In 2023, Jewish Family and Children’s Services of Long Beach merged with the Orange County Jewish Coalition for Refugees and established a presence with an office in Santa Ana. Now, for the first time in over a decade, low-income mental health and social services, under Jewish auspices, will be available under a new name—Jewish Family & Children’s Service of Long Beach and Orange County.
Founded in 1958, JFCS built a reputation for delivering sliding scale counseling, senior care, family support, youth services, food and utility assistance, domestic violence services, support groups, and more across Long Beach and the northern parts of Orange County. Their services have long emphasized equity—available to all regardless of ethnicity, religion, insurance status, or identity—driven by a vision “to see a community healed, one person, one family, at a time”
Recognizing growing mental health and social service needs in central Orange County, JFCS has announced targeted programming for the area, leveraging its clinical expertise to serve new, and often underserved, communities. The first clinical program coming to Orange County will be counseling services at its Santa Ana office starting this September. Fueled by a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation of Orange County and a large gift from an Orange County anonymous donor, JFCS stands ready to serve almost 100 clients in the Santa Ana office in the first year alone. “Mental health care shouldn’t be a luxury. This expansion allows us to reach individuals and families who have historically faced financial and systemic barriers to accessing the support they need,” said Trip Oldfield, the organization’s CEO.
Currently, the organization provides the following services in its Santa Ana office:
• Rent and utility assistance for low-income seniors
• Food assistance
• Emergency basic needs specifically for Jewish Families (Jewish Family Fund);
• Emergency transportation needs for Jewish individuals/families (bus passes, car repair, bicycles, gas cards etc);
• Assistance for Ukrainians, Afghans, or other refugees who have been in the US for less than 5 yrs;
• Scholarships for low-income students at OC universities and colleges;
• Adopt a Family (holiday gifts low-income families with children);
• Clinical internships for MSW and MFT students in Chapman, CSU Fullerton, and Pepperdine OC.
For the new counseling services, JFCS will accept insurance or sliding scale fees to ensure that everyone has access to affordable mental health care. They are also a teaching and training facility for graduate-level students pursuing their social work or therapist credentials. All clinical interns are supervised by licensed JFCS staff members.
The second piece of the expansion into Orange County will be free, community-wide workshops hosted at the Merage JCC. Topics and speakers rotate but will generally be mental health or social work related. The first of these free workshops will be “Increase Motivation and Attention Through Mindfulness”, facilitated by Joshua Pickett, LMFT and being held on Wednesday, October 22 at 6:30 p.m. You can reserve your space on the JFCS website (jfcslboc.org).
JFCS staff have also been working, through a partnership with the Orange County Jewish Collaborative, to help facilitate a grief support group as well as referrals for Rabbinical Care on an as-needed basis for Jewish clients.
The one program that JFCS will not be expanding to Orange County is the work that they do with Holocaust Survivors. Recognizing that the Jewish Federation of Orange County, in partnership with JFS San Diego, is providing the highest level of care, compassion, and companionship to most survivors in Orange County, JFCS will continue to do the same for its existing Long Beach and northern Orange County Holocaust survivors.
Further expansion in 2026 will include senior in-home care services on a fee for service basis. For questions or assistance, you may call their Santa Ana office directly at 714-881-8835 or visit www.jfcslboc.org.