Population growth. Aging Baby Boomers. More people with health coverage. Together they add up to a healthcare workforce shortage that’s been building in California for decades.    

For five years, Stockton-based HealthForce Partners California has worked to close the workforce gap under the fiscal sponsorship of United Way of San Joaquin County. Last week, the group announced it will begin operating as an independent nonprofit.

“We’re proud of our shared roots and the role we played in supporting HealthForce Partners’ launch, and we look forward to seeing its continued impact across our region and beyond,” Kristen Birtwhistle, President and CEO of United Way of San Joaquin County, said in a press release.

According to HealthForce’s 2025 impact report, the group has helped to provide more than 80 paid internships, over $1 million in scholarships, training opportunities for social workers through regional California State University programs and investments in peer support and substance abuse counseling. 

With the help of colleges, employers, funders and training partners, HealthForce has developed programs to support the training and employment of the region’s nurses, behavioral health professionals, pharmacists, community health workers and administrative assistants.

California State University, Stanislaus is one of several regional colleges to see its students begin to enter the workforce through its partnership with HealthForce. 

For example, during the last academic year, 18 graduate students enrolled in certain behavioral health programs at CSU Stanislaus were awarded $5,000 HealthForce scholarships after demonstrating an intention to invest their time and skills in communities within Stanislaus and San Joaquin Counties.

“We really are in a behavioral health workforce desert,” said Dr. Sarah Sweitzer, Dean of CSU Stanislaus’ Stockton campus. “We have some of the lowest numbers of behavioral health providers in the state of California.”

In San Joaquin County, the scholarship is offered to graduate students pursuing master’s degrees in social work, marriage and family therapy and professional clinical counseling.

Before partnering with HealthForce, Sweitzer said, the school’s behavioral health graduate programs struggled to retain emerging clinicians, not for lack of interest or dedication to their communities, but because the local healthcare system could not properly support students who needed training in their fields.

For example, students in the school’s graduate social work program are required to log 1,000 supervised clinical hours. Sweitzer said the requirement proved to be one of the main barriers for her students because the region simply doesn’t produce enough licensed professionals to provide that supervision.

“We have hospital systems who would be happy to bring students in for practicum sites, but they don’t have the clinical supervision,” she said. “So HealthForce is able to hire, through their grant funding, clinical supervision for students. The scholarships are important, but it’s not just about the scholarships, right? For us, it’s more about making sure we have adequate supervision at our sites.”

HealthForce CEO Paul Lanning said in an email that in San Joaquin County the group was able to employ one full-time and two part-time field supervisors to work with students earning their clinical hours at placement sites including county behavioral health services, the Child Abuse Prevention Council, Children’s Home of Stockton, and San Joaquin PRIDE Center.

Once HealthForce showed success in Stockton, the City of Modesto invested $500,000 in the organization to address behavioral health workforce shortages there. Still, retaining qualified workers remains a challenge.

Greg Diederich, Board Chair of HealthForce and CEO of Community Medical Centers, a federally qualified health center network that services San Joaquin county, told The Intersection that while the groups share a goal to train medical assistants looking to transition to nursing, so far only one out of the 10 trainees on that track have chosen to stay at CMC. The others left because they could earn more with Kaiser or Sutter facilities, Diederich said.

“How do we articulate a career ladder that we want you to stay and we’re going to grow you here and have a reason for you to stay because we invested in you and you invest back in us?” he said.

Vivienne Aguilar is the health equity reporter at The Intersection, a project of the Central Valley Journalism Collaborative. Contact Aguilar at vivienne@cvlocaljournalism.org.