(PS9-84) Reducing Mental Health Disparities Through Community-based Partnerships That Foster and Promote Resiliency

High exposure to trauma, coupled with limited resources in minority and low-income communities, exacerbates mental health challenges faced by an increasing number of children from traditionally underserved backgrounds. Existing care models rely on mental health services being delivered in specialty settings and focus on intervention when an individual reaches a high distress level, which is potentially too late. Prevention and early intervention are vital for reducing mental health issues and fostering resilience in the face of adverse circumstances.

As part of a clinical service initiative, we collaborated with five community partners ranging from early head start providers to after school programs and community centers. We identified major community mental health needs and co-developed programs to address these gaps with community stakeholders. We describe an academic community partnership approach for enhancing access to evidence-based interventions to make mental health care more accessible by bringing clinical expertise to communities through partnerships with local community organizations thus, reducing traditional barriers to accessing clinical care. This initiative targets several barriers known to make access to mental health services more challenging especially in under severed communities including, transportation, a dearth of advance-certified mental health providers, and cost. Initial evaluation findings confirm feasibility of this approach, provide limited preliminary intervention outcomes, present lessons learned, and discuss methods and consideration for program scale-up. Four major themes emerged, including establishing an equitable partnership, tailoring and implementing interventions to effectively reflect appropriate community contexts, stakeholder buy-in, and capacity building within communities.

As CBT, clinicians, researchers and educators, we must identify ways to develop sustainable, replicable models or academic-community partnerships that engage communities in large scale ways to impact public health. Developing such an infrastructure may serve as a long-term preventive solution to mental health challenges that plague communities particularly those with disparate resources.