Leadership Vacuum at Oakland’s Human Services Department Exposes Systemic Failures
A failed 2023 plan to dismantle Oakland’s Human Services Department left a leadership void, now filled by interim staff amid fiscal uncertainty.
The City of Oakland recently completed its budget process for the next two-year budget cycle. Every city agency and department must make tradeoffs, balancing costs against goals, in an effort to provide the services which Oaklanders expect from city government. However HSD faces an even stiffer challenge: without a permanent director since 2022, having recently removed two top managers without clear rationale, and seemingly without the financial management to properly administer the multiple grants and programs which support thousands of needy Oakland residents, it is unclear whether HSD has the leadership necessary to continue providing services as well as manage competition for and administration of grants and other fiscal resources.
In May of 2023, newly inaugurated mayor Sheng Thao and her administration proposed to reorganize the structure of the city administration to effectively eliminate the Human Services Department (HSD) and merge its functions into other departments,1 ostensibly to close a nearly $360M budget shortfall over the 23-25 fiscal years. At the time, the idea was controversial: although the budget plan was adopted by a majority of the city council, councilmembers Janani Ramachandran, Treva Reid, and Noel Gallo specifically voted against the plan citing in part their concerns about a lack of clear planning, leadership, and thought regarding the proposed series of consolidations. Since that time, Thao’s mayoralty collapsed, ultimately ending early with a successful recall campaign against her. Ultimately, HSD and its programs were not consolidated as the 2023-25 budget proposed; this has led to a vestigial department shorn of titular leadership and stability in its core management team.
What is the Department of Human Services?
The $145.8M Human Services Department (HSD) is fifth-largest department by budgeted expenditures,2 and is primarily concerned with providing services to specifically-identified populations3 within the city. HSD providing the following as its mission statement:
The Human Services Department (HSD) promotes the health, education and well-being of Oakland children, youth, families, single adults and seniors by providing free resources and programs to build strong Oakland communities through civic engagement with the support of grassroots leadership. We collaborate with a diverse group of local organizations to eliminate poverty, economic and racial disparities by addressing the current and emerging needs of the community.
While this mission involves many activities, there are three main areas that are most visible to Oaklanders and which constitute the bulk of HSD’s activities: administering the Head Start early childhood support program, providing services to seniors and the homeless, and administering the local, state, and federal money (in the form of grants and other avenues) that supports many of HSD’s services.
Head Start is a federal- and state-funded program that focuses on early childhood development and school readiness for young children up to age five from low-income families. In April of 2025, Head Start reported having 450 of a possible 674 children enrolled in the early development portion of its services. Beyond this, HSD’s child and youth programs include youth (from early childhood to age 21) engagement programs to get young people involved in civic life, food programs for needy children, and administering funding for child aid programs and grants.
Senior care at HSD includes running Oakland’s four senior centers with current membership of over 5,000 seniors, assists senior citizens with housing concerns, provides clinical case management, and assists with transportation for seniors. Similarly, HSD administers a program assisting disabled adults with transportation options, including rideshare and wheelchair-accessible van service (in conjunction with county paratransit).
HSD also provides services to the city’s homeless population through its Community Homelessness Services division, one of several areas of the city government which address homelessness (including the fire department through its “MACRO” program and the city’s Encampment Management Team). HSD’s duties include oversight of non-governmental organizations (NGOs)4 that provide services to the homeless,5 assisting with housing and services for homeless people, and administering the city’s point-in-time survey of homelessness.
How is HSD Funded?
While there are many other services provided by HSD, a trend of the funding model for the services is that HSD relies on what the city calls special revenue funds to pay for the personnel, services, and operational costs that make up its portfolio. In the 2024-2025 budget, HSD’ expenditures were approximately 46.44% general funds and 53.1% special revenue funds (of a listed $145.8M budget); in 2025-2026 that percentage is expected to change to 50.3% and 49.55%, respectively (with a corresponding cut of overall budget to $122.7M, mainly as a result of expected special revenue funding dropping by nearly $17M due to projected drops in special revenue funds made up of grants from the State of California and other sources).
Special revenue funds often have specific requirements detailing both how the money must be spent as well as documentation that must be provided to support spending decisions. This is especially true for federal funding (e.g., from the Department of Health and Human Services), where failure to properly spend or document spending of federal money can lead to clawbacks, or a situation where the city must return grant money.
Leadership Vacuum and Proposed Merger History
HSD has not had a permanent director since 2022, when Sara Bedford retired from the position. Since then, a series of temporary leaders have cycled through:
Estelle Clemons (interim, June 2022 - May 2023)
Scott Means (interim, May 2023 - July 2024)
Martina Bouey (acting, removed April 2025)
Bouey told this publication that she had six years of experience at the time of her removal from the department, and that she was one of the two most senior management figures at the department. The other was Diveena Cooppan, who was in charge of the Head Start program until she was removed at the same time as Bouey.
One of the reasons that a permanent director has not been hired since Bedford retired appears to be the 2023 proposal by then-Mayor Sheng Thao and her team to reorganize the structure of the administration to effectively eliminate HSD and merge its functions into other departments: homelessness services to the Department of Housing and Community Development, youth and family services to a new Department of Children, Youth, and Families (essentially an expanded Parks, Recreation and Youth Development Department).
