Riverside Awarded Behavioral Health Access Grant from Attorney General’s Office!

We are proud to be one of only 22 organizations – out of nearly 260 applicants – to receive a two-year, $475K grant from Attorney General Martha Coakley’s office. The grant program, entitled Increasing Access to and Measuring the Benefits of Providing Behavioral Health Services in Massachusetts supports new projects aimed at improving access to behavioral health services.   The goal is then to measure the impact, and hopefully success, of these new projects.  We will use the grant to serve individuals with significant psychiatric issues who are at risk of hospitalization or arrest who have previously had no connections (or limited connections) to medical or behavioral health care, and assist them in gaining these services.

To achieve this goal, we have developed the Transitional Community Support Program (TCSP).   TCSP staff will be mobile and will meet individuals in their community and serve those who often do not have easy access to care. The TCSP intervention will be six months in duration.

TCSP will help a significant number of individuals and we anticipate will decrease reliance on hospital emergency departments and reduce psychiatric hospitalizations. We also expect to see the number of homeless decrease and that individuals transitioning from prison will have a decrease in the rate of returns to prison.   The program will be implemented in 20 cities and towns in Norfolk and Middlesex counties and Riverside will partner with the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University to evaluate the program.   We are very excited that the grant affords us the opportunity to both implement this innovative pilot program and to measure the pilot’s effectiveness.

~ Scott M. Bock, President/CEO