We have all felt the impacts of the mental health crisis, directly and indirectly – limited access to services, the devastation of suicide, greater challenges that youth now face coming out of the pandemic.
For me, these have all been a part of my life, most of all the loss of my best friend to suicide recently.
What can we do about it? What can I do about it, as just one person?
That’s a question I asked myself and what inspires me at the Mental Health Initiative, a collective impact program of United Way of Northwest Vermont. This multi-year effort leverages the participation of more than 200 community members to find solutions at scale to many of the most challenging problems we are facing in the mental health system of care.
I will discuss my work with United Way of Northwest Vermont's Mental Health Initiative on a new show launched by Neil Parekh and Dawn Helmrich Neuburg, “Shining Light on Shadows: A Candid Conversation About Mental Health.” You can watch the live show Thursday, October 17 at 7pm ET / 6pm CT OR the recording on Facebook, Twitter*, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram* and Neil's website.
*We won't know the exact urls for Twitter or Instagram until we go live. For now, those links go to Neil's accounts.
Our community partners have identified three priority areas that we have focused on:
Workforce development, making sure that the right people are in the right place at the right time
Suicide prevention, strengthening and aligning resources to help each other
Youth mental health, responding to the acute needs of our next generation
Participants in the Mental Health Initiative include direct care providers and community members with lived experience. In addition, participants come from many of the other places that now overlap with the mental health system of care, including schools, early childhood and higher education, housing, transportation, local and state government, libraries, after school organizations, religious and civic groups, and more.
Together we collaborate to improve the mental health system of care, share information, trainings, and resources to increase mental health literacy and access for all community members, and create necessary spaces to connect and convene stakeholders around these important issues.
We have had many successes so far among the projects that our participants have designed and moved forward. For example:
Mental Health First Aid: Responding to the growing demand for Mental Health First Aid, we helped more than double the number of certified trainers in Vermont. This effort has strengthened our ability to provide sub-acute care “upstream,” before a mental health challenge becomes a crisis.
Youth Mental Health Connections Call: Recognizing a need for a place to share timely and relevant information on youth mental health, we convene a monthly call focused on co-facilitated by our partners at KidSafe Collaborative. These one-hour meetings include a review of relevant data, a guest speaker, and informal networking.
Stand-Alone Pods for Youth Therapy: Many schools and youth programs lack private therapeutic space for youth to meet with a therapist. In response, we are supporting the installation of stand-alone rooms, or “therapy pods,” to help these critical important conversations happen in a supportive space.
2024 Suicide Prevention Symposium: We are proud to have partnered with our colleagues at the Vermont Collaborative for Practice Improvement & Innovation on the first in-person statewide suicide prevention symposium since before the pandemic. This sold-out event featured more than a dozen diverse workshops and suicide prevention training and certification opportunities.
Mental Health Toolkit for Employers: Local companies and community organizations asked for an easy-to-use guide to resources with suggested conversation prompts for the workplace. We are excited that this toolkit produced in collaboration with United Way’s Working Bridges program, has been downloaded more than 3,000 times.
Collaborating together, we have found innovative ways to support ourselves and each other. For more information, please see our website or contact me at steven@unitedwaynwvt.org
Steven Berbeco is the Director of the Mental Health Initiative at United Way of Northwest Vermont
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