Background
Earlier this week, Desert Truth previewed the Desert Sands school board meeting and discovered a strange presentation from an organization called California Children’s Trust (CCT). CCT’s has a five year plan to “re-imagine” and transform mental health care for children in California. Translation: CCT wants to transform the way mental health care is “financed” in California by getting taxpayer funded medicaid to pay for everyone! District staff used the CCT presentation in an attempt to educate the board on May being mental health awareness month, which is fine as far as intent is concerned. Yet, district staff should take greater care when presenting extreme leftist organizations propaganda, and be cognizant of what the purpose of that propaganda is. By all appearances, the CCT presentation went into the record as fact, with no critical thinking applied by either staff or the board.
Who is California Children’s Trust?
CCT is not a registered with the California Secretary of State as a business, nor is CCT on record with the IRS/FTB as charity. So, what is CCT?
Thank you for asking! CCT is an organization, formed and funded by extreme leftist billionaire foundations. CCT also has the support of, and supports, extreme leftist organizations and woke universities, or at least the founder/CEO Alex Briscoe does. Much of the information on CCT was difficult to find on traditional search engines, so a shout out is due to freespoke.com, that rendered relevant search results.
Our first clues about CCT comes from a website maintained by an organization called Northern California GrantMakers. In March of 2018, CCT founder “Alex Briscoe presented [to the grantmakers] a fledgling model for reimagining California’s behavioral health system for children.” Beware of that term, “reimagining,” think to when extreme leftists wanted to “reimagine” the police–that worked so well, democrats are now blaming the entire movement on Republicans. Just five months after presenting that fledgling model:
According to the website, “the California Children’s Trust (the Trust) was formed as a fiscally sponsored project of New Venture Fund with initial funding from the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Genentech, McKenzie Foundation and Mental Health Services Oversight and Accountability Commission.”
With cash in hand, Alex Briscoe’s intentions were to launch a “three-year initiative to build a broad-based coalition that advances a fundamentally different approach to defining, serving and investing in the social, emotional, developmental and behavioral health of California’s children and their families.“
True Purpose of CCT
Well, that sounds hunky dory doesn’t it? At this point, it sounds like all of these foundations, with their untold billions, are actually going to give directly to schools for the mental health crisis. Nope. The foundations (and we’ll get to them momentarily) are actually giving money to Briscoe, to push for change in government policy so that Medicaid pays–which means you and I, and every other taxpayer.
Why? Because the purpose of CCT, and the intentions of those that fund them, is not to bring actual care to students (and families) in need, it is to bring loony leftist concepts like equity and social justice to the realm of mental health in public schools, and to profit. Probably. In 2022, Briscoe gave a presentation at San Francisco State University entitled “Financing Equity & Justice to Address the Behavioral Health Needs of California’s Youth (English),” which reveals the tell. Reimagining really means refinancing.
Organizations CCT Associates With
Briscoe gave the presentation at the “sixth didactic seminar” of the Equity & Justice-Focused Integrated Behavioral Health Counselor Training Project. The project is a part of the Department of Counseling at San Francisco State and is intended to “[increase] the supply of equity and justice-focused integrated behavioral health trained counselors accessible to California youth.” Remember, paid for by Medicaid. The language says it all–the project is leftists from a notoriously leftist institution.
If the leftist buzzwords were not enough to designate these organizations as extreme leftists, perhaps the Marxist symbolism will be. Within the above presentation is a slide that uses the Marxist fist at the top of their solution framework pyramid.
Here are some of the results of an image search for “Marxist Fist”, in case you weren’t aware of the historic symbology used by the Black Lives Matter movement and others, like Mao.
Not leftist enough? Well, how about the Bay area based, leftist pro-abortion group Trust Women, which listed Briscoe as a supporter in 2015? Trust Women had an issue with the anti-abortion Walk For Life organization hanging banners in the San Francisco area, so Trust Women circulated a petition demanding action from the city. Those demands were:
Wow! Forced speech, forced ideology, and a call to delegitimize, criminalize, and silence any that oppose them–does that sound like a group that values a Constitutional Republic which cherishes free speech?
Follow The Money
So, who are these foundations investing money in CCT, to force a redistribution of wealth type policy change and what type of return are they expecting from it? How much are they investing?
Again, Thank you for asking! Briefly though, as this article is getting long in the tooth.
The first, and seemingly primary, funding organization mentioned for CCT earlier was the New Venture Fund. The New Venture Fund is a 501(c)(3) worth hundreds of millions of dollars and described as being a “left-of-center” organization. The biggest donors to the fund is the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation who have given New Venture over $304 million, including the $8 million seed money in 2008. You know, Bill Gates that hung out with Jeff “didn’t kill himself” Epstein. That Bill Gates. New Venture is managed by Arabella Advisors and both are recognized as being associated with Democrat dark money, by the New York Times no less!
Notice the President of New Venture is Eric Kessler, who also founded and runs the Arabella Advisors. Kessler, and this is the kicker, was a Clinton Administration White House appointee and served on the now defunct Clinton Global Initiative. Under Kessler, Arabella also manages other democrat dark money funds, such as the Sixteen Thirty Fund. There is also an association with the current Biden administration, as several employees of these groups moved on to the Biden camp.
For those readers not aware, Special Investigator Durham recently reported that Hillary Clinton funded the Russian Collusion hoax, which Obama and Biden then used to commit treason by spying on and trying to fraudulently remove a duly elected President Trump. Talk about extreme leftist Marxism! And, that is just one of many leftist organizations that fund CCT!
Critical Thinking Questions
This article did not even have the space to delve into how much money these extreme leftist organizations have given CCT, to push a Marxist ideology that the rest of us will pay for. But the organizations themselves are worth billions, surely there is a more effective way to deal with the mental health crisis that, at least in part, was caused by their very own ideologies.
If CCT visions came to fruition, would it create a large group of workers dependent on taxpayer Medicaid for their livelihood? Would that group have an incentive to increase the number of students identified as struggling with mental health? Would it create a group that had an incentive to increase members in their ideological movements by increasing gender dysphoria and other diagnosis’ that could lead to debilitating psychotropic drugs? Do any of the involved organizations have financial interests in pharma, health applications, or surgical centers? Is there a correlation to activist organizations like CCT springing up in education and the increase of Gender Support Plans in the same time period?
So What?
California Children’s Trust does not seem very trustworthy. And, while it does not appear that the DSUSD has any official relationship with CCT, district staff need to do better when vetting materials they are pushing. If district staff fail at that task, they are at risk of being purveyors of propaganda and disinformation; peddlers of dangerous ideologies that seek to become policy and destroy our Country from within.
Believing everything that was read or seen on TV is why those in power chose to believe in, and push, disastrous policies like closing schools and forcing masks and vaccines on everyone they possibly could. STOP listening to the same people! How school districts can brag about teaching critical thinking and inquiry when they themselves are seemingly incapable of practicing those same skills, is a question I leave you to answer, dear reader.