This article has been edited to clarify that the committee does not have oversight powers.
County mental health officials are asking residents to join a committee that will make recommendations for the county’s new care response program.
The Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services (ADAMHS) Board of Cuyahoga County is accepting applications for what it’s calling the Care Committee as it gets ready to launch its non-police mental health crisis response program this month.
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.
Care response teams will work in two Cleveland ZIP codes — 44105 and 44102 – for a year as part of the board’s pilot program.
The pilot program will consist of five teams, each with a licensed behavioral health professional and a peer support specialist, who is someone with lived experience with mental health or substance use disorder who has been through training and certification. The teams will respond to 988 calls or to calls to the FrontLine crisis hotline.
FrontLine, which manages the County’s 988 suicide and crisis lifeline and already has an adult mobile crisis team and a child response team, will manage the care response teams.
Applications for the committee are due by 5 p.m. on Sept. 23.
The board is looking for members who are:
- Mental health service clients or their family members who live in 44105 or 44102.
- Mental health service providers who serve clients in one of the two ZIP codes.
- An advocate who lives in Cuyahoga County and is interested in the success of the care response program.
The Care Committee will help the board gather community responses to the program and provide feedback on how it is developed and rolled out in its first year.
“Community engagement is vital to our Care Response Pilot Program,” Scott Osiecki, CEO of the ADAMHS Board, said in a news release. “Working in partnership with neighborhood residents, businesses and those with lived experience has helped us create a roadmap thus far that aligns with the community’s needs and priorities.
‘It’s important to build that trust’
The board announced the committee after several residents said they wanted to see continued community oversight rather than just community input before the program launched.
Josiah Quarles, co-founder of Responding with Empathy, Access and Community Healing (REACH), a coalition that advocates for care response in Cuyahoga County, said it’s important for community members to be included in the design of the program from the beginning.
Having community input will help keep decision-makers accountable to residents’ needs and will help educate the community, Quarles said.
“We have one shot at this,” Quarles said. “It’s a pilot. If the results do not indicate that it’s worth scaling up, then we will lose this point of leverage. The money will go away, and who knows when we get another shot. So it’s very important to do this right and get results that exemplify the benefits that it can provide in the community that would warrant continued funding and continued scalability.”
The Care Committee will also help hold the ADAMHS Board and FrontLine accountable, making sure they’re transparent in how they run the program, Quarles said.
“I think there just needs to be a little more visibility, particularly when you’re creating something new,” he said. “So as an institution, it’s important to build that trust, that community will be involved in informing the decisions and assessing the effectiveness or the shortcomings as the pilot works itself out because it’s not a finished product.
