 Thanks so much for everyone who's came out here tonight. We're so excited with the crowd that's out here. But my name's John Krieg and I'm our Santa Rosa Chief of Police. And I'm gonna keep my part really short tonight because really the police department's not the part of this program. Really a star of our show is gonna be our in-response team members and especially our program manager, Katie Swan, who's gonna really go through the detail tonight about providing the incredible opportunities that we've had over this last year. But for me, this journey started for us for the city of Santa Rosa in July of 2020 where the city came together saying, like, it's time for a change in Santa Rosa. And we started coming together, one of the very early partners here in the room or two of them are here tonight, Jenny Lynn Holmes and Scott Westrope. Those were the first two who started like talking to us and Jenny Lynn Holmes from Catholic Charities, Scott Westrope from the Santa Rosa Fire Department as our fire chief started talking about, hey, how can we get involved? And then we got some incredible support from our former mayor, Tom Schwedhelm, who came together saying, how can I be a part of this? And we started talking about all these different ideas and looking at programs that cost the country. The city of Santa Rosa was one of the first to sign a consulting agreement with the Kahootz program and Eugene, Oregon, which was really one of the trendsetters in this and starting their program in 1989. And I can't tell you after, it must have been 800 meetings that we've had between the county and the city and community groups developing and working, but at the end of the day, we've built a team here in the city of Santa Rosa that is absolutely a model for the state of California. And ours is so uniquely different than other teams that we see across the state. And one of the key things that we're gonna talk about today, and we have Wendy Tappen here today from the county's team as well. She was a key partner in helping us develop this from the county, but it's having license or associate licensed mental health clinicians in our team. And they'll talk a little bit about that, but for the associate license and for the licensed mental health clinician of having a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, 3,000 clinical hours of field work and then certified by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences. And this is compared to our old model of the police officer who has four to eight hours of training in the police academy. It's unbelievable to talk about how long it's taken us for cities across the city of California to make this change, but we didn't stop there. And this is where Scott Westrobe came in. We started looking at different models about having like the first aid clinician versus the EMT versus a paramedic and saw the absolute value of having the increased medical expertise of having a paramedic on our rigs. And it's gonna be able to divert from our local ERs and we have some of our representatives here tonight from that. So we took the investment and it is a significant investment with the paramedic but it greatly provides so much for a better level of service in the field. Then we met with some of the teams across the country and saw that the high rate of the teams being utilized by some of our unsheltered members in the community. And to be very clear, this is not a homeless team. It's a mental health team, but we all know there's many in our homeless community not all, but many who are struggling sometimes with substance abuse, sometimes with mental illness. So we worked with Catholic Charities and embedded that homeless outreach specialist. So now you have the License Mental Health Commission, the paramedic and a homeless outreach specialist riding together as one highly skilled multidisciplinary team responding to thousands of calls across the city of Santa Rosa and lieu of a police officer and lieu of an entire fire truck and an ambulance and all the other resources that we were sending to these calls, but we didn't stop there. And that's where we're gonna talk about tonight when Katie goes into the system navigators and we saw time and time again in my career that where people were going to the crisis stabilization unit within hours getting put back out in the street or sometimes days putting out in the street but then still not knowing where to go from there. I think surprise, surprise, they're back into crisis within hours or days later. We're having unnecessary police involvement with them. So these system navigators are now providing some of that support and helping how do you get to your doctor's appointment? How do you get that next level of care? They're helping family members who are trying to provide support to them have had to navigate the crazy complex mental health system that we have here in Sonoma County and throughout the state. So you're gonna learn today about what the team is doing who are responding out there. We're gonna learn about what these system navigators are doing. But one of the most important parts of tonight is not just we're super proud of the team are gonna brag a lot about the stats but we're also gonna talk about some of the challenges what we've had with hiring but the most important part of this night is hearing from you. And we're gonna go back across the library and we're gonna do the breakout group. So we're gonna hear what can we even do being better and we're learning things that we can do better working with our local ERs with better response to some of our different nonprofits throughout the city working with some of the homeless