Feb 20 Allies for Children’s Mental Health Policy Roundtable

Feb 20h in Bold Voices by

(February 20, 2025)

Allies for Children hosted our first Mental Health Policy Roundtable on Thursday, January 30, 2025. We had a diverse group of participants including advocates, funders, mental health clinicians, educators, community-based organizations, and lived-experience experts. We have been identifying stakeholders and experts throughout the past year as we conducted our comprehensive gap analysis of mental health supports and services in schools, out-of-school time (OST) programs, and community-based organizations (CBOs) all across our region, to develop the report, Bridging the Gap for Youth Mental Health. This report was used to catapult our discussion at the policy roundtable. The main objective for this Mental Health Policy Roundtable was to identify concrete action steps to move us forward on a path toward program and policy changes that will ultimately increase access to mental health services and supports for Allegheny County students and their families through collective conversation and problem-solving.

After doing introductions, the group dove into the high-level findings from the report and then broke up into groups to provide reflections from different perspectives on the five themes, which include:

  • Adequate, Appropriate, and Supported Staff
  • Services and Programs that Meet Students’ Needs
  • Quality, Sustainable Partnerships
  • Addressing Unique Community Needs
  • Stable, Recurring Funding Streams

Each group spent 5 minutes in each area discussing and responding to the themes using provided prompts to initiate the discussion. We expected a good amount of feedback with the high caliber of expertise in the room but we were blown away by the abundance of valuable information shared. It was difficult to get the teams to move on to the next theme as the conversations were so rich. After everyone had a chance to share their sentiments in each area, we allowed each group the opportunity for a gallery walk to check out what their colleagues had written and respond. A volunteer from each group shared out some of their discussion to the entire roundtable, which led to a dynamic discussion

We ended the meeting by collectively defining our vision for this group moving forward:

  • Act as a sounding board to speak truth to the research and accurately reflect what is happening on the ground and in the field.
  • Help to move agreed-upon recommendations forward by utilizing unique strengths and roles within the system to propel action items forward.
  • Collectively approve any external messaging, reflections, or recommendations that came from the work.
  • Share information with others and continue these conversations outside of this group.
  • Identify statewide groups doing this work since we know that the more voices we have, the stronger we are.
  • Help to build upon the resources that are already available and breakdown the silos so that our collective efforts can impact more students.

The first Mental Health Policy Roundtable was a success! So what’s next? Before we could even address what our thoughts were regarding next steps, several participants asked when we were going to meet again. We look forward to reconvening the group in about 6 weeks and digging deeper into the policy recommendations. In the meantime, AFC will continue to meet with other experts and policymakers to acquire as much support as possible.

Heather Wilkes, Allies for Children Policy Director