CA Dedicates $60 Million to Reduce Disparities in Mental Health (posted 5/11)

NNED’s Community-Defined Evidence Project Seeds “Reducing Disparities Project” in California

The Community-Defined Evidence Project (CDEP) focuses on what is “evidence” for diverse communities and “what works” to reduce disparities in behavioral health. Building on this concept, the Multicultural Office, lead by Rachel Guerrero at the California State Department of Mental Health is investing in a project to reduce disparities for their multicultural populations, the California Reducing Disparities Project (CRDP).  The program is focused on the African American, Asian/Pacific Islander, Latino, LGBTQ, and Native American populations. A contract was awarded to five organizations to focus on each of these population groups.  These five organizations will work to identify new service delivery approaches defined by multicultural communities for multicultural communities using community-defined evidence to improve outcomes and reduce disparities. Based on the NNED's CDEP project, CRDP defines community-defined evidence “a set of practices that communities have used and determined to yield positive results as determined by community consensus over time and which may or may not have been measured empirically but have reached a level of acceptance by the community.” To download the fact sheet click here.

 

Pacific Clinics, the parent organization of the Asian Pacific Family Center (APFC), a NNED Partner located in the Los Angeles area, has recently been awarded one of the five two-year contracts by the State of California Department of Mental Health (California DMH) to identify and document culturally specific and appropriate approaches to reduce mental health disparities for the Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) populations in California.  In collaboration with four other workgroups covering different California regions, APFC will lead the efforts to accomplish this goal in the Southern California area through regional and statewide steering workgroup inputs, focus group feedback from diverse AANHPI community stakeholders, as well as information and data provided by other AANHPI experts and community leaders.  It is expected that the resources identified by this project will be available in the future on a website.  The information and recommendations will also be included with those from other projects (focusing respectively on African American, Latino/a, Native American, LGBTQ, and multicultural populations) in a cohesive document of recommended actions for California DMH to inform its future efforts in reducing mental health disparities for these communities.

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