advocates throughout the city and things that we could do but we wanna hear that and we're gonna be taking detailed notes on that we're gonna be sitting down with our team and saying all right year one was a success how much greater are we gonna do with year two? So I'm gonna turn it over now to Mary Frances Wall she was the executive director of Nami Sonoma County she's been an incredible partner so has the whole Nami board and our vice president Marcus here as well from Nami Sonoma County but Mary Frances and Nami has played such a key part and they helped us even with things like what are we gonna name this team and what's gonna be the color of our uniforms what's gonna be on the side of the vans and we even got some feedback on there we originally had mental health support team on the side of the van and we got feedback saying hey that can be stigmatizing so we heard the feedback we made adjustments and we're working on taking that off of these vans so we don't have that having just the in response thing and that's gonna be the model that we continue to follow we lead where we think we can go but we're always receptive to hearing some of the constructive criticism and making changes so wherever Mary Frances is if you can come on, oh come on down Mary Frances. Unfortunately I have remarks to share but bear with me please. Okay so as John said thank you I'm here from Nami which stands for the National Alliance on Mental Illness so we're a community-based nonprofit organization that help families and individuals who are affected by mental illness and we do that through education, through support providing information and being advocates in our community for the people who are affected by mental health conditions. It's really my honor to be here to mark this very first year of in responses operations because it's something that in response is brought to this community something that Nami has advocated and worked hard for to see happen in our community for many years. So every one of us experiences stress and every one of us has the potential to have the feelings of being so much in distress that it's overwhelming, that we feel out of control. So we or somebody we love can be in that position and it might be somebody that's a family member could be somebody we work with it could be another student, teacher could be somebody on the street but when somebody lives with a mental health condition or has a substance use challenge or is homeless they may be much more likely to experience a mental health crisis than those of us who don't have to manage those challenges day to day and when someone has a mental health crisis they deserve help, not handcuffs. They deserve the right level of care when and where they need it whether that's at home, at school, in a workplace or again on the street. They deserve help that treats them with dignity, responders who are knowledgeable about mental health conditions and substance use conditions and they deserve help from people who know how to de-escalate a situation and how to de-escalate behaviors that come with fear or anger or despair. They deserve responders who understand that if someone has had a traumatic experience in the past as a child in an encounter with law enforcement in an emergency department or even a hospital that that person might react in a very challenging way in their behaviors. In 2007, here in Sonoma County there was a 16 year old boy who lived with mental health challenges. He lived at home with his family in Sebastopol and he experienced a mental health crisis. His parents tried to get him to go in for help and he refused. He was very aggressive. He was agitated and probably very frightened. He had a very large knife and he threatened his younger brother with that knife. His parents were desperate so they called 911. Officers came and the situation did not go well. They were not able to calm him down and they had to make a split second decision and he was shot and he died. So this 16 year old lost his life. The parents lost their 16 year old son. This, that is just one story among many and some of them have happened here in Sonoma County but there have been thousands of similar tragedies across the United States. Persons in experience in mental health crisis have been injured, they've been arrested, they've even lost their life in a split second. This has made many people afraid to call 911 for help. Many families have been worried that if they make that call their loved one is going to be killed. There's still people out there, still people in our community that feel that way. So for years we relied on law enforcement to respond to persons experiencing a mental health crisis or substance use crisis, sometimes both at the same time. And while law enforcement officers play an incredibly important part in keeping this community safe, we just heard from Chief Craig and they are not mental health or substance use professionals. So three years after that Sebastopol team lost his life in 2010, Sonoma County created mobile support teams. These are trained mental health clinicians who assist law enforcement officers to handle mental health crisis calls in the county when they're invited in to do so. But they have limited hours and very limited geographic reach in Sonoma County because the funding is limited. But last year in January, 16 years after the 16 year old lost his life, the city of Santa Rosa and the city, the Santa Rosa Police Department gave a gift to this city of the in response team. It is a fantastically better way to handle mental health crisis calls. It's phenomenally better. So the in response team, as you're going to hear about