S1 Episode 3: Possible Solutions & Real Suggestions

Episode 3 features Victor's take on lessons learned as a result of the pandemic. As he puts it, "Just because you have a good idea doesn’t mean it is perceived that way." Victor discusses ways to foster community partnerships, build relationships and narrow the equity gap among service providers and elsewhere.

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Transcript

"I think that we learned some very valuable lessons as a result of the pandemic. I think that we have learned in the way that we respond to the pandemic. We’ve learned in the way that we rolled out vaccines. A couple of very valuable lessons. One is that, just because you have a good idea or a good resource, it doesn’t mean that people are going to perceive it that way. If you don’t have those relationships with the community and, even more so, if you have historically had bad relationships with the community, it is very difficult for the community to trust and believe that you have their best interest at heart. So part of what we have to do is, we have to do a better job of partnering with the community. Because at the end of the day, historically marginalized communities don’t want a savior, they don’t want a rescuer, and they don’t want a handout. They want a partner. They want someone to come in and say first of all, we acknowledge that, historically, we’ve not paid attention to your challenges. We’ve not addressed them well. And at times, we have handled them horribly. But all of that aside, lets unite today and figure out how do we do what’s best, not only for your community, but for the community as a whole so part of what we have to do is we have to build relationships with those communities. We got to go into those communities and find trusted Black and brown voices. That we can partner with. That we can bring to the table and allow them to help us understand how do we access the community? I talk a lot about the faith-based community. But even with that, we’ve got to understand that the faith-based community in the Black and in the brown community has changed. When I grew up, everybody went to a community church. And I still think that the faith-based community is, in large part the gateway to the community, but for younger people, they don’t go to the church on the corner anymore, they go to the mega churches. And so I think we’ve got to figure out how do we reach communities differently and build those collaborative partnerships.

The people who can inform us about how to do that have been here all the while. We just haven’t talked to them. And part of the reason we don’t talk to them is because part of building those relationships means you may have to spend some time letting people wag their finger in your face and tell you how you failed them. And that may be a necessary component to building trust. You may have to acknowledge past failures and that’s a necessary component of building trust but I think the other thing is that we have to think about those relationships differently. First of all, I think we have to partner differently. We can’t just rely on traditional partnerships because a lot of providers, even in the behavioral health community, a lot of providers have not looked like the community they served. It doesn’t mean the providers that are representing those communities aren’t out there, they just haven’t had access, often times to government contracts and resources. So, we have to create avenues to bring those people into the fold. 

We have for example the faith-based community coming to us all the time and saying we want to partner with you. So it’s not like they’re not asking to be at the table. There are a couple of things we have to do differently. We have to think differently. We have done a pretty decent job of integrating behavioral health into primary care. Primary care to behavioral health. It’s time for us to figure out how do we integrate behavioral health into the faith-based community. So, if Black and brown people either don’t have access to resources or won’t go to resources where those services are available, what if we took those resources into the church? What if we created a venue with all the tele-psychiatry and all the tele-health capabilities that we have today, what if we partner with faith-based communities and said, ok, providers, we can set up your Telehealth, but you can come here and you can interact with your provider, in an environment that’s known to you. 

 One of the other things I think that we can do differently is, we pay a lot of money for consultants, because we value their expertise. But we bring Black and brown people to the table and say, help us understand how to partner with their communities. We don’t treat them like consultants. We don’t pay them like consultants. If we value their expertise, then let’s treat them like we value their expertise. And then the third thing I’ll say is that, when we talk about historically marginalized communities, there are people that are historically marginalized for a number of different reasons. There’s race, culture and ethnicity, mental health challenges, there’s the intersectionality of all those things. So one of the things I think we can do differently is, we have, for example, here in North Carolina, we have certified peer support specialists. People with lived mental health experience who are certified at helping others who are going through mental health challenges. In North Carolina, we have roughly 4000 certified peers. We have about 1600 that are gainfully employed. One of the things we can do is figure out how do we make better use of those resources? That’s one of the fastest ways we can close the gap of providers of color in the communities we serve. Across the country, African Americans make up roughly 13% of the population. 4% of psychologists are black. 2% of psychiatrists are black. So it will take time for us to build that workforce. But one of the things that we can do and that will help us reach into those Black and brown communities is, we have a ready made workforce of peers, people with lived experience, that if we pay them a living wage, we can bring those people into our treatment teams and begin to close this equity gaps, while we partner with historically black colleges and universities and while we partner with residency programs, to close those gaps in providers of color, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers."