Ken Berrick, Alameda County Board of Education president, and founder and CEO of Just Advocates, will participate in a session at the 2026 CSBA Counties Governance Workshop, March 11-12 in San Diego, on supporting foster youth along with André V. Chapman, CEO and president of Fostering Promise, a nonprofit that aims to ensure every young person aging out of foster care has access to a successful future.

Just Advocates partners with individual children and families to navigate the child welfare, juvenile justice, education, developmental services and behavioral health systems. Prior to founding both Just Advocates and his consulting company Rising Social Strategies, Berrick founded and led Seneca Family of Agencies, a nonprofit dedicated to providing unconditional care to children and families through comprehensive mental health, education, juvenile justice, foster care and permanency services.

CSBA interviewed Berrick ahead of the workshop to glean some insights into his governance philosophy and the work of his organizations.

County boards are responsible for some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children and youth. Most come in through the juvenile justice door, which could have been avoided if there had been early intervention via special education or child welfare support, but often there isn’t. Having my background and knowledge has allowed me to look through the broader social lens of the context of their educational experiences and has allowed me to think about how to shape policy to move them toward proper service networks. I am blessed to be able to work with a superintendent and team that are also focused on enhancing opportunities for young people and exploring mental health and alternative education as pathways to different directions for these kids.

When you view education as the most optimal point to intervene and support families, and view it as having the primary goal of advancing social mobility, you can think about education as an invitation for connection to young people and their families, and connection to some of the levers of social mobility and change. County offices have a big picture view but are also able to intervene in some more micro-ways — such as oversight of interdistrict transfer, suspension and expulsion — and have valuable insight that wouldn’t exist without the broader role of the county office.

My experience at Seneca and understanding of what community services and supports could be informs every aspect of my work. This was only amplified as I moved into Just Advocates and started seeing the subtle things that disadvantage students from an advocacy perspective. As an example, I’ve seen how affluent parents have all kinds of choices available to them (private schools, access to special education, therapy, etc.). Kids that don’t have these advantages often get stuck when they run into a mental health issue, a learning disability or other roadblocks. There’s no advocacy for those kids, and they don’t have the same access to the broad range of resources that affluent families do. At Seneca, I learned about the broad array of services that could be available to help kids excel, and at Just Advocates, I’ve been able to move some levers to help school districts understand how they can access these services.

Educators often think like educators, and that will be the first frame they’ll view an issue through, but mine will always be the whole child in the context of their community, social advantage or disadvantage, family connections, support system and network. Being able to work with a superintendent who brings the same frame and comes from the alternative education world, allows us to look at how to maximize both education and social and familial opportunities to maximize a child’s success. As a team, we can look at the circumstances — Alameda County has it rough with school budgets — and think about how to maximize opportunities for transition from court and community schools and develop pathways to social mobility and employment, amongst other things.

In my role at Seneca, we developed a Youth Advisory Board that worked in collaboration with our core management team. It was fun and challenging to have the Advisory Board reverse decisions that we had made as a management team, and fun to see them inform decisions once they were more deeply integrated in the work. I had an extraordinary group of people who have gone on to hold key policy positions and have continued the work that we started. Instead of starting with an idea and taking it to the youth, we responded to their ideas and that would lay the groundwork — it was a generative partnership rather than a reactive partnership. It’s a different kind of process, but a necessary one if you want to see any kind of innovation.

This one is easy — you’re not the Lone Ranger. There are multiple systems that should come to bear and act as a single system. We don’t currently do this, and it’s an enormous mistake. In no jurisdiction that I work in, including Alameda County, do the systems work seamlessly for the benefit of kids and families. We will continue to fail until we work as a whole, single system of care.

Responses have been edited for clarity and length.