Mississippi Families As Allies Inc

Supporting community:we developed and launched a training for parent peer support supervisors in collaboration with the mississippi department of mental health. We also developed and piloted a more in-depth training to prepare staff to incorporate parent peer support into their agencies in partnership with region 6 mental health center. Region 6 serves most of the delta area so this will help address both work force shortages and lack of resources in that area. We expanded our work with the hinds county children coalition and helped with four community convenings that brought together youth, families and community stakeholders to prevent youth from becoming involved in the youth court system. This work was supported by grants from the annie e casey foundation. We also helped the university of mississippi medical center in echos related to children's mental health and helping families address school issues. Henry moore provided national training on family-driven practice.

Supporting positive change:we worked state and national initiatives to improve policies and practices for children with disabilities and their families. We helped form a special education coalition to ensure all of the groups that support families with education advocacy work in a coordinated way with each other and families and address the issues families and children face. We helped in organizing and implementing the largest recovery day ever at the capitol. The day resulted in multiple news stories about the importance of overdose prevention and legislation that allows nonprofits to distribute lifesaving naloxone to families and others who need it. We issued several policy updates on how to end mississippi's common practice of jailing people who need mental health care and provided technical assistance to legislators working on related bills. Joy hogge, executive director of mississippi families as allies, was appointed to mississippi's medicaid advisory committee and also completed certification as a psychologist to be able to do civil commitment evaluation. We believe this additional certification could help in addressing mississippi's crisis of jailing people with mental illness simply because they need treatment. Dr. Hogge was also asked to serve on a national task force that looked at how the practices of psychiatry and peer support could be better coordinated.