This week, communities are strengthening crisis response through smarter funding and closer partnerships, from Clive and New Glasgow securing their crisis intervention teams and Danville launching a new co-response program, to Midland's Ten16 Recovery Network landing a national grant for rural opioid care infrastructure and north Minneapolis seeing opioid ER visits decline thanks to grassroots harm-reduction efforts.

Facing a funding cliff that threatened to disband the program, Clive's police-mental responder crisis intervention team, which handled 692 calls in 2025, will now be fully funded and brought in-house after the Iowa Primary Care Association increased its annual contribution by $30,000 and the city eliminated an administrative position to cover a new city-employed mental health responder role.

With funding secured through Health Canada's Emergency Treatment Fund, New Glasgow will embed an accredited civilian social worker within its police service this month as a pilot Community Crisis Outreach Worker program, expanding the town's existing co-response model for mental health and substance use crises.

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Let’s image a 34 year old army veteran named Marcus.

Marcus calls 911 on the weekend at 2 a.m., agitated and disoriented. The officers who respond don't know he has PTSD. They don't know he's been seeing a VA behavioral health counsellor for six months. They don't even know he stopped taking his medication three days ago.

That information lives in a system they can't access. So Marcus ends up in handcuffs. Then a cell. Then a courtroom.

And his counsellors only find out on Monday morning...

This is what happens when the people trying to help can't talk to each other.

With Julota, Marcus's care team can see what they need to see, when they need to see it. The next time he calls at 2 a.m., the responding officer knows. The co-responder knows. And instead of a cell, Marcus gets a callback from his counsellor by morning.

Same person. Same call. Completely different outcome.

That's one of the abilities Julota gives your program.

Ten16 Recovery Network, based in Midland, Michigan, received a grant on behalf of Recovery Centers of Michigan (RCM) from the Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts (FORE), part of a broader $3.7 million investment FORE made across 25 community-based organizations nationwide. The funding will help RCM's seven member organizations across Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula build a shared Administrative Services Organization to improve coordination while preserving each agency's local identity.

Specifically, the infrastructure investment will address practical barriers to rural care access, including shared clinical supervision, universal credentialing, administrative support, and shared clinical records. Ten16 CEO Sam Price said the grant lets RCM "build the systems behind the services" so people can be connected to care more quickly and sustainably. FORE President Dr. Karen Scott framed the award as recognition that community-based organizations are often the first, and sometimes only, place people feel safe seeking help.

Danville Police, the Pittsylvania County Sheriff's Office, and the local Community Services Board launched a co-response program pairing law enforcement officers with mental health clinicians to respond to crisis calls involving mental illness, substance abuse, or developmental disabilities, with the team currently operating 8 a.m.–11 p.m. daily and hopes to expand to 24/7 coverage as funding allows.

An MPR News data analysis found that opioid-related emergency room visits declined in north Minneapolis between 2021 and 2024, even as fentanyl continues to reshape the local drug landscape. The improvement is credited to a broad, informal overdose response network — including healthcare providers, community coalitions, a local fire station, and everyday neighbors carrying naloxone.

Resources like NorthPoint Health & Wellness Center's 38-page "Northside Survival Guide" reflect the kind of grassroots, harm-reduction infrastructure that's grown in the area in recent years. Public health officials and frontline workers say they can't pinpoint a single cause for the decline, but point to the sustained commitment of people working on the ground. The piece frames the drop as a hopeful sign, while cautioning that the underlying crisis is far from resolved.