Indianapolis Funding Three Year Mental Health Initiatives – ARPA Funding
The City of Indianapolis is committed to spending $10 million annually for the next three years for a total of $30 million in mental health investments. The administration is currently in the process of hiring a senior project manager for mental health to help support the implementation of this work and hopes to have programming stood up in Quarters One and Two of 2022. Below is a summary of the mental health programming funding using ARPA dollars.
In-School Mental Health Services and Violence Prevention Programming ($7,570,000): This program bridges the divide between community-based programs and schools, providing students with access to wraparound services. Every student receives an individualized service plan built by a school coordinator. That coordinator then works with families to connect them to essential services like mental health counseling and healthcare and access to enrichment activities. Based on the aggregate data from the service plans in year one, resources will be invested in years two and three in community-based services that students need.
Mental Health Toolkit ($750,000) Eskenazi will deploy a toolkit at faith based-and community-based organizations. The toolkit will prepare frontline community workers with the tools needed to identify mental health needs.
Overdose Treatment Center ($710,000): The Holistic Recovery Center for Women and Children will address the burgeoning substance misuse crisis through a community-based service model for women to include pregnant and parenting women with substance use disorder. The Recovery Center will house on-site residential options, community-based peer groups, dedicated literacy, job training classroom space, childcare center, and wellness facility.
Mental Health Support for Juvenile Detention Center ($6,000,000) Mental health services focused on trauma, conflict resolution, and peer and family support, provided in detention and ongoing services following their time in juvenile detention. There must be consistent follow-up since juvenile detention is often relatively brief.
Mental Health Support Services for High-Risk Homeless Individuals ($3,300,000): In partnership with a community mental health center (CMHC) and Horizon House and other service providers, this will launch a three-year pilot program to fund mental health clinician services for individuals experiencing homelessness who are in the permanent supportive housing pipeline and who have a high need for intensive, home-based mental health services that are not currently Medicaid-reimbursable. The project may also fund the services of "navigators" or peer support specialists who can help such individuals transition into more traditional models of Medicaid-reimbursable care offered by CMHCs. The pilot project's goal is to demonstrate the efficacy of this type of service as an adjunct to an application for a Medicaid waiver to enable such services to be provided on a more permanent footing and as additional critical support to help high-risk individuals stay securely housed.
Behavioral Health Clinicians Training ($4,170,000) Indiana faces a critical shortage of qualified behavioral health professionals to meet increasing needs related to both the opioid epidemic and consequences of COVID-19, in addition to already high levels of unmet mental health need in our communities. Failure to address the mental health needs of our communities results in millions of dollars of economic, medical, and social burden. This proposal builds from a highly successful collaboration between Eskenazi Health, Community Health Network, Indiana University School of Social Work, and Ascend Indiana, to enhance opportunity by scaling up our workforce development strategy and incorporating innovative programs to both expand the reach of existing partnerships and create a new collaboration with Martin University. By training more individuals to be behavioral health clinicians, mental health programming and MCAT will expand. Without this investment in personnel, our ability to implement or scale mental health programming is severely limited.
Mental Health Delivery Systems Change ($7,500,000) A variety of staffing, data analysis, process improvements, evaluation, and technical assistance improve the mental health delivery system.
Do not hesitate to reach out to me if you have questions, concerns, or comments about these opportunities and initiatives. My door is always open and my role, as always, is to be your microphone.
Sincerely,
Michael-Paul Hart