The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) GAINS Center focuses on expanding access to services and supports for people with mental health conditions and substance use disorders who come in contact with the criminal justice system. The following is a glimpse into the work one of our teams is doing to support crisis response services in numerous jurisdictions across the nation.
SAMHSA launched the Cooperative Agreements for Innovative Community Crisis Response Partnerships (CCRP) program to help divert adults, children, and youth experiencing behavioral health crises from law enforcement, particularly in communities with high levels of service needs. Through the creation or enhancement of mobile crisis and co-response teams, communities are poised to provide care to individuals in settings appropriate to their needs. Ideally, mobile crisis and co-response teams involve multiple providers, such as licensed or unlicensed counselors, other mental health professionals, social workers, emergency medical technicians, law enforcement, first responders, case managers, and people with lived experience.
The first cohort of 12 CCRP grantees was awarded in 2022, with 13 additional grants awarded a year later to form the second cohort; a full list of recipients can be found on the SAMHSA Grants Dashboard. The duration of each award is 4 years. Throughout the length of the program, grantees receive support from SAMHSA’s GAINS Center, which serves as the SAMHSA-identified CCRP Technical Assistance (TA) Center.
TA is available on all matters related to program development, whether it’s creating job descriptions and staffing plans, establishing policies and procedures, fostering collaboration amongst partners, or planning for sustainability. The grantees have unique and diverse goals for their projects due to the broad funding guidance, with a shared underlying focus on creating or enhancing mobile crisis and co-response initiatives.
- Individualized TA includes regularly held status meetings with the grantees and their SAMHSA program officer, as well as quarterly meetings with grantees to recognize progress and resolve pain points.
- Cross-site TA comprises large-scale events open to all CCRP grantees. In addition to attending webinars and other training events, they are welcome to participate in Wellness Fridays and communities of practice (CoPs). The latter is geared toward roles associated with the grant site. Currently, CoPs are available for project directors, project evaluators, providers of crisis services, people with lived experience working within the crisis teams, and first responders.
The CCRP TA Center also includes a grantee portal. The portal features a library of resources on a variety of topics related to crisis response that are available to the public, which readers are welcome to access.
Meet the CCRP TA Center Staff
Several consultant advisors and various subject-matter experts are enlisted to support grantees, but CCRP TA Center operations are the responsibility of the following five staff members, each of whom is dedicated to making a difference.
Kristin Sauerbier, LCSW, team lead for the CCRP TA Center, provided emergency care in emergency departments and behavioral health care settings for many years. Later, as the program director of a not-for-profit organization providing crisis services, she helped launch a co-response pilot initiative with a city police department, which then expanded to other law enforcement agencies with the help of CCRP funding. Kristin recalls, “I learned so much during the development and launch of that initiative and was eager to share our exemplary processes with other programs across the country. One of the biggest complaints we hear is the lack of standards for mobile care, from training curriculums for crisis responders in the field to policies and procedures. Our team is passionate about building those standards and supporting their implementation in a hands-on way.”
Dan Abreu, M.S., CRC, LMHC, serves as the lead consultant advisor for the CCRP TA Center, sharing with grantees his vast experience across all six intercepts of the Sequential Intercept Model. He notes, “Having provided technical assistance across the country for many years, I can say the current investment in prevention and crisis services on federal, state, and local levels is unprecedented. Grantees have a great opportunity to enhance civilian response and strengthen collaboration with law enforcement. They are making tremendous strides under the guidance of and with support from our core team and our impressive pool of subject-matter experts.”
Nicholas Roos, M.A., is a TA coordinator and will facilitate the CoPs for providers of crisis services and first responders. Prior to joining the CCRP team, Nicholas provided direct crisis support in a variety of settings and milieus, most recently in conjunction with the Vermont State Police, and served as a trainer for a collaborative initiative between law enforcement and crisis providers, in which participants worked through scenarios before interacting with each other in the field. Nicholas reflects, “So much of my professional career has been geared in this domain, and helping organizations create programs from the ground up is very exciting. This position allows me to educate people on the importance of crisis services and best practices for providing those services on a national level.”
Kyle Mosack, M.S., LMHC, NCC, is the newest member of the team. Starting his career in outpatient behavioral health clinics, he transitioned to a focus on crisis response services. He draws on his experience developing and overseeing peer specialist services to co-facilitate the peer specialist CoP. “What drew me to this work is the dynamic nature of crisis programs,” Kyle explains. “Whether creating a new program or expanding a current one, there’s always a new puzzle to solve: training staff to be clinically ready, refining logistics to reach rural areas, reducing response times, ensuring program sustainability, etc. It’s satisfying to develop and share strategies that will help programs evolve, particularly when there is no clearly established path to follow.”
Alex Paucar, B.A., is a project assistant who, his colleagues appreciatively say, keeps the CCRP TA Center “on its tracks and moving forward.” Interacting with people and providing support have been lifelong interests, but how they could be combined with a passion for criminal justice became clear during Alex’s studies at the University of Maryland and subsequent work with the Maryland Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention and Policy. “The connections I’ve made with colleagues and partners from different backgrounds have been invaluable,” Alex shares. “Though much of the work we do may take place ‘behind the scenes,’ I take immense pride in knowing that our team’s contributions help populations who have long been under-supported transform their lives.”
Stay tuned to learn more about the CCRP grantees work in the months to come, and visit the grantee portal for publicly available resources related to crisis response.
Like what you’ve read? Sign up to receive the monthly GAINS eNews!