Arbor Circle’s Mental Health Awareness and Training Project will educate community members living/working in Ottawa County, Michigan who interact with person(s) who may experience a mental health crisis/disorder. Groups targeted for this training will be law enforcement, first responders, educators, teen leaders and business leaders and managers. Arbor Circle will provide a continuum of Evidence-Based Mental Health Awareness Trainings and bolster referrals to the mental health treatment system. Our target is to support and ensure access for the almost 10% of Ottawa County residents who experience poor or extremely poor mental health. The percentage of our adult population experiencing poor mental health is demographically representative of our community as a whole. However, our youth of color are experiencing mental illness at a significantly higher rate than our Caucasian students. Special attention will be made to better engage and support our youth of color in Ottawa County. Our two goals are to increase the percent of adults in Ottawa County who access treatment for their mental illness by 10% and to reduce the percent of youth who indicate they have attempted suicide in the past year 5% by 2026. The objectives to reach these goals are to increase adults who view others as “caring and sympathetic to people with mental illness”, increase adults reporting resilience factors, increase training for adults and youth on mental illness in Ottawa County, and to expand and enhance the connections between organizations to ensure more effective referrals for persons with SEI/SED. To achieve these goals and objective Arbor Circle and our partners will train 570 unique individuals in project year 1, 850 in project year 2, 1,275 in project year 3, 1,280 in project year 4, and 1,390 in project year 5. The total number of individuals trained throughout the project term will be 5,365. Arbor Circle will partner with local coalitions like Building Resilient Youth and the Ottawa County Suicide Prevention Coalition and organizations like Community Mental Health of Ottawa County (CMHOC) and the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Office (OCSO) to provide a continuum of Evidence-Based Mental Health Awareness Trainings. The continuum of training will include Crisis Intervention Team Training, Question, Persuade, Refer and Mental Health First Aid. Arbor Circle will also build on the work of CMHOC and OCSO to assess and create enhancements in our referral system where needed. We will review the sustainability of a designated follow up agency who can contact community members after a mental health crisis where first responders were called. As this project calls for collective implementation of training, all partners will contribute to a collective reporting tool to create a comprehensive evaluation of the projects impact annually and throughout the 5 years of the project.
