Please join us for an honest, thought-provoking conversation about how our community’s resources can do the most good by supporting families early, breaking cycles of trauma, and saving lives and public dollars in the long run.

Hybrid Meeting In Person or Zoom Invite Link https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86522348777

We are honored to welcome Dr. Jenny Espinoza, MD, as our guest speaker for the November Monthly Members Meeting. Dr. Espinoza is a physician whose career has taken her into some of the most challenging and underserved settings in the country. She served as Chief Physician and Surgeon of California’s prison health care system and as Medical Director of a clinic for homeless veterans in San Francisco. It was her time as a primary care provider at San Quentin State Prison that inspired her to become a Culture of Health leader and to ask a harder question: What if we could prevent the harm long before it reached a prison clinic?

That question led her to co-found Back to the Start, where she serves as Executive Director. Co-led by incarcerated writers and journalists at San Quentin, the organization is built on a simple premise: we should invest in children and families at the front end rather than pay a far higher price later for mass incarceration, which treats only the symptoms of our policy failures. Back to the Start is changing the narrative by supporting incarcerated people as they write honestly about their own lives, from childhood through incarceration. Those stories shine a light on the cradle-to-prison pipeline, where poverty, violence, systemic racism, and harsh school discipline set vulnerable children on a path they never chose.

Dr. Espinoza will share the documentary Breaking the Cycle: Reflections Behind Bars, directed by Sundance and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Jacob Kornbluth. Filmed inside San Quentin, it captures incarcerated writers, policymakers, and community members coming together to explore evidence-based solutions. At its heart are personal narratives and poems from people who grew up without the support they needed, and their words make clear that incarceration is too often the result of systemic injustice rather than individual failure alone