Riverbend Community Mental Health will receive part of a $500,000 grant to help meet the behavioral health needs of the children and families in the community, which have been exacerbated by the pandemic.

“Recognizing that New Hampshire has a long way to go in terms of having a full array of community-based supports for children, especially those with complex behavioral health needs, we wanted to lean in and support that infrastructure,” Traci Fowler, the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation’s director of behavioral health, said in announcing the grant. “We believe that now, more than ever, our community mental health centers need flexible philanthropic funds to be able to respond to community needs in real-time.”

The foundation provided funds to 10 community health centers across New Hampshire that provide outpatient and emergency behavioral health services to residents in collaboration with the NH Community Behavioral Health Association. Each community mental health center can use the funds within their children’s departments as needed, including working with parents and caregivers.

These mental health centers will use their funding to focus on areas such as youth mental health first aid training, group counseling with parents on issues such as grief and LGBTQ+ identities, supporting parents of adopted children, and emerging issues with youth such as crisis management.

Riverbend, which is based in Concord, plans to use the funds to strengthen its training practices for clinicians, promote staff retention and allow for more communication with school counselors and increase its work with families within the school system.

“We’re extremely grateful to the organization to be able to give us this funding and it is really a great opportunity for us to be able to invest in our staff,” said Lisa Madden, president, and CEO of Riverbend. “It takes folks like the endowment to be able to recognize that not everything that we do has a billable opportunity.”

The grant covers the majority of the services provided by community mental health centers that are not covered by insurance, like workforce incentives and parent and caregiver support groups.

At present, Riverbend has 28 to 30 open clinical positions.

Madden said improving access to care is dependent on having a consistent workforce that is not in transition and is staying in current positions.

“I think that the funds will help us in retaining staff; we have wait lists that are caused by a high turnover of staff,” said Madden. “We have to increase base pay and compensation to really help people in our work as a career and not just as a temporary job.”

Each community mental health center will receive $50,000 in flexible funding over two years to increase support for services to children, youth, and families that are not covered by Medicare, Medicaid, or commercial insurance.

The centers received their first payment at the end of last year.

Roland Lamy, the executive director of the Community Behavioral Health Association said he is thrilled that the charitable foundation has recognized providing care for children and their mental health needs as a priority and has made an investment that would help improve efforts with workforce retention.

Across the association’s member community mental health centers there were nearly 340 open clinical positions as of December last year, driven largely by the significantly trailing compensation.

“We can use some of the funds in the realm of internship support,” Lamy explained as one way to address the workforce shortage.” I think this is additive to the strategies that we’re already putting forth to try to improve our vacancy rates and our retention rates.”

Other organizations receiving funding include:

Center for Life Management of Salem and Derry; Community Partners, of Rochester and Dover; Greater Nashua Mental Health; Lakes Region Mental Health Center; the Mental Health Center of Greater Manchester; Monadnock Family Services; Northern Human Services, which serves residents of Carroll, Coos and Upper Grafton counties; Seacoast Mental Health Center; and West Central Behavioral Health, in Lebanon.

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