First 5 Orange County (First 5 OC) and Orange County Health Care Agency (OC HCA)
Mental & Behavioral Health; Perinatal Mental Health; Early Childhood Mental Health; Early Relational Health; Social Determinants of Health
Community Engagement; Collective Action; Strategic Communications
Orange County, California
Health+ Studio is partnering with the Orange County community to strengthen the countywide mental health continuum of care to better meet the health needs of families and children from prenatal to age 8. The result of our first two years of collaboration is the Roadmap for Family, Infant, and Early Childhood Mental Health in Orange County. The work to implement the vision continues into 2026.
The roots of lifelong mental health begin before a child is even born. Yet for many families, the mental health system only shows up after something has already gone wrong.
Leaders and service providers in Orange County wanted to change that. They saw major shifts in statewide mental health funding on the horizon, and they were determined not to let programs for expectant parents and young children get lost in the shuffle. More than that, they had a bolder ambition: to build a system oriented around prevention—one that wraps families in support early, before crises have a chance to take hold.
To make the vision real, they needed something that didn’t yet exist: a single, shared roadmap that could unify the field, guide decision-making, and be flexible enough to evolve with changing resources and community needs.
The temptation in systems design is to start with the system: the funding streams, the org charts, the service gaps. This community decided to start somewhere else entirely: with the people who need to navigate the system.
The core belief anchoring the work was that families, and the providers who work alongside them, are the foremost experts on what’s actually working—and what isn’t. Rather than relying on surveys or administrative data, the team designed deeply participatory experiences to surface that knowledge.
In six community visioning workshops and two tabling events held across the county, parents and caregivers weren’t just asked what they thought — they were invited to build it. Recognizing that conversations about mental health can sometimes be triggering, the team used a hands-on, collaborative exercise where they asked families to physically construct models of communities that support mental well-being. 
The exercise made something abstract feel tangible, and created space for honest conversation.
Meanwhile, Health+ Studio engaged approximately 300 individuals from over 70 local organizations—through individual interviews, working sessions, and collaborative meetings—to map the broader ecosystem of care. The goal was to hold both perspectives at once: what families experience on the ground, and what systems leaders understand from above.
The result of this process was the Roadmap for Family, Infant, and Early Childhood Mental Health in Orange County, a guide for implementing and sustaining the community’s vision for supporting the mental and behavioral health of families with young children from prenatal through age 8.
But the team was deliberate about what the Roadmap is, and what it isn’t. It’s not a top-down prescription. It builds on existing community strengths, names the gaps that need filling, and offers concrete recommendations for how to move forward. It also acknowledges its own limits: the document won’t do the work. What it can do– and already is doing—is bring together a network of partners committed to turning the vision into reality.
The process of creating the Roadmap was as important as the document itself. By designing an engagement process that treated community members as experts rather than subjects, Health+ Studio is working with Orange County to build something more durable than a plan: a foundation of trust and shared ownership across a diverse coalition.
The work of implementing the Roadmap continues into 2026.