On March 31, 2023, ground was broken on the Atlanta Center for Diversion & Services, an outcome of Fulton County’s participation in SAMHSA’s GAINS Center for Behavioral Health and Justice Transformation’s Building a Competent Crisis Care System at Intercepts 0-1 (Crisis) Learning Collaborative. Begun in 2020, the Crisis Learning Collaborative (LC) focuses on informing and guiding best practices to improve crisis care processes at a national level. These strategic goals are attained by enabling teams to examine crisis care holistically through such focuses as co-responder models, models of care, and implementation. These processes enabled the Fulton County team to achieve a “very heavy lift,” the inception of the Atlanta Center for Diversion & Services, which will expand existing pre-arrest diversion services and increase community safety and wellness in the Atlanta, Georgia, area.
SAMHSA’s GAINS (Gather, Assess, Integrate, Network, and Stimulate) Center focuses on expanding access to services for people with mental and/or substance use disorders who come into contact with the adult criminal legal system. One of the core strategies in this mission is expanding local working partners’ access to emerging best practices, subject-matter experts (SMEs), and other learning initiatives. LCs are peer-to-peer models in which local jurisdiction teams work with national leaders to create coordinated strategic plans and implementation strategies for a focus topic.
Through the LC model, SAMHSA’s GAINS Center and LC SMEs aided the Fulton County team in focusing on its core objective: establishing a crisis care center in the Atlanta region. The Harris Center in Houston was identified as a potential model of care, and a site visit was arranged and conducted. An underutilized site within the Atlanta City Detention Center was identified as a potential location for the Center for Diversion and Services. A strategic planning session with SAMHSA’s GAINS Center connected the Fulton County team to county- and city-level partners for the purposes of coordination, feedback, and identification of potential sources of funding. Ground was broken on the Center for Diversion and Services with the help of core partners, including the City of Atlanta, the Georgia Justice Project, the Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative, Bloomberg Associates, and the Grady Health System.
The GAINS Center’s Crisis LC worked with teams representing a wide range in size of jurisdiction, showcasing the strength of the LC model and allowing for teams at different scales to learn from one another. As part of its work with the Crisis LC, the Hartford (Connecticut) team developed and launched HEARTeam (Hartford Emergency Assistance Response Team), an additional first responder model that provides crisis de-escalation services for individuals who call 911 in a behavioral health crisis. In the last year, approximately 80 percent of Hartford’s 911 calls were diverted to the HEARTeam.
SAMHSA’s GAINS Center at PRA continues to support the Fulton County team, Hartford team, and the other teams in the LC cohort with technical assistance, research, and training. Lisa Callahan, PhD, a Senior Research Associate at PRA and project lead for one of the cohorts of the Crisis LC, said she is, “impressed with how these teams are doing this work on top of all their other work” and by their commitment to their populations.
The breaking of ground on the Atlanta Center for Diversion and Services demonstrates the effectiveness of the LC model, which will continue to be a key part of SAMHSA’s GAINS Center and PRA’s collective mission to provide direct training and technical assistance to jurisdictions across the nation to better support people with behavioral health needs who are in contact with in the criminal legal system.