Baton Rouge Mental Health Asset Mapping

DESCRIPTION:

The National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP) at the Columbia Climate School, Columbia University, has a long history of collaboration with The Children’ Health Fund (CHF) on many projects along the Gulf Coast, including mental health research, response and recovery support for Hurricane Katrina and the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. NCDP has designed and conducted mental health resource mapping and community service mapping activities as part of national projects focused on Children in Disasters. As an academically-based center, NCDP has access to researchers and research administrative structures to ensure high quality, unbiased research with safety measures for conducting human subjects research. Approach Providing a robust mapping of mental health service assets will require developing an awareness of organizations and key stakeholders, as well as an understanding of the capabilities and capacities of the services available. In support of this, NCDP will implement a multi-faceted asset mapping project that will leverage publicly available information, administer provider organization surveys, and conduct key informant interviews to collectively provide a rich understanding of the existing resources and capacities in the Baton Rouge area, with children identified as a special area of focus within the broader system(s) and stakeholders. Prior to the start of the formal research, NCDP will meet with leadership at CHF and the Pennington Family Foundation to confirm research objectives, evaluation the overall research approach to ensure it is contextually appropriate, and support for NCDP for facilitating introductions and gaining access to key information sources.