Northwest Washington's Behavioral Healthcare Leader
May 2021
What's Inside
Join us for our virtual grand opening & celebration!
May is Mental Health Month!
Foster Care Awareness Month
Fourfront Contributor: Investing in Behavioral Health Providers
Congressman Larsen visits with our IMPACT Team
We're Hiring!
Have you had a chance to get the COVID vaccine?
Dear Community Partners,

Welcome to the May edition of The Compass Point, the monthly e-newsletter from Compass Health. Spring is in full swing at our agency and across our communities and there's lots of exciting things for us to share with you.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and while we champion behavioral health advocacy and awareness everyday at Compass Health, this month gives us a chance to check in with one another and encourage mental well-being. If you’re looking for a good starting point, our website has a substantial list of resources and toolkits.

We’re also gearing up for the virtual grand opening of our new permanent supportive housing building! This project is truly delivering solutions for some of the region’s most pressing challenges, and we can’t wait to share this moment with the communities we serve. You can learn more about our Broadway Campus Redevelopment project and RSVP to the grand opening on our website.

In other news, we’ve continued to advocate through Fourfront Contributor, the coalition of behavioral health leaders across the state, to amplify our shared message around the need for adequate funding models to help us ensure we have a strong workforce in place. Chronic underfunding, which affected community behavioral health providers well before the pandemic, has led to systemic behavioral health workforce shortages across our state and country. Through our advocacy, we are calling on state leaders to recognize the importance of community behavioral health providers in serving and supporting our community and to collaborate on sustainable solutions. You can read the op-eds we’ve published across the state on our website.

These are just a few of the major milestones happening at Compass Health, and I encourage you to read on to see what else we’ve been up to these past few months.

I look forward to seeing you all on Friday, May 21 for the virtual grand opening and celebration!

Best,
Tom Sebastian
President/CEO
Compass Health
Join us for our virtual grand opening & celebration!
The virtual grand opening for our new permanent supportive housing building is just one week away!

Join Compass Health on Friday, May 21, from noon to 12:30pm, as we celebrate the opening of Phase I of our Broadway Campus Redevelopment project. This new building includes 82-units of supportive housing coupled with facilities for integrated treatment and support services for people with chronic behavioral health challenges.

Join us May 21 for a walkthrough of the new building and to learn about how this facility will impact the greater community.
May is Mental Health Month!
As a behavioral health organization, we know that mental health needs affect all of us in some way. For example, 1 in 5 adults in America experience a mental illness, and approximately 10.2 million adults have co-occurring mental health and addiction disorders.

Now, more than ever, we want to emphasize the importance of de-stigmatizing mental health needs and focus on sharing resources that encourage well-being and seeking help. In fact, we have a mental health toolkit on our website that can serve as a great starting point for promoting mental wellness and whole person health.

This year, we’re especially proud of the many ways that our teams have stepped up to provide care even as we faced the challenges of the pandemic. From quickly adopting our telehealth platform, to going above and beyond for clients by delivering our summer camp kids at-home packages, or even forming new community response partnerships with law enforcement, our teams continue to deliver on our mission.

And that’s why we’re also encouraging our team members to check in and reach out – we know this has been a tough year, and we’re in this together.

For more Mental Health Month resources, check out some of our go-to organizations: NAMI or Mental Health America.
Foster Care Awareness Month

There are over 423,000 children and youth in foster care across the country, and many have been facing increased isolation over the past year. It is more critical than ever for communities to work together to identify the right mix of supports that will establish meaningful connections for children and youth in care.

This year, National Foster Care Month focuses on how to strengthen these connections and the role of family and youth engagement. It’s important that all families and youth have meaningful involvement in court hearings and case planning to make it possible for youth to stay connected to their parents and extended support systems while in foster care.
Fourfront Contributor: Investing in Behavioral Health Providers

As part of our ongoing partnership with Fourfront Contributor, an advocacy and leadership coalition of four of the largest community behavioral health providers in Washington state, we are amplifying our shared message around the need for sustainable solutions that will allow us to respond to and support growing needs in our communities.

Our organizations are facing unique workforce challenges that have shaped and impacted our services across the state. These include major staff shortages and increasing turnover rates because of systemic underfunding of our services, all of which affect our ability to meet the needs of our most vulnerable populations.

Our op-eds in the Seattle Times, Puget Sound Business Journal, The Spokesman-Review and the Yakima Herald detail our concerns and the impact this workforce will have in local communities.
Congressman Larsen visits with our IMPACT Team
In April, we met with U.S. House Representative Rick Larsen and members of the Skagit County Sheriff's Office to talk about our IMPACT program (Integrated Model of Police And Crisis Teams). We demonstrated how this partnership will help provide early and voluntary behavioral health intervention to increase access to services and reduce calls that require a level of experience outside the scope of law enforcement.

We were thrilled to share the many ways Compass Health partners across organizations to address some of our communities’ most complex challenges while improving relationships and increasing access to care.
We're hiring!
We’re looking for dedicated mental health professionals to join our team!
Our Child, Youth, & Family and Adult outpatient teams across all five counties (Snohomish, Skagit, Island, San Juan, and Whatcom) are hiring for various positions including bachelor’s and master’s level clinicians and more!
Have you had a chance to get the COVID vaccine?
Use the Vaccine Locator on the Washington State DOH website to find a vaccine distribution that's close to you! You can even make an appointment at the Genoa Pharmacy in our Bailey Building in Everett!