Mental Health Care Support

AEF is committed to supporting mental health care services by sponsoring Care Solace, a complimentary and confidential care coordination service available for AUSD students, staff, and families.

Care Solace flyer

Click to download a flyer.

Care Solace fills a massive gap in our district mental health services for students, staff, and families. It offers 24/7/365 multilingual support for families to get connected to mental health services, regardless of insurance. Care Solace acts as a ‘care concierge’: a Care Companion quickly and confidentially finds available mental health and substance use providers matched to their specific needs. Care Solace can connect students, staff, and families to therapy, couples/family counseling, psychiatry, intensive outpatient programs, partial hospitalization programs, and residential/inpatient programs. The Care Companion seeks out providers with availability and keeps the client updated via text or email along the way. They offer the client at least two provider options and will even assist in scheduling the appointment.

The Care Companion touches base after the appointment about the satisfaction with the provider match. If the provider isn’t a good match, they will continue their search. Without Care Solace’s service of acting as a ‘care concierge’, often families give up their search on finding a provider that has availability to see them. Making all those calls on your own is exhausting and frustrating. Families have voice and choice in the type of help they need from Care Solace.

AUSD student services coordinator Jodi McCarthy on CareSolace:

"Families have been really grateful for the support that Care Solace offers.  Staff have also really been thankful that they are able to make a warm handoff to ensure that students and families are supported...Education funding is not stable and AEF is a partner that keeps students and families in the center of everything that they do.  I can’t express enough gratitude to AEF for helping with the heavy lift of mental health support!"

Key Figures from CareSolace for the 2024-205 School Year

Care Solace offers a special dashboard for administrators that gives real time data on our use of the service. AUSD can easily see the impact Care Solace is having for our families.

For the 2024-25 school year there were:

  • 764 Inbound interactions (phone calls, emails, video-chats, and text messages from community members).
  • 5,480 Communications saved (outbound calls, emails, and texts by Care Concierge as they work to set up an appointment for a community member in need.).
  • 69 Warm Handoffs (all referrals from school staff)
  • 23 Family initiated cases (families who contacted Care Solace and solicited help from a Care Companion)
  • 60 Anonymous searches for providers (families searched the Care Solace database on their own and did not request a Care Companion)
  • 36 Total appointments into care. Care Solace only counts appointments into care for families that confirm their appointment and want to continue with the therapist. What typically happens is that a family will not get back to Care Solace once the appointment has been made because they believe that they don’t need to… they got the service they were looking for.

The Queer Teen Alameda Center (QTAC) offers programs for teens in 6th to 12th grade. The Center is completely confidential and adults are fingerprinted and approved to be there. Snacks and beverages are provided. There are fun programs and activities every Friday, but teens are not required to participate in the weekly programming as there are plenty of other recreational games, arts, and crafts, socializing, etc.

Find out more here.

Queer Teen Alameda Center