Dane County joins Harvard to expand mental health crisis services | Government
Dane County will participate in a Harvard initiative to explore alternatives to a police response during mental health emergencies, with the aim of creating a program for rural communities that’s similar to CARES in Madison.
The CARES program, or Community Alternative Response Emergency Services, is a partnership between Madison Fire Department community paramedics and Journey Mental Health Center crisis workers that responds to behavioral health emergencies in the city. In less than two years, it has rapidly expanded from a pilot program operating only in Madison’s downtown to a citywide operation responding to hundreds of calls a year.
Its success has opened up the question of whether the rest of Dane County could also have access to this behavioral health response in emergencies — a service intended to avoid police interactions that escalate into violence and to provide specialized care appropriate to a mental health crisis. Both Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway and Dane County Executive Joe Parisi have signaled their support for a partnership on CARES between the city and county.
Those discussions are in early stages and haven’t yet led to a clear timeline or a solution to numerous obstacles. Local leaders hope the new Harvard initiative will help answer big questions on how a countywide system would work.
Harvard Kennedy School adds resources
The Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab announced Thursday at the Dane County Community Justice Council meeting that Madison and Dane County will be included in its 2023-24 “Alternative 911 Emergency Response Implementation Cohort,” providing research support, testing new approaches and analyzing data.
“We were drawn to the program in Madison and Dane County for the success of the CARES program in its first two years of operation and the opportunity to support CARES as the program matures and expands,” Marianna Yamamoto, a government innovation fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, said at the Thursday meeting.
Through the initiative, the county hopes to address capacity building for the future expansion of CARES, as well as new diversion protocols and workforce challenges, said Carrie Simon, the urgent care manager in the county Department of Human Services.
“It’s important to remember that while CARES is an exciting new approach to crisis response in our community, it represents only one segment of a continuum of crisis services,” Simon said at the Community Justice Council meeting. “CARES is operating within the city of Madison with limited hours and limited days. We’re first looking at what’s happening now and whether we are making the right choices about how expansion happens.”
She added, “We don’t feel like CARES as it is itself is necessarily the right solution for the more rural areas of our county.”
Challenges reaching rural Dane County
Ché Stedman, assistant chief of medical affairs for the Madison Fire Department, oversees the CARES program along with Journey Mental Health Center.
Ché Stedman, the assistant chief of medical affairs for the Madison Fire Department who oversees CARES, said it wouldn’t be too complicated to expand the program into Fitchburg, Verona and other neighboring municipalities. The Dane County 911 center, which dispatches CARES teams, already responds to calls in neighboring cities. It’s just a matter of creating a partnership.
However, moving farther out from Madison gets more complicated, Stedman said.
In more rural parts of the county, many fire departments rely on volunteer staff. Rural communities have been hit hard by financial and staffing struggles that slow the response to 911 calls for all types of emergencies, and those communities experience their share of mental health crises.
Stedman has been on calls for the past month with the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab and said the aim of the initiative is to figure out how to have a program similar to CARES across the county.
“What we’re trying to decide is if the county wants to pay the city of Madison to hire more workers and actually respond out into the county. CARES is willing to do that, but right now we’re just in the exploratory phase of figuring out what’s best,” Stedman said. “When you get way out into the corners of Dane County, the more rural areas, there’s just a different need there.”
Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett said he is excited about the collaboration.
“You have our 100% support,” the sheriff said on Thursday. “We are providing people with the best service possible and we understand that we have taken a role in responding to mental health calls, but we are not the best to do that. We look forward to other alternatives to do that and we will support those.”
The Harvard Kennedy initiative launched in September 2021. This year’s other cohort members include Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; Alexandria, Virginia; Baltimore, Maryland; Tucson, Arizona and others.
Allison Garfield joined the Cap Times in 2021 and covers local government. She graduated from UW-Madison with a degree in journalism and previously worked as a government watchdog reporter for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin and was the state capitol intern for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Support Allison’s work and local journalism by becoming a Cap Times member. Follow her on Twitter @aligarfield_.
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