As policymakers grapple with the government shutdown, Ted Lempert in California is keeping tabs on how it may affect kids here. 

The president of the nonprofit Children Now is paying particular attention to potential cuts to Medicaid, or Medi-Cal in California, which provides health coverage for roughly half of the state’s children.

“The federal administration and Trump talk about California a lot,” Lempert said, “so it’s even more important that we do a good job for our kids in California to show, ‘Hey we can do things right here.’”

The shutdown began Oct. 1 after Republican and Democratic lawmakers failed to come to an agreement on how to fund the federal government. The feud began after Democratic congressional members refused to vote yes on a Republican stop-gap measure, which included funding cuts to Medicaid.

Mike Odeh, senior director of health policy for Children Now, said the shutdown could impact operations at the federal health care agency, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as time passes. “I don’t know if CMS is operating at full capacity so (funding) delays could  impact different approvals or different processes that the state needs to make sure that the program is running,” Odeh said.  

Despite political instability on the national level, Lempert says he and his team are committed to their ongoing campaigns for youth advocacy. One of their goals is to teach parents and youth to advocate for themselves and share their stories. 

“ It’s absolutely essential that every kid has their unique set of supports to reach their potential,” Lempert said. “With the instability that we’re living in right now, kids take the brunt of that and it has an effect through their whole lives.” 

Odeh’s also overseeing a number of Medi-Cal related initiatives. One goal is to expand access access to preventative services like regular checkups, immunizations and screenings. State audit reports and data  have shown that not enough kids have access to these services, Odeh said. The nonprofit is also working to help families access behavioral health services, and make Medi-Cal services more accessible for kids in foster care.  

The nonprofit began in 1988 as a means to spotlight issues affecting youth in the United States. “ The organization was founded on the belief that children’s advocacy wasn’t as effective as it should be and there needed to be a different way of doing it,” Lempert said.

Treating families as partners in the advocacy process and listening to their insights and ideas has been crucial, the organization noted in a recent report detailing the impact of a collaboration called All in for Kids. 

Family advocacy was crucial to convincing California lawmakers to pass the Paid Family Leave Benefits Bill, which takes effect in January. The new law will increase wage replacement rates to 90 percent for low-wage workers and 70 percent for the remainder of California families when on family leave. The new law helps make family leave more equitable because women, immigrants and Black and Latinx residents are more likely to hold lower-wage jobs.

In addition to actively involving families in advocacy, the All in for Kids report noted that changing language about communities, from “at risk” to “leaders in change,” for example, can have a powerful effect on children’s health and wellbeing. It can also work well, the report found, to have families start small with demonstration projects or models that can then inform larger policy changes. 

Listening to families helped the organization with “creating or adding to our policy agenda

based on those recommendations; some of those recommendations are things we had not thought about before,” organization leaders noted in the report. 

The All In For Kids collaboration was an incubator program of sorts, providing funding to children’s advocacy groups. Lishaun Francis, senior director of behavioral health at Children Now, said the organization’s involvement in the program helped to strengthen its network with likeminded leaders in policy and advocacy spaces.  ”We were  helping each other workshop, how to think about problems,” Francis said.  Children Now held focus groups with parents and caregivers, and spoke with policy makers about the importance of reducing Medi-Cal premiums for children’s mental health treatment.

Children Now also recently sponsored a bill that revised school suspension and expulsion policies for drug use. Going forward, the nonprofit is urging state lawmakers to create a disaster relief fund for foster youth, and researching methods to improve Medi-Cal for all children.

“ I’m really focused on those things that draw us closer together, those projects, those programs that gives our young people a feeling of belonging and community,” Francis said.

Francis and her team are also working on AB 1043, an online safety bill that would require tech developers to let parents enter their child’s age at device setup. Advocates argue that these protections will limit youth’s access to potentially harmful online material. “Removing the excuses from tech companies about why they can’t make sure our kids are safe online is a really important goal of ours,” Francis said.

While Children Now staff are hard at work juggling so many different policy areas, Republican and Democratic lawmakers continue to remain at odds over resolving the government shutdown. Even as federal Medicaid funding looks uncertain, Odeh said his organization’s will continue to advocate for California children.

“ We’ve worked for a really long time to make sure that kids have health coverage,” Odeh said.