Thursday, November 21, 2024
11/21/2024
The City of Newark’s Community Crisis Response Partnerships aims to improve the City’s crisis response system by enhancing existing co-responder teams to effectively provide trauma-informed comprehensive community-based behavioral health crisis services to individuals experiencing mental health emergencies, including those who are homeless. The project is a collaborative effort of the City’s Office of Homeless Services (OHS), Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery (OVPTR), Newark Police Division (NPD), and Office of Public Safety, 988 Suicide and Crisis LifeLine Center and behavioral health care provider (Rutgers University Behavioral Health Care (R-UBHC)) and community-based organizations (Mental Health Association (MHA) and Bridges Outreach Inc (Bridges)). The project’s goals are to: 1. increase access to comprehensive community-based behavioral health crisis services across the City of Newark by enhancing the capacity of existing co-responder and mobile crisis response teams so that they are ready to respond within one hour of dispatch; 2. create a compassionate, caring, and culturally competent behavioral health crisis workforce equipped to safely diffuse mental health crises by increasing the racial/ethnic diversity of crisis responders as well as providing in-service evidence-based and cross-agency training opportunities; 3. enhance the responsiveness to homeless individuals experiencing mental health crises by increasing collaboration between Newark’s systems for crisis care and homeless services; and 4. create an integrated city-wide crisis response system across the care continuum by enhancing cross-agency collaboration through data sharing and formalized partnerships with community-based organizations, hospital emergency departments, crisis receiving, and stabilization programs as well as R-UBHC 988 Lifeline /crisis call center. The project’s objectives are: to hire three additional social workers to increase availability on co-responder teams at NPD precincts; recruit 100% racial and ethnic diverse crisis responders to deliver culturally and linguistically appropriate responsive crisis response services; provide evidence-based crisis intervention training to crisis co-responder social workers and NPD officers; provide group training and one-on-one coaching on self-care to OVPTR staff; incorporate homeless screening assessment tools and/or questions into the crisis hotline screenings; integrating a licensed clinical social worker into homeless outreach and engagement teams; provide monthly training to increase the knowledge of trauma-informed care and population-specific issues and challenges related to homelessness among OVPTR social workers, NPD officers, and Public Safety Telecommunications (PST)); educate OVPTR co-responder teams on homeless programs, resources, and services through annual and quarterly training co-led by community-based homeless service organizations; develop and implement protocols for partnering and coordinating project activities with OVPTR co-responder teams, NPD, Office of Public Safety, 911/PST, as well as the 988 and crisis hotline call center operated by R-UBHC; establish inter-departmental and external data sharing agreements; conduct a review of the crisis response and screening law to streamline local response and identify opportunities for early behavioral health intervention; develop and implement post-crisis follow-up protocols for all recipients of mobile crisis response services; create a visual crisis map of the local crisis systems; lead the development and implementation of collaborative community safety plans; and develop and launch a public and cross-agency communications campaign to increase awareness of the 988-call line. By 9/29/2026, the project anticipates screening at least 2,000 unduplicated individuals for behavioral health issues and training 1,113 professionals across the behavioral health crisis care system.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).
