WI Discretionary Funding Fiscal Year 2017

Dunn County Mental Health Improvement Project, implemented by Arbor Place, Inc., involves collaboration with UW-Stout and local behavioral health providers to provide free training in an evidence-based program called Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) to adults who regularly interact with youth. The project includes the following objectives, strategies and interventions: increase the mental health literacy of adults who interact with transition-aged youth (16-24 year olds) by training at least 6 MHFA Instructors and offering a minimum of 20 MHFA trainings to approximately # adults in Dunn County annually (400 during 3-year project); increase the capacity of adults within Dunn County to respond to the behavioral health issues of transition-aged youth by engaging trained mental health first-aiders in a learning community that addresses comprehensive continuum of mental health recognition, management, and prevention strategies; conduct at 6-10 outreach and engagement strategies annually (a minimum of 24 during the 3-year project) with transition-aged youth and their families or caregivers to increase awareness of and promote positive behavioral health; link transition-aged youth with behavioral issues to mental, emotional, and behavioral health assistance and services by developing a technology enhanced outreach and referral system that will help to monitor and support an increase in referrals of transition-aged youth ; increase the number of collaborative partnerships with relevant youth-serving community agencies and programs by establishing the Dunn County Mental Health First Aid Collaborative.

The goal of the Bad River Native Connections Program is to improve mental health and reduce substance abuse and suicidal behavior by increasing culturally responsive prevention activities and integrating access to supportive treatment and recovery services for the native youth in the Bad River Area. The audience for the Native Connections program is school-aged youth to 24 years of age; we plan to serve approximately 350 youth annually. The Bad River Native Connections Program will work to integrate prevention, support, and recovery services by hiring an AODA Prevention Specialist and a Case Manager to fill gaps in services and build strong connections with other services in the schools and related agencies. Both positions will be overseen by the Bad River Health and Wellness Center administration and directly supervised by the Assistant Administrator. The AODA Prevention specialist will: gather data and information; establish baselines for reporting; plan and coordinate appropriate tribal prevention and education activities; and determine where more work and intervention is needed. The Case Manager will improve access, use of services, and outcomes by working within the school system to build collaboration and service connections for Native youth with substance abuse, alcohol abuse and/or suicide ideation. The Case Manager will: receive referrals; connect youth in need to appropriate resources; follow participants through prevention, treatment and aftercare; and boost prevention efforts by connecting outside services with the Bad River Health and Wellness Center and other tribal AODA and prevention programs. A data gathering and reporting system will be designed and implemented to assure referrals from Ashland School District. Program metrics will be added to our established performance improvement process, analyzed, and reported monthly for changes or course corrections in the project. We look forward to working with SAMHSA to implement this important project.

Project AWARE Community Grant allows Janesville Mobilizing 4 Change (JM4C) to provide Youth Mental Health First Aid training to equip adults with the skills to help an adolescent developing a mental health problem or experiencing a mental health crisis. JM4C's goal is to reduce the number of youth reporting depressive symptoms and attempting suicide. They will reduce the stigma surrounding mental health issues and increase youth access to care. Based on adolescent reports of high rates of depression, suicidal ideation and suicide attempts from the 2014 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, JM4C expanded their focus from substance abuse prevention to include improving the mental health environment for youth. Youth in Janesville are surrounded by risk factors for mental health: poverty, juvenile arrest rates, homelessness, youth and adult substance abuse, unemployment, child maltreatment, bullying, low school connectedness, and poor academic achievement. JM4C Project AWARE will reach its goals through the following objectives: train 1.6% of the adult population, youth will be surrounded by trained adults who are capable of recognizing and responding to any mental health issues that arise; and to decrease the number of attempted suicides by 5%, as measured through the Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

