CSAC Bulletin Article

Stepping Up: The California Summit

January 12, 2017

The National Stepping Up Initiative—an effort to improve the way we respond to people with mental illness who are also in contact with local criminal justice systems—will hold its first California Summit next week in Sacramento. The event provides the opportunity to engage with national experts, peers from across the state, and people living with mental illnesses. Fifty-two of California’s 58 counties are planning to attend, with a mix of supervisors, administrative/executive officers, law enforcement agencies and behavioral health agencies.

Sessions will include key questions that county leaders need to ask such as Is Our Leadership Committed; do we have baseline data; have we conducted a comprehensive process analysis and inventory of services; and do we track progress. Additional sessions will look at the perspectives of family members and people with lived experiences, improving care coordination between criminal justice agencies and community-based treatment providers and overcoming behavioral health workforce shortages in rural counties.

The two-day conference will take place at the Double Tree Hotel in Sacramento on January 18-19. For more details and a copy of the agenda please click here.

Continuing the momentum of the California Summit, the National Association of Counties (NACo) is hosting the Stepping Up: Introduction to the “Six Questions County Leaders Need to Ask” webinar on Thursday, February 2 from 11:00 am – 12:15 pm. The webinar will introduce the yet to be released report, Reducing the Number of People with Mental Illnesses in Jail: Six Questions County Leaders Need to Ask (“Six Questions”).

During the webinar, a national expert from the Council of State Governments Justice Center (CSG) will provide an overview of the Six Questions and Four Key Measures of Success and will describe how the strategies provided within the report can assist counties in their Stepping Up efforts. Additionally, county officials will share how they have been using the Six Questions in their own communities to help further their initiatives’ efforts to reduce mental illness in their jails. For more details and to register for the webinar please click here.

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