TAC NAMES DIRECTOR OF HUMAN SERVICES PRACTICE

June 1, 2005. 
Boston, MA. 

The Technical Assistance Collaborative, Inc. (TAC) announced today that John Morris has joined TAC as Director of the Human Services Practice.  John Morris, MSW, is Professor and Director of Health Policy Studies in the Department of Neuropsychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine.  He will remain based at the University in Columbia, SC.

TAC is a national non-profit organization providing leadership, technical assistance and consultation on the design, implementation and financing of best practice behavioral health services.  TAC also specializes in affordable and supportive housing for people with disabilities and strategies to end homelessness. 

Steve Day, Executive Director of TAC said: “We are delighted to welcome John as a senior member of the TAC team, and we look forward to building on TAC’s history of support to the behavioral health field through his efforts.  This is a time of great promise but also of numerous challenges for the