tonight, is multidisciplinary, trained to de-escalate rather than escalate, offers the knowledge of a licensed mental health clinician and a licensed paramedic with thousands of hours of training behind them. The in response team is trained to build trust with a person in distress. They are trauma informed and they're guided by the principles of peer support. A lot of that's buzzwords in the mental health world, but they all have deep meaning and they are so important to effectively and safely responding to somebody in crisis. So what we have in Santa Rosa is truly a cutting edge mobile crisis response team. It's a unique partnership of agencies working together, the police department, the fire department, Bucaloo programs, Catholic Charities, Humane Dodd Therapy and Education Services and Sonoma County Behavioral Health, each bringing in their own area of expertise. Still, we know that there are individuals and families, whole communities in Sonoma County that don't have access to this kind of crisis response. There are families still fearful about calling for help because they've had a bad experience or their loved one had a bad experience, even a traumatic experience in the past. So there is more work to be done. We need to build a system of crisis care that means not only is there someone to call, but someone to provide the right kind of response and access to services that prevent mental health crises in the first place and access to places that will be there when people are beyond their crisis and they have some place to go for the kind of care and support they need. So while in response is a fantastic step in the right direction, we still have work to do. And thank you for listening. Thank you so much, Mary Frances. And now we really want to turn it over to the star of the show. And Katie Swan is our program director. She's from Buckaloo and Buckaloo has helped been so much and Chris is here and Erica are here from Buckaloo. But Katie is from day one, been here helping create the data, steer this team, meeting with us. She was one of the key partners meeting with Kahootz and worked so closely with the training with the team. So Katie's been really the lifeblood of this team. And like, and we've been talking a while back and I was like, anything we do to make sure you're always happy and you're here forever Katie because we can't operate without Katie. So let me turn it over to Katie. Thank you chief vegan and Mary Frances. I appreciate it. And thank you for all coming out tonight. Bear with me, mics are not my favorite part. So just hang in. Okay. So tonight I wanted to talk to you a little bit about in response overall and what the program is and then talk to you about the data that we collected for the first year. Can we go to the next slide? Thanks. So in response is a partnership between six organizations. We have the Santa Rosa police department that is one of our partners. We work with their dispatch team on a daily basis. We have a Santa Rosa fire department. We have paramedics on our team. We have behavioral health clinicians through Sonoma County behavioral health that work with the mobile support team on our unit. We have engagement specialists that are experts working with homeless services and supports through Catholic charities. We have human and dad therapy and education services that provides a system navigator for our team that provides a wraparound care. And then for Bucklew programs we have several system navigators, a team leader and then myself. Next. So how our team works is we have two units or two vans that work in the city of Santa Rosa. We have one van that runs seven days a week from noon to 10 p.m. And then we have a second unit that runs Monday through Thursday from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. So we have some overlap on those days. Our goal moving forward in the next year or so is to be able to go towards a 24 hour response so that we'll have four units in the city of Santa Rosa working 24 seven. The makeup of how our team works is we have three staff that sit on our van at all times. So we have our behavioral health clinician from Sonoma County Behavioral Health. We have a paramedic from the fire department and we have an engagement specialist from Catholic Charities. And they all sit on that van together. And so anytime our team gets called out to dispatch to offer support in the community those are the three people that show up to the community to provide that support. And then we have our wraparound team so our system navigation team. We have five navigators that play a really important role as part of our team as well. And so they are the ones that do wraparound care and get people connected to support and resources prior to a crisis or maybe after a crisis. And I'll go into that a little bit more later on. Thank you. So the types of calls that we respond to in the communities is we respond to mental health crisis calls. We also provide support and respond to families or individuals that are needing a mental health support and resources for folks experiencing some type of substance use challenge. They may be under the influence in the moment and need support for folks that are struggling with mental health challenges and might be at risk of being unhoused, unsheltered or at risk of homelessness. We can respond to welfare checks that folks call in in the community that are directly related to mental health or substance use. And again, we can provide wraparound care. So helping folks get connected to doctors appointments a psychiatrist, figuring out how to fill a prescription at the pharmacy, how to pick that up, how do you find transportation