This project serves to support reentry and community integration of criminal justice-involved consumers through the development of a forensic peer specialist model in Wisconsin. Using Participatory Decision-Making, the Grassroots Empowerment Project (GEP) will facilitate monthly meetings with individuals from multiple stakeholder groups to develop a model for forensic peer support. GEP will then train criminal justice-involved consumers and support them as they provide peer support. GEP will target three areas of the state to bring stakeholders, criminal justice-involved consumers, families, advocates, corrections staff, and law enforcement together to discuss the needs of criminal justice-involved consumers returning to communities and living in institutions. These regional groups will collaborate to establish guidelines and requirements for criminal justice-involved consumers to become forensic peer specialists. These groups will also conceptualize what forensic peer support looks like in WI. GEP anticipates that the trained forensic peer specialists will be employed and working in their capacities during the third year of the grant. GEP will also continue Empowerment Days for 100 consumers to meet with policymakers and discuss mental health systems improvements, and communicate with members through social media, listserv, and quarterly newsletter.

Individuals with SPMI and SPMI/co-occurring substance use disorder (SUD) have poorer health status, higher rates of chronic illness, greater frequency of multiple conditions, and less access to preventive, routine, and ongoing medical care than individuals without these disorders. Journey Mental Health Center (JMHC) has recognized that a subset of consumers with SPMI or SPMIISUD (approximately 650 of 2,012 served) do not have health insurance or regularly visit their primary care physician, regardless of encouragement and enabling services to support referral. The purpose of this project titled, "Creating a Health Home for Individuals with Severe and Persistent Mental Illness (SPMI): Journey to Health and Wellness," is to improve the physical health status/wellness of individuals with SPMI by embedding primary care services (i.e. primary care on-site and chronic disease management) into the community mental health center to serve this group. The target sample includes adult consumers with a diagnosis of SPMI (schizophrenia, other psychotic disorders, bipolar disorder, major depression with severe psychotic symptoms, PTSD, or OCD); 70% have a co-occurring SUD; 70% are age 27-55; with 65% Caucasian, 15% African-American, 4% Asian (Hmong, Cambodian, and Laotian), and 8% Hispanic; most have publically funded insurance (93%), but are likely to be uninsured during periods of the year due to enrollment caps or inability to pay premiums; many have not seen a primary care practitioner in the past year. A total of 326 consumers (65 in year 1; 163, year 2; 261, year 3; and 326, year 4) are expected to meet the criteria/consent to participate in the health home initiative. m Interventions to be utilized include chronic care manage- ment (i.e., case coordination, health promotion, transitional care from inpatient to other settings, individual/family support, referral to community/social support services); screening, brief intervention and referral to substance use treatment.

A 5-year project titled "Native Connections" is proposed to address suicide among tribal youth. The vision for the Native Connections project is to protect the lives of all tribal members by promoting health and healing in the realms of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Traditional Anishinaabe beliefs state that all realms of health are intrinsically related. The proposed project will specifically address contributing factors by improving fragmented health care systems (tribal and non-tribal), improving access to mental health care, conducting community outreach, and implementing evidence-based suicide prevention practices. The proposed project will center on the promotion of mental health to coincide with other community interventions which may address physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Taken altogether, these interventions including the proposed Native Connections project will lead to healthy, living Anishinaabe people.

Mnwaadzid Miinwaa Wankiid, or Live Well and Live in Peace, is a culturally congruent approach focused on Native at-risk youth and families who are suffering from suicide ideation, behavioral health, and trauma. The project utilizes western evidence based approaches and tools that consist of CRA,QPR,PHQ-9, and Avatar.

Year One of the project consists of developing protocols, practices, and policies that address service gaps, prevention, and crisis response with the sponsoring community in Lac du Flambeau. The project will build on their current infrastructure and engage the community through their Saving Lives Community Partnership Taskforce.

The project will conduct community awareness on suicide prevention and behavioral health by hosting Community Readiness Training, and conducting the CRA on an annual basis in LDF. The project will conduct training using AVATAR Program within the local 7 school districts. Finally, the project will attend 12 community functions and conduct 778 suicide and behavioral health risk screenings using the PHQ-9. The project will collect the data from the various tools initially and work with the community and system partners through technical assistance to allow for sustainability and on-going data collection. The project will develop this model in LDF the first year and develop a plan to implement the model in at least 12 other tribal communities in the region for years 2-5.

