County mental health leaders will use the first three months of 2024 to gather additional resident input after mental health advocates pushed for more community involvement in the creation of the county’s care response pilot program. 

The Alcohol, Drug Addiction & Mental Health Services (ADAMHS) Board recently contracted R Strategy Group to hold community engagement meetings starting in January as the board continues to build the program.

The added efforts to listen to the community come after mental health advocates raised concerns about the lack of community input. 

“We heard the community, and we share their view that [the] care response pilot project [should] reflect the needs and desires of the community that it intends to serve,” said Scott Osiecki, CEO of the ADAMHS Board.

Osiecki said the board hopes local foundations will continue R Strategy’s funding beyond March 2024 so the group can form a community advisory committee.

The ADAMHS Board is working with the City of Cleveland and FrontLine, a community behavioral health center serving the county, to create a non-police crisis response program — also called care response. 

What is care response? Care response is a program where a mental health expert and often a paramedic respond to emergency mental health crisis calls. This program does not involve police at all.

Board allocated $2.5 million in 2024 for pilot program

The board previously used R Strategy group to research what care response could look like in Cuyahoga County and how much the program would cost.

The strategy group then hired Dr. Mark Hurst, a psychiatrist and healthcare consultant who led a research team, held community listening sessions and presented the board with a report. 

That report, presented in May, estimated that an 18-month pilot program with two teams would cost $1.65 million. That includes training, vehicles, equipment, and salaries of a lead trainer, licensed behavioral health professionals and peer support specialists. 

In November, the board allocated $2.5 million from its 2024 general budget for the pilot program. That amount doesn’t include the current $59,500 contract with R Strategy Group.

The board estimates that funding will cover five response teams, all serving Cleveland. Osiecki said the goal is to launch the new program sometime in the summer, though the timeline is tentative. 

Plans to create a care response team started after Policy Matters Ohio and REACH (Responding with Empathy, Access and Community Healing) worked with the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless (NEOCH) to produce a report titled, “Talk to Me Like a Regular Person, Not a Criminal” in 2022. The coalition’s Homeless Congress, which is made up of people who have experienced homelessness, surveyed 177 community members who are most likely to need a care response program. 

Mental health advocates to host community meetings

Policy Matters Ohio and REACH are two of several organizations that formed a coalition and launched a website – Care for CLE – to teach residents about care response and to ensure that creating the program involves community input from the start. 

Josiah Quarles, director of Organizing and Advocacy at NEOCH and co-founder of REACH, said the goal of starting a pilot program in the summer is ambitious. It seems soon especially given that the program includes training 911 dispatchers, Quarles said. 

Though he’s not sure how much R Strategy Group can accomplish with community engagement in three months, “at least the thought is there,” he said. 

In the meantime, Care for CLE leaders plan to continue meeting with organizations and community members likely to use care response to learn how the program can best serve them. Coalition leaders then plan to bring what they hear from the community to the ADAMHS Board and to Cleveland leadership, Quarles said. 

Quarles said he hopes there will be ongoing community feedback during the pilot program. There’s often a reluctance to make systemic changes, but these changes to emergency first response can also be hopeful, he said. 

He hopes care response will help meet residents’ needs “with empathy” and remove “folks in crisis from police and the carceral system,” Quarles said. 

“It’s also been a real joy to make connections across the city and in the county,” he said. “And see the light go on in people’s heads when they really come to understand what the impact of a program like this can be.”