to those places? Things along those lines on top of it, Wendy. So a lot of the community keeps asking, so how do we ask for your help? How do you show up? And so there's a couple of ways that that happens. So you can, if you are needing support or if it's a loved one that you are needing support for or you see a community member that you're concerned about, you can call 911 or we have a specialized number which is the 707-575-HELP number for folks that are in Santa Rosa. And so when you call that, our dispatch team answers and we'll ask you questions to get clarity about what's happening. And once they have understanding it's related to mental health and substance use, they can dispatch our team out. So our team, a lot of the time is dispatched out and can go out by themselves and those three folks on the van and can provide that support in the community. There are times that there might be some safety concerns if somebody's acting erratic or aggressive in some way or there might be some past violence or there might be a concern of a weapon, we might go out and co-respond. So we will go out with law enforcement and partner with them and they will help us make sure that the situation is safe and then they'll hand the call over to us and we'll be able to provide those mental health services. Another option too is if we can't confirm that it's safe for us to go out by ourselves, we might have law enforcement go out first and then have a stage. So we might be a couple of blocks away and then they can make sure that the scene is safe and from there we can go in and provide those supports and let law enforcement leave if that's possible. Can you go to the next slide? So I picked this picture, it means a lot to me. So this was the ribbon cutting a year ago on January 11th and it was the first day. So our whole team came together for the first time and we did the ribbon cutting and then we went back to our office and actually ran calls that day. And so it just was a cool moment to remember that we're a year out from that. The next few slides, I'm gonna go through some of our data points. So the first slide that you're seeing is a total number of calls that we ran for the year. So and it's broken down by months. So the total number of calls that we ran from January 11th, 2022 to 2023 was 2,893 calls. We started off slow and steady in the beginning. In January, it was a part of a month. So we ran 70 calls and then we went up a little bit more and a little bit more and kind of held stable for a while. And then it was mid-September that we were able to start our second unit that ran 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. And in that you can see that our calls increased as well. And we really picked that time one because we wanted to expand services for more hours but we also really wanted to meet and support the schools in Sonoma County and our youth in the community. Can you go to the next slide? So the next slide might be hard to see but it talks about the types of service we provide. So every time that we go out on a call we track the primary service that we offer in the secondary service. So we responded to 456 calls for service and related to homeless services. So that's the green column. The blue column is the secondary service. So we might have gone to a call provided mental health services first and then we provided homeless resources as the second service. So looking at this you can see that we do a lot of different supports but the main focus is our mental health services that we provide. So we provided 1,284 services that were directly related to mental health as a primary need. A few others that were tracking as homeless resources if somebody needed medical support substance use services and system navigation. The next slide is our diversion call types. So what this means is if our program was able to divert calls from service so meaning that we were able to respond to a call and not have law enforcement go or that law enforcement could leave the scene once we arrived or we didn't have to have an ambulance or a fire truck present during our call. So we ran a total of 2,893 calls for the year and 1,762 of those calls were law enforcement diversion calls where they didn't have to respond at all or that they responded and they were able to leave after we arrived, which feels like a big success overall for our community. We supported 121 individuals to access different services than having to engage with the criminal justice system. We diverted 677 calls that may have needed an ambulance or fire truck or that we got there and then we were able to relieve the fire engine and they were able to go on to other calls. And then we diverted 152 individuals from going to the ER. So we were able to safety plan, give skills, connect them to other resources so that we didn't, those folks didn't have to go into the ER system. Next slide. We also wanted to look at kind of who we were serving by age. And so what we learned through the year is that 7% of the folks we served were between zero and 17, 6% were 18, but between 18 and 25 years old, 37% of the folks were 26 through 59 years old, 16% were 60 years and older. And then we had a category of 34% that were unknown. Either we weren't able to gather that information in the moment or do the crisis circumstance or folks weren't comfortable sharing that with us at that time. And then on our next slide, we broke it down by gender. So we wanted to see who we were serving. So 47% of folks we worked with this year identified as female, 49% identified as male, 2% identified as transgender and another 2% were unknown. So all of the data that I just talked