Traumatic Event Response

The Hampton-Newport News Community Services Board (H-NNCSB) is the publicly-funded behavioral healthcare provider for Hampton and Newport News, Virginia serving over 12,000 individuals per year across the two cities. As a community that has experienced a number of traumatic events over the past several years, including the shooting of a teacher by a six-year-old which gained national attention in early 2023, and an agency that provided 185 responses to youth in crisis in the 2023 calendar year, the H-NNCSB proposes the implementation of a traumatic event response team to serve the citizens of this community. The purpose of this grant is to expand the reach of the current Community Outreach program which includes only one Community Outreach Coordinator. Funding from this grant will allow an expansion of the team which will include a part-time Mobile Crisis Therapist and a full-time Community Outreach Specialist. Currently, the Community Outreach Coordinator must work with existing agency staff to coordinate the needs for community responses as they arise; this involves disrupting the schedules of these staff or developing workarounds to respond to the needs of the moment. The addition of these two positions allows the agency to have staff who are readily available to be dispatched in the event of a traumatic event or crisis. The Mobile Crisis Therapist will be available to go to schools and other sites to serve youth experiencing crises or trauma. The Mobile Crisis Therapist will be able to provide support individually, or to a group when there is a traumatic event. In addition to responding to crises, the Community Outreach Specialist will work with community partners to identify training sites wherein community members can receive specialized training on assisting individuals experiencing a mental health crisis. Expected outcomes include having more individuals in the community trained to recognize signs of mental health crises, a more coordinated approach among behavioral health and law enforcement services within the community when a community response is necessary, and a coordinated, rapid response to community traumatic events.