Kota, M.D.
Pediatrician, Clinical Associate Professor, Kaiser Permanente, University of California San Francisco
Christopher Stewart, M.D.
Professor of Pediatrics, Attending Physician, Medical Examiner, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco General Hospital
Sarah Whitelaw
Managing Director, Hall Capital Partners, LLC
Lareina Yee
Senior Partner, McKinsey & Company
Clarence Wooten
Entrepreneur & Founder, Revitalize Venture Studio
Bill Barnes
Project Manager, Office of the City Administrator
Sylvia Deporto
Retired, San Francisco Human Services Agency
Jason Di Piazza
Director of Business Development, Farallon Capital Management
Anthony Heckman
Head of Growth & Founding Team, unitQ
Hilary Mendola
Healthcare Consultant
Katie Riester
Head of Investor Relations, Felicis Ventures
Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh
Executive Vice President, Industries Salesforce
Douglas Tom
Pricipal, TEF Design
Board leadership practices
GuideStar worked with BoardSource, the national leader in nonprofit board leadership and governance, to create this section.
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Board orientation and education
Does the board conduct a formal orientation for new board members and require all board members to sign a written agreement regarding their roles, responsibilities, and expectations? Yes -
CEO oversight
Has the board conducted a formal, written assessment of the chief executive within the past year ? Yes -
Ethics and transparency
Have the board and senior staff reviewed the conflict-of-interest policy and completed and signed disclosure statements in the past year? Yes -
Board composition
Does the board ensure an inclusive board member recruitment process that results in diversity of thought and leadership? Yes -
Board performance
Has the board conducted a formal, written self-assessment of its performance within the past three years? Yes
Organizational demographics
Who works and leads organizations that serve our diverse communities? GuideStar partnered on this section with CHANGE Philanthropy and Equity in the Center.
Leadership
The organization's leader identifies as:
Race & ethnicity
No data
Gender identity
No data
No data
Sexual orientation
No data
Disability
No data
Equity strategies
Last updated: 05/03/2021GuideStar partnered with Equity in the Center - an organization that works to shift mindsets, practices, and systems to increase racial equity - to create this section. Learn more
- We disaggregate data to adjust programming goals to keep pace with changing needs of the communities we support.
- We have long-term strategic plans and measurable goals for creating a culture such that one’s race identity has no influence on how they fare within the organization.
- We seek individuals from various race backgrounds for board and executive director/CEO positions within our organization.
- We have community representation at the board level, either on the board itself or through a community advisory board.
- We engage everyone, from the board to staff levels of the organization, in race equity work and ensure that individuals understand their roles in creating culture such that one’s race identity has no influence on how they fare within the organization.