On Wednesday, Aug. 20, the Richland County Mental Health Board held a press conference to unveil their new Strong Families, Safe Communities grant. More than $1.4 million is going toward the provision of care coordination and crisis intervention for at-risk youth with developmental or mental disabilities in the state of Ohio.
The grant is part of a two-year, $5 million statewide initiative which was launched last summer.
“We are pairing with a program that’s been ongoing for a year,” explained Executive Director of Richland County Mental Health and Recovery Services Joe Trolian. “We’re coming in as the second round.”
Stark County was involved in the first wave of the initiative. John Adler, executive director of Stark County’s mental health program was also present at the conference. He explained that one of the goals of this initiative is to try to keep at-risk youth (ages 8 through 24) at home instead of just in the state.
“The challenge with kids that are put in out-of-home placement is that eventually they come back, and what we were seeing is that lots of kids that were coming back – once they aged out of the system and they weren’t successful – they ended up in the criminal justice system,” stated Adler. This new grant will offer wrap-around services to try to prevent this from happening.
In light of instances of youths throughout the United States making headlines due to acts of violence at school and to other students, there rose a need to address local communities throughout the state of Ohio.
Ohio Department of Developmental Disabilities Director John Martin explained, “The governor [Kasich] gave us $5 million and asked us to try to do some pilot source of projects to see if we could develop additional resources at supporting local communities who were struggling with these young kids who were often violent either to themselves or others.”
The next phase of this grant will cover Richland, Ashland, Ashtabula, Trumbull, and Tuscarawas counties. Richland County will get $69,180 from this grant which went into effect on July 1, 2014 and runs through June 30, 2015.
“One of the pieces for this grant was sustainability,” explained Trolian. “We have a pretty lucrative pooled fund that, once we get this up and running will be able to sustain us beyond the length of the grant.”
Mayors Theaker, Hutchinson and Parkison were present at the conference.
“The challenge with kids that are put in out-of-home placement is that eventually they come back, and what we were seeing is that lots of kids that were coming back – once they aged out of the system and they weren’t successful – they ended up in the criminal justice system,” stated John Adler.