about is specifically related to our in response unit. So the folks that sit on our van and that van that gets dispatched out to calls. The next section I'm gonna talk to you about is about our system navigation team Chief Pregan talked about a little bit. Our system navigators is a partnership between Humanity and Therapy and Education Services and Buffalo programs. So we have five navigators in total and that provide education support and system navigation. And so the really big piece to me of why this is so important is all of our navigators have some type of lived mental health experience or substance use experience or may have supported somebody in the community that they care about to access services in a challenging time. Big piece of why this is important for me is I too have my own lived mental health experience and I have kiddos with pretty big needs. And so one of the big passions for me to work in this role is because I need a service like this in my community for my family. And I live in the city of Santa Rosa, right? So it all kind of goes back to home. And so for our navigation team, the feedback that I keep getting from our community is it's really helpful to have somebody navigate these services with me to access the support that I need and provide choices about what my options are because they've walked through it in a different way, right? It's not a clinician telling me how to do it but it's somebody who's lived it trying to navigate the system. And so we have one part-time navigator through He Wanted Dad and we have another four navigators from Bucalut programs that are full-time. So this data is specifically related to our navigation team. So our navigators, we just added a couple of navigators a few months ago. And so you'll see our numbers increase over in the last few months but overall we served 494 individuals from our navigation team alone and they had 2,367 contacts amongst those individuals. So that's a pretty big support in our community that wasn't there prior. On our next slide. So I wanted to kind of break out for you what services our navigators provide. A lot of our navigators provide personal support and people might wonder what that means but it's somebody to talk to when you're having a hard time, you might feel overwhelmed, you might have anxiety, how do I get to the next step? What resources can I find? Or it's a family with a youth that has just struggled with a mental health challenge and that's new for them and they don't know what that means or where to go or how do you even talk about that? So our navigation team had phone calls or visits. So they had 1,027 visits to provide that personal support over this last year. They did 185 appointments related to crisis interventions. So our navigators are intervening in a moment of crisis and getting them connected back to our in response units so that they can go out and provide that emergency assessment in the moment. They were able to offer 248 visits of system navigation. So teaching people how to advocate and navigate our system of care. They provided visits, 409 visits related to referrals to get connected to resources in our community. They provided 911 follow-up appointments for after meeting with the van or they had an appointment and they wanted to check in and see how that went or they had a housing appointment to secure the first apartment and finding out how that happened. And then they had 299 contacts that were other which is actually a really important number to pull out because that's all care coordination. So that means that our navigators are working with individuals and families and hearing what their needs are and then working with all of the providers. So it could be a primary care doctor, a psychiatrist, it could be a therapist, it could be a school system to pull them all together to be able to create a plan that can support that individual family in a more supportive way. Let me go to the next slide. So kind of looking back over the year, I picked this picture too because this was on the ribbon cutting day. This was like the first time our whole team came together. I remember like, even for myself not knowing half of our team, I was like, oh, here we go. Let's see how it goes, right? And so we can go to our next slide. One of their biggest successes was our team. It was actually our concern because we brought six organizations together that hadn't all worked together before and it all was kind of a nuanced program, right? But what happened pretty quickly is our team got really united quickly and we all kind of learned and we are all ongoing learning together. We've strengthened and build partnerships amongst community partners, hospitals, non-profits, churches, you name it, we were really working hard to build those relationships and strengthen those. And we've seen great success on that. And we've continued to increase community engagement like tonight and more so going to different, you know, I just went to Montgomery High School last week and chatted with them about who we are and how can we engage and how can we hang out with your students so that they know who we are and that what we look like when we show up to provide support. And then like I mentioned earlier, we were able to provide add two more navigators because there was so much need for that wraparound care. And some of our challenges that we faced over the last year was one of them was collaborative or yeah, collaborative data collection essentially because we had six different organizations, right? That had their own database systems and their own policies and procedures and we didn't have a way to track data together. And