Grant award for Collaborative Crisis Intervention Services to Youth

The Log is publishing grants that were awarded in the past year:
Congratulations to the Behavioral Health and Training Partnership’s Jessica Delzer on being awarded $152,312 from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services for the project titled, “Collaborative Crisis Intervention Services to Youth” in November. This grant funds a collaborative effort between social workers, therapists, county workers, schools and parents/foster parents to decrease the escalation of crises, and subsequent hospitalization, of teens and young adults. The goal is to understand how trauma affects students emotionally, mentally and physically. To understand how their minds, behavior and school performance are affected by trauma so students can receive better support. Another goal is to figure out what county workers need to better serve the community, like secondary traumatic stress training, so they can perform their jobs to the best of their abilities. The collaborative effort of training staff (social workers, therapists and county workers), training school staff (teachers and principals) and training foster parents greatly increases the success of crisis de-escalation. When the people who see children every day in school and at home are educated to deal with trauma, they can better support these kids and de-escalate crises. Monthly surveys measure the effectiveness of these collaborative efforts. Surveys count how many teens and young adults were diverted from hospitalization or suicide. This data is compared to the number before the courses were implemented to measure the effectiveness of the courses in improving how county workers, school staff and parents are able to handle and de-escalate crises. Learn more.