Kenneth Joyner, an 11-year-old black boy, places a sticky note on a white sheet stuck to the wall. The sticky notes are community members' answers to the question written on the white paper, "How should we roll out this program and communicate about it in this community?"
Kenneth Joyner, 11, places a sticky note on a white sheet stuck to the wall. The sticky notes are community members' answers to the question written on the white paper, "How should we roll out this program and communicate about it in this community?" Credit: Stephanie Casanova / Signal Cleveland

County mental health officials received 73 applications for an advisory committee that will help gather community feedback on the crisis response program known as care response. 

The care response program, a non-police mental health crisis response program, started in September in two Cleveland ZIP Codes, 44102 and 44105. 

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.

The Care Committee will be made up of 10 to 12 residents, including clients who receive mental health services or their family members, mental health service providers and community advocates, said Clare Rosser, chief strategy and performance officer for the Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board of Cuyahoga County. 

The group 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. 

“Their insights are going to help us ensure that the approaches that we take are culturally competent and relevant to that community that we serve,” Rosser said. “We were really excited by the number of qualified candidates that we received, and so I think it really shows how engaged people are.”

Once it’s fully staffed, the care response pilot program will consist of two supervisors and six 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 respond to 988 calls or to calls to the FrontLine crisis hotline if clinicians determine a person needs an in-person assessment. 

FrontLine, which manages the county’s 988 mental health, addiction and suicide prevention hotline and already has an adult mobile crisis team and a child response team, is managing the care response teams. 

An example of what happens ‘when people show up’

Josiah Quarles, co-founder of Responding with Empathy, Access and Community Healing (REACH), a coalition that advocates for care response in Cuyahoga County, credits community members for pushing for a resident committee. Advocates have been persistent in asking to be more involved in the process. 

“We were told no at least 100 times,” he said. “So this is like one of those really small victories that you can cherish.”

The ADAMHS Board announced the committee after several residents said they wanted to see continued community involvement throughout the process rather than just before the program launched. 

“It’s an example of what happens when community is made aware of something, makes a call, and people show up,” Quarles said. “And they speak with authenticity and integrity, and they are informed on the issues.”

Rick Oliver, director of crisis services at FrontLine, said the ADAMHS Board and FrontLine planned to have a community board and gather community feedback from the beginning. They just wanted to set up the program before setting up the committee, Oliver said. 

Rosser said community input has always been an important part of the process of starting the care response program. 

“The ADAMHS board values the community voices that rose this up as a response that our community is ready for,” Rosser said. 

The ADAMHS Board is working with FrontLine and the Cleveland Department of Public Health to host more community engagement meetings in mid-November, Rosser said. 

Goal: fully staffed by end of November

The care response team only works through 988 for now. State and federal officials are working on integrating the 988 and 911 systems so calls can be transitioned to the appropriate response. 

People can call 988 anonymously to talk through their mental health or addiction symptoms and get connected to the right resources. If a caller is going through a crisis, hotline employees will get more information from the person and determine whether they should send out a care response team for an assessment. 

Sometimes a care response team gets to a person in crisis within 15 minutes. Other times, the person asks the team to meet them at a certain place and time later that day, Oliver said. 

In September, only four out of 26 calls from the two ZIP codes required in-person assessment from a care response team. So with approval from the ADAMHS Board, care response teams helped people outside of the two ZIP codes. 

Care response teams responded to 17 people last month. Six of them got psychiatric help from FrontLine, seven were linked to other behavioral health services and four people didn’t need further help after their assessment, Oliver said. 

Oliver’s goal is to have the program fully staffed by the end of November. Teams are currently working from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Some team members are going through training. Once fully staffed, the teams will work 24 hours a day, prioritizing the two target ZIP codes. 

A freelance reporter based in Arizona, Stephanie was the inaugural criminal justice reporter with Signal Cleveland until October 2024. She wrote about the criminal legal system, explaining the complexities and shedding light on injustices/inequities in the system and centering the experiences of justice-involved individuals, both victims and people who go through the criminal legal system and their families.