so we've worked together to find an interim approach to be able to attract that data and that's where I got the data that you saw tonight and we're working collectively to move forward to build out a database system for the county so that we can track crisis response data across the whole entire county. Another piece was because of COVID the supply chain issues were challenging. So it took us a really long time to get our vans and our vehicles and there's still little pieces here that are hard to get but we navigated through that. Staffing, you probably all know across the US staffing is a challenge no matter which field you're in and so that's been an ongoing challenge for us but we're continuing to be able to bring staff on which feels great. And that then leads to expanding our hours. We wanted to expand to 15 hours earlier but we're halfway through the week and we're working on filling the other half so that we can be 15 hours, seven days a week. And then with that, I'll just put on the plug. So if you all know anybody, we're hiring. So we're hiring for all roles. So for mental health clinicians to the county, paramedics to the fire department, engagement specialists or Catholic charities in a community navigator through Buckloo programs. So I kind of gave you a brief overview of our program and some of our data tonight. After this, we're gonna go over to the back to the library and have breakout sessions. I'm actually really excited for you to all be part of that and actually meet our team. Our team are gonna facilitate the breakout sessions for you all so that you can ask them questions, hear their perspective for us to hear your perspective to hear how it's going. If you have feedback, we'd like to hear that as well. I learned something new every single day for our team and so I actually think that they're the experts for our team, it's not me. So I'm excited. So please go over there and check that out after this. We have one breakout session that can be in Spanish and we have two breakout sessions in English. And after the breakout sessions, we're gonna have a raffle. So hang out so that we can do that as well. Before we head over there briefly, is there any questions that you have for me specifically around the data or the pieces that I presented tonight? I had quiet house, I did it then. Yeah, go for it. They will be, yes, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, we will either post them on the website or find a way to get those out, yeah, absolutely, yeah, so. Yeah, go for it. Or the things that I chatted about and then otherwise you can ask questions directly to our teams, yeah. So it depends on what that individual is needing, right? And what type of support that they're looking for, right? Cause we have different supports and services that we can provide to them in that moment and folks can go to the Renda Center for Detox if that's appropriate and if they're looking for that care, if they're looking to get into shelter, we can help navigate them to shelter. It kind of depends on what the need is. And that might be a really good question to also talk about in a breakout sessions cause our team is gonna be able to talk to you about that directly. It's in English first, that's what I was gonna say, right, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, and then also when you call the five zone, five help number, they're gonna answer within response too. So that it's a different feel as well as then answering with folks that are saying Santa Rosa Police Department. Go for it, yeah. We do have a safety gate in the van, correct, yes. And the van is here too that if you guys wanna see it before you leave, we can show you that. I can get you that number, I don't have that off the top of my head currently. We can do one more, I think there's a few more folks, yeah, I might've thought about that, but I haven't figured out how to do that in a way that feels safe for individuals in that current circumstance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it. So if we're on a call and it's gotten to the point that we're worried about safety for the individual or for our team, we do call law enforcement to help us come in and help provide support to maintain the safety for everyone in the community, yeah. So the, yeah, so there, it's not unduplicated. So it's number of contacts, so it's number of times you are dispatched out to a call or a number of contacts we had for the system navigators between those 494 individuals, those were those, the total number of contacts amongst those people. We do have some of that data. It has, with our data tracking system, we're in the process of getting that so that that data is very clear and distilled, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'll take two more questions, yeah. So the van provides an ability to provide different levels of transportation, right? So that folks might also be without shelter and so they have items with them and that we can take those items along with them to a different location. It allows us to have space in our vehicle to have sleeping bags and food and clothing and all of those different pieces, yeah. So some of our funds are through the city of Santa Rosa and through other grant funding sources. Yes, absolutely. We have funds to sustain us for a few years and then we also have city support to continue to back our program. Yeah, great question. No, no. All right, well, thank you all. I appreciate your time. If we can head over to the... Yeah, if you can all hang out and go over to the library to meet our team, that would be great. I would love to hear from you all and have you all meet our team.