Beyond top level leadership, the Department currently does not have an assistant director nor a permanent budget and fiscal manager (Annie Friberg is currently acting in this position). Each of these positions is critical to the department’s success. For instance, the city’s budget process requires that city agencies and departments jostle for a limited amount of money that is available to fund their programs; department leadership is key not only for providing zealous advocacy for the department’s programs and funding, but also is needed when the ultimate budget decisions have been made and tradeoffs are needed within each department. Consistent leadership also contributes to overall culture and morale; in a department like human services, where a need to balance the value of service to the downtrodden against exacting fiscal accountability is both difficult and necessary, it is incumbent on leadership to set the direction and message of the department.
Fiscal management is even more important for HSD, as a review of the special purpose funds supporting the department shows. For each of the special funding sources for HSD listed in city’s FY 25-27 budget (see Fig. 1), there are spending and documentation requirements; requirements that a fiscal manager must review and ensure are completed properly. At worst, if these funding sources are not properly administered, the funds could be clawed back by the granting agency. Additionally, none of these funding sources has the same rules, and all will require slightly different justifications, spending decisions, and documentation requirements.
(Figure 1, Special Revenue Funds for HSD. Source: City of Oakland Fiscal Year 25-27 Budget)
Looking to the Future
As of the date of this writing, none of these leadership positions 一 Department Director, Assistant Director, and Finance Director 一 are listed on the city’s job opportunities website. Whoever takes these positions will not only face the strong headwinds of a city budget that faces citywide financial pressure, but will also need to address the difficulties faced by the state of California in budgeting, the capricious nature of the Trump administration’s federal funding and grant processes, and the federally-governing Republican party’s penchant towards cutting federal expenditures on social services. Oakland Report reached out to the city’s spokesperson, Sean Maher, via email for a comment but did not receive a response by the time this article was posted.
As with any business or organization, the recognized best practice6 in making tradeoffs and setting organizational priorities is strategy: a north star for the organization to follow as it makes the thousands of decisions that encompass large responsibilities such as budgeting and fiscal management.
Strategy in turn requires leadership:7 leaders not only set priorities and drive the agenda forward, but the best act as information brokers,8 bringing together disparate parts of the organization and ensuring that each section of the organization is working towards the common goal. It is for this reason that the lack of titular leadership in the Department of Human Services raises concerns about the overall strategy of the Oakland city administration.
An additional consideration that faces the city administration and its top decision makers is the fact that much of the proposed FY 25-27 budget is premised on eliminating unfilled vacancies in order to avoid layoffs of current employees at the city. While leaving positions unfilled can provide budget flexibility, it also can negatively impact the organization in ways that outweigh the cost savings, especially when considering critical positions such as the ones at HSD.
This leaves open questions for city leadership, including City Administrator Jestin Johnson and Mayor Barbara Lee. HSD is a multi-million dollar department with an important mission, over 280 full-time employee (FTE) positions, and a passionate customer base (evidenced in part by the 13 people who waited until the end of a lengthy daytime city council sub-committee to express their concern over the uncertainty surrounding the Head Start program). Finding leadership for this department is one of many pressing needs that must be attended to by the new administration.
Tags: Analysis, Human Services, Leadership
Changes included moving homelessness services to the Department of Housing and Community Development and youth and family services to a new Department of Children, Youth, and Families (essentially an expanded Parks, Recreation and Youth Development Department).
For FY 24-25 midcycle, the top five departments by budgeted expenditures were Police ($375.1M), Fire ($207.3M), Public Works ($206.8M), Housing & Community Development ($192.9M), and Human Services ($145.8M).
E.g., low-income families with children, senior citizens, and the homeless.
One example of these organizations is Operation Dignity.
Operation Dignity’s professional services agreement with the city to provide outreach services is an example of the operations HSD oversees.
A well-known proponent of this is Michael Porter, who writes that “trade-offs arise from limits on internal coordination and control. By clearly choosing to compete in one way and not another, senior management makes organizational priorities clear. Companies that try to be all things to all customers, in contrast, risk confusion in the trenches as employees attempt to make day-to-day operating decisions without a clear framework.” Porter, M. What is Strategy? Harvard Business Review, November-December 1996, 69.
Leadership in the organizational context is discussed in the works of scholars such as John Kotter (see e.g., Kotter, J. What Leaders Really Do. Harvard Business Review, December 2001. 85-97)
See e.g., Burt, R. Positions in Networks. Social Forces, 55(1), 93-122.
Hello Joe and thank you for highlighting the gap in leadership in Oakland's Human Services Division. I am a commissioner currently serving on the Mayor's Commission on Aging and attended every budget hearing to enlighten Councilmembers of the critical nature of the services Oakland provides to vulnerable older adult residents and to advocate for their funding, particularly programming and services run through its senior centers which at one very low point were slated to be closed. Our efforts were largely successful; however, we too pointed out the lack of leadership in the Health & Human Services department as a concern as did the Budget Advisory Commission in their recommendations. According to BAC, hundreds of thousands of dollars were found encumbered by the division for loosely defined, unsigned contracts and grants with community-based organizations, some of whom were delivering services in good faith based on verbal assurances that a contract was forthcoming. And on at least one occasion, the City Administrator had failed to fully vet budget reduction proposals in Human Services without seeking to fully understanding the consequences. We are encouraged that the City Council and Mayor Lee have acknowledged seniors and senior programming as basic needs in the budget they passed. Fingers crossed that the planned revenues come through. Thanks for the great reporting on the City.