Years 2-5, the project will work with at least 12 tribal communities in the great lakes region on suicide and behavioral health prevention and early intervention.

The project goal is to reduce suicide amongst AI youth and families' and increase early intervention and responses by identifying risk of youth prior to a crisis. Through the use of the tools the project will identify the number of at-risk youth in need of services, the percentage of follow-up on such referrals, and community social change.

The Milwaukee County Housing Division (MHCD) proposes to increase capacity and coordination efforts to address homelessness in Milwaukee as well as expand and enhance its existing Housing First program. The Milwaukee County Housing First (MCHF) project will make 450 outreach contacts and enroll 140 homeless individuals and families in permanent housing over the three years of the project. The population of focus will be: chronically homeless individuals, families, and transitional-aged youth (ages 18-25), who have SUDs, SMI, or CODs, as well as veterans with these disorders who meet the Hearth Act Category 1 definition for homelessness; and families who are not chronically homeless but meet the Hearth Act Category 1 definition for homelessness and who have an adult with SUD, SMI, or COD, as well as transitional-aged youth who meet that definition. MCHF will use the EBPs Housing First, Motivational Interviewing (MI) and Trauma-Informed Care (TIC). These EBPs were selected because the priority for MCHF is individuals who are chronically homeless, almost all of whom have an SMI and most often a COD. Goals/ objectives to be measured include: 1) enhance capacity and coordination efforts to address homelessness in Milwaukee; 2) assist participants to achieve or maintain recovery from SUDs; 3) improve their mental health functioning; 4) secure and sustain permanent housing; 5) manage their activities of daily living; 6) improve their quality of life; 7) engage in purposeful activity; 8) build a supportive social network; 9) enroll in health insurance and other benefits; and 10) minimize sub-population disparities in access to, use of, and outcomes of project services. The evaluation will be overseen by Dr. Gwat-Yong Lie of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who has conducted evaluations for 3 previous and 1 current SAMHSA grant-funded projects for homeless persons.

The City of Milwaukee's Office of Violence Prevention's Recast MKE Project will target Milwaukee's high-risk youth and families in order to promote resilience and equity through the implementation of evidence-based, violence prevention, and community youth engagement programs, as well as linkages with trauma-informed behavioral health services in response to trauma and stress associated with recent civil unrest.

From the Strategic Plan, the project will address the goal of the project, which is for the Milwaukee community to work together to improve behavioral health, empower community residents, reduce trauma, and foster sustained community healing. This will be accomplished through the implementation of six sets of strategies and interventions consisting of: Partnership, Disparities in Access, Trauma-Informed Behavioral Health Services, Peer Support, Building Community & Personal Resilience and Healing, and Training.

Mental Health First Aid for Youth in Transition is a project co-sponsored by Outreach Community Health Centers, Inc. and Lad Lake, Inc. that is designed to improve the mental health literacy of adults who come into contact with transition-aged youth and, through them, the proportion of youth who access mental health supports earlier in the progression of their illness. The project is designed to complement a similar effort undertaken by the Milwaukee Public Schools District so as to provide the widest and most diverse geographic reach through Milwaukee County while concentrating efforts and targeting out-of-school, disconnected and/or marginalized youth (16-24) in some of Milwaukee's poorest and most troubled neighborhoods. Primary project activities include the training of 30 area "Mental Health First Aiders" comprised of neighborhood leaders, private/charter school educators, municipal police departments, transit and library workers, neighborhood centers and associations, communities of faith and youth-serving organizations. In turn, these 30 instructors will provide MHFA training to at least 5,625 other adults in the community who have the opportunity to encounter and engage transition-aged youth. It is expected that the number of youth between the ages of 16-24 who present for services at area behavioral health organizations to increase by 20%. As a related objective, project activities are designed to increase by 20% the number of youth who seek services for mental health conditions prior to those conditions progressing to serious mental illness.