Okay, everybody.

I'm going to call the meeting of the Health and Human Services Committee to order.

Our first order of business is to approve the minutes of the November 10th, 2025 meeting.

I will make a motion to approve those minutes.

Can I get a second?

Second.

Thank you.

We have a motion and a second.

Any discussion?

Hearing none, that motion is approved.

All right.

Our next agenda item is a communication from Assistant Planning Director David Boss regarding the community health action team call also known as chat, the annual report from September 2024 to December 2025.

And Mr.

Boss, I'll turn that over to you.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I appreciate the opportunity to come in and review our this being our third report from the work of the community health action team.

Just in terms of, I was going to cover quickly before I hand it over.

We've got several members of the team here that kind of cover each of the some of our focal focus areas a lot better than I can do.

But I think since there are some new folks that uh on the dias, um, just a quick kind of background on the community health action team we was established after the uh 2022 community health needs assessment, an action plan that was developed.

It was a unique uh effort.

Um that kind of combined uh we had the representatives here of the key foundations, the schools, the city came together and worked with three are with uh the Center for Community Solutions to develop uh the community health needs assessment.

Um kind of a unique thing normally hospital systems do those.

Um the city did it for its residents and then developed an action plan which went back out to the residents to kind of to uh solicit and develop uh interventions towards uh the the needs that came out of that assessment.

Um as part of the review of the the assessment and the action plan by council, there was uh there was a recommendation and then followed through with a charter for a community health action team that was stood up.

And so over the last several years, uh we started in 2023 uh where we we initially started to work through the preliminary interventions that were provided through that action plan by the community.

Uh it was an awful lot of work analyzing, sometimes combining, sometimes kind of setting aside some interventions into kind of a parking lot, if you will.

Um over that uh year we basically got through all the interventions and organized them into kind of five categories that were based on the social determinants of health.

And so those focal areas are the same ones that you see today.

Um access to behavioral health, food access, was started as community information and has developed into the resource guide.

Um adaptive programming and then after school program, we've combined in the same kind of focus area of adaptive and middle school programming and then housing.

Um into 2024, the uh the chat forms subcommittees, and so we kind of expanded that discussion from the members of the action team to include some key community stakeholders that were identified through the assessment and really delved deeper into the interventions in those specific areas.

Um we looked at three specific kind of directions for the actions that were already to be done, who were doing them, um, you know, who were they done for, um, and kind of an effectiveness uh look at those for those interventions and actions that weren't already being done, why weren't they being done?

Were there reasons?

Uh were they not feasible?

Um was there not an organization to take hold and drive them forward?

And then there was kind of a a third area that we recognized during the first year of our work was that what was missing from this.

Obviously, any time you kind of go out to the community with uh a fairly open-ended question, even based on the needs assessment of actions, the recommended interventions, I think we we were quick to realize our own kind of short or gaps and shortfalls within that list of interventions.

And so that was kind of the third area that we looked to the subcommittees to try to fill that in in terms of what was missing.

Um those actions and then the work of the subcommittees continued.

Um now we find ourselves in the last year for 2025 as those things have kind of continued to become more focused, more refined, um, really into the table that you see in this report here.

As well as you know, the the kind of the changing environment that we addressed this past year, there's there's always kind of turnover on the action team that has happened, but as the work of the of a lot of the subcommittees is kind of I guess kind of been refined and kind of been found new directions and potentially a new new organizations and things.

We continued to meet to continue to kind of work these things that are in the table from this last year because it is a unique, it's a unique organization in insofar as the chat brings um kind of the nonprofits, the schools and the cities together, uh which there's not a whole lot of venues that do that to discuss these types of issues across the social determinants of health.

Um so it has a lot of value for that reason, um, as well as I think kind of the the broader environment of this year.

Um there was an awful lot of churn um loss of funding cuts, uncertainty that kind of entered into the the world of a lot of these areas.

Um that's kind of in a nutshell and very quickly kind of the background context and then the ongoing challenges that we've had this year.

Um so the crux of this report is to kind of, you know, as it's intended as an update of the work over the last year of the action team.

And so the progress by priority area that we kind of lay out here is really, you know, what's been done in 2025 in each of these areas, uh, and then what's the the very general or basic kind of way ahead.

Um so with that I will I will turn it over to our uh access to behavior health.

Is that right?

Hi, good evening.

I'm Kristen Broadbent, um CEO and president of Three Arches Foundation, and um happy to be here tonight.

Um so the behavioral health, when we first started, it was actually access, just access to health care, and um, you know, found that behavioral health in particular um was where more coordination and access was needed, and really we brought um providers together who all had some type of footprint in Lakewood, and they were like they didn't know like they knew one another, but they they didn't really know how to access one another.

And so um we did two things.

We created initially we established a care a healthcare providers round table, and then we um started investigation of a co-responder program.

And the round table was um great.

I think we had three meetings through the middle of 2025, and they were exchanging cards and talking to each other and saying, you know, oh gosh, if you run into this problem, I can help expedite that.

Um navigation is huge, and so many individuals, you know, our healthcare system is so complex, and especially for somebody with behavioral and mental health issues, you add that on to it and the stress level and people don't know where to go and how to access things, there's a long wait for providers.

And so bringing these organizations together was really beneficial from their standpoint to understand, you know, sometimes they're treating a lot of the same people and figuring out how to help folks um work through the the very complex um system.

So one of the things that the committee spent some time on is working with the case Western Reserve students to help um with the community resource guide and you know to really triage it and look at it like in kind of a step-by-step manner of who is involved, at what level, what services are provided, how's access, all that kind of stuff.

So we spent a lot of time on that.