BEST Neighborhoods (Bridge and Engagement Services Team Neighborhoods) is a collaboration between RAMS, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, and other community partners that provides street-based behavioral health care throughout the city, one neighborhood at a time. With carefully created care plans, strong multi-disciplinary teams, street-based medical and psychiatric resources, and the support of other agencies and City departments, we seek to quickly improve the health and quality of life of people experiencing homelessness and living with chronic mental health conditions.

RAMS joined the BEST Neighborhoods program in Aug. 2023 with a team of Peer Counselors who use the combination of their training, lived experience, and knowledge of the system of care to provide street-based care, referrals, and linkage to mental health treatment, medical care, substance use services, and shelter/housing. The team currently operates six days/week, 8am-6pm, with an eye toward increasing to seven days/week in 2024. RAMS BEST Neighborhoods will also expand to include a clinical behavioral health team in early 2024 to most effectively offer assessment, treatment, and care coordination for clients in the field.

The BEST Neighborhoods team frequently provides follow-up care for clients encountered by the Street Crisis Response Team, also staffed by RAMS Peer Counselors. We are grateful to play a key role in the City and County of San Francisco’s mental health reform efforts.The BEST Neighborhoods program’s origins and strong impact so far have been covered by the San Francisco Chronicle’s ‘Fixing Our City’ podcast series. You can read and listen more about it here, from April 25, 2023.

To the RAMS Staff and Community,

The Board of Directors is pleased to announce the appointment of Angela Tang, MSW, LCSW, as the new President and Chief Executive Officer of Richmond Area Multi-services (RAMS). Ms. Tang will begin her official capacity on September 1, 2023. The Board unanimously selected Ms. Tang as the candidate to lead and represent RAMS, a leading community provider of culturally competent and culturally responsive mental and behavioral health services, training, and program innovation. In making its decision, the Board considered the need for RAMS in the coming years to navigate the changes in mental health care funding and delivery. Ms. Tang is uniquely qualified not only to guide RAMS in this process but also to propose and define policy at the local, state and federal levels. In her role of elevating RAMS’s visibility and influence, Ms. Tang shall continue enabling RAMS to create, fund and implement programs that reflect our expertise and values especially as it relates to providing culturally responsive care.

During her nearly two decades of service at RAMS, Ms. Tang has proven her commitment to the Mission and Vision of the organization, and to the well-being and professional development of RAMS staff. Her experience includes being on the Leadership Team and has been creative & strategic through having fostered innovative and culturally responsive programs while building the infrastructure for operational excellence, quality improvement, sustainability, and scalability. Today, RAMS has continuously achieved outstanding external reviews by funders and is recognized as a highly reputable mental health services provider in the San Francisco Bay Area. Moreover, Ms. Tang is an inclusive and values-oriented leader and communicator that cultivates meaningful staff engagement strategies.

In serving the community, Ms. Tang draws from her personal experience of being a native San Franciscan and a daughter of Chinese immigrants who faced multiple barriers relating to race, language, and financial hardships. She has a Masters of Social Work (Administration) from Columbia University, and is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, as well as certified in Healthcare Compliance and Lean Six Sigma. Since starting at RAMS as the agency’s Operations Manager in 2004, she has since been the Director of Operations, Interim Co-Leader for 14 months during the COVID Health Emergency, and more recently, the Chief Operating Officer serving as a principal strategist of the daily agency operations. Ms. Tang has extensive experience representing RAMS with funders, community leaders, and local and nationwide coalitions, as well as leading contract negotiations and the modernization of RAMS infrastructure.

The RAMS Board of Directors wishes to take this opportunity to express our deep gratitude to outgoing RAMS President & CEO JayVon Muhammad, who led RAMS through exciting phases and expansions over the past 2.5 years, with new and diverse programming developments, acquisition of $6.5 million in funding for a new permanent building, as well as RAMS being named as Nonprofit Of The Year by Assemblymember Ting in 2022. The RAMS Board of Directors has been honored and humbled to work with Ms. Muhammad. Her leadership as well as her kindness, enthusiasm, and passion for social justice and equity, will be greatly missed. From Ms. Muhammad: “It has been a great privilege to serve as the CEO of RAMS, an organization that truly cares for the communities being served. In a social media post, a friend wrote the following message to me “(JayVon Muhammad) the Black Liberation Mary Poppins. Stay ready…she might be floating to a neighborhood near you”. That being said, I came to RAMS with a purpose and that purpose has come to an end. It is now time for me to float on to my next work, leaving you in the well-qualified and caring hands of Angela Tang. I cannot wait to see what comes next for RAMS.”

As RAMS continues to aspire to new heights and milestones while being the standard-bearer for excellence in culturally responsive care, please join us in welcoming Angela Tang in her new role as President & CEO. The Board looks forward to her exemplary leadership and continued years of service at RAMS.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors,

Patty Rodriquez, Board Chair

With sadness and deep gratitude, the RAMS Board of Directors is formally announcing the departure of JayVon Muhammad, President and Chief Executive Officer of RAMS. Her last day will be on August 31, 2023.

Ms. Muhammad joined RAMS at an unprecedented time, in unprecedented circumstances. She was appointed on March 8, 2021, to lead RAMS into its next phase, a year into the COVID lockdowns. Ms. Muhammad came to RAMS after serving as Chief Executive Officer of SWLA Center for Health Services in Lake Charles, Louisiana. A San Francisco native, Ms. Muhammad had already paved her path as an inspiring, equity-centered professional with more than 20 years of healthcare and community leadership experience in the Bay Area and Louisiana. In the words of former RAMS Board Chair Cynthia Huie, “Her expertise in designing and overseeing equity-based clinical programs in underrepresented communities, as well as her passion and energy for innovation and partnership, will help RAMS build upon our record of accomplishment as we continue to address the compounding COVID-19 and mental health crises in San Francisco.”

Under Ms. Muhammad’s leadership, RAMS expanded its scope of services to include new and diverse programming including EMBRACE, which provides perinatal mental health services for Black Families, in partnership with the University of California San Francisco, SF Department of Public Health (SFDPH), and Southeast Health Center. Ms. Muhammad also initiated the Unity Road Trip, a program where Chinese American and African American youth girls travel on a month-long road trip across 16 states learning critical historical and cultural information about their lineage, histories, and contributions to the United States. Through this journey, these young leaders gain knowledge, relationships, and skills to educate, build unity, and heal their communities. Other significant initiatives include creating The Living Room, a crucial welcoming piece of the Tenderloin Linkage Center which was a temporary SFDPH site to reduce overdose deaths and increase connections to supportive services, The Lotus Project, a partnership with Public Health Institute to provide training on trauma care to Asian American & Asian Immigrant communities, expanding the RAMS leadership team to include the Director of Community & Workforce Empowerment and the Director of Community Engagement & Government Affairs, and being instrumental in RAMS’ opportunity to secure $6.5 million in funding towards the acquisition of a new building for a permanent program site in the San Francisco Richmond District. Under Ms. Muhammad’s leadership, RAMS was also chosen as Nonprofit of The Year by Assemblymember Philip Ting to represent his District.

The RAMS Board of Directors was honored and humbled to work with Ms. Muhammad. Her leadership as well as her kindness, enthusiasm, and passion for social justice and equity, will be greatly missed.

Over the next few months, the Board will be working closely with Ms. Muhammad to ensure a smooth transition.

With appreciation,

Patricia Rodriquez
Chair, RAMS Board of Directors

Every three years, RAMS and its Hire-Ability Employment Services program must be evaluated by the Commission on Accreditation for Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF), which assesses and accredits over 60,000 behavioral health, employment, and other community services across the globe. CARF assesses programs for roughly 20 factors including cultural competence, financial management, program management, health and safety, and others. 

We are proud to announce that, last week, CARF awarded us a perfect score! RAMS is among the top 1-2% of CARF-accredited programs to achieve this in the world. Not only is achieving a perfect score on this prestigious assessment unheard of, this is actually the second time that we have achieved this during the last five CARF reviews!

Through numerous interviews with employees, community partners, and program participants, CARF reported that:

• Community partners said that the RAMS team is “supportive, empowering, impactful, diverse, [compassionate], responsive, flexible.” 
• “The organization is truly participant driven.”
• Clients reported that “their dreams desires, and rights are respected by staff” and “RAMS Hire-Ability has the most caring staff that any organization can have”

We are incredibly proud of our team for how they imbue their work with dedication and compassion. 

The team at RAMS Division of Peer-Based Services has been invited to present at two mental health conferences. 

The RAMS Division of Peer-Based Services have been invited to speak at the Mindset College Conference, a virtual event organized through a collaborative effort from four NGOs based in Hong Kong: Baptist Oi Kwan Social Service, Caritas Hong Kong, The Mental Health Association of Hong Kong and New Life Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association. The conference “aims to provide recovery-focused trainings and courses on mental health for people-in-recovery, caregivers, mental health practitioners and anyone who is concerned about mental health.” This year, the theme of the conference is Recovery, Coproduction, and Peer Development. The conference will take place via Zoom on April 2023. More details will be available early next year. 

One of our esteemed Peer Supervisors, Vania Mendoza has been invited to join a in-person panel presentation at the NARPA conference (National Association for Rights, Protection, and Advocacy). NARPA’S mission is to support people with psychiatric diagnoses to exercise their legal and human rights, with the goals of abolishing forced treatment and ensuring autonomy, dignity and choice. The conference will take place in Newark, New Jersey from October 26-29. Additional information about NARPA can be found on http://narpa.org/

We’re proud to have peer staff with such high levels of expertise sought after at both the national and international level.