Fund for the City of New York, Inc.

At least one in five New Yorkers will experience a mental health disorder in any given year.

Front-line staff at community-based organizations (CBOs) report that many clients often appear depressed or anxious, which they suspect may interfere with clients’ ability to succeed in programs. However, with limited mental health training, staff at these organizations are unprepared to deal with clients’ emotional and/or behavioral problems. In response to this issue, New York City has released a plan to guide an overhaul of the City’s mental health services. A key component of the initiative is Connections To Care (C2C), a public-private partnership that aims to build mental illness prevention and treatment capacity of CBOs that work in the areas of workforce development, education, and early childhood services. In 2016, NYHealth awarded Fund for the City of New York a grant, in partnership with the Altman Foundation, to support CBOs in building their capacity to help low-income New Yorkers receive mental health care. In 2017, NYHealth awarded the Fund for the City of New York a grant to continue this initiative.

Under this grant, NYHealth continued to support the C2C initiative, which pairs mental health providers with CBOs to administer mental health screenings to individuals from low-income communities. With C2C guidance, the CBOs continued to perform staff trainings, offer participant services, and integrate new practices and perspectives into their organizational and team culture. The C2C program had already shown promise and progress. To date, it has trained more than 900 CBO staff members in the 4 core C2C evidenced-based modalities: screening, motivational interviewing, mental health first aid, and psychoeducation. The trained staff have served more than 8,700 individuals since the fall of 2016, putting C2C on track to surpass its goal of 15,000 participants by the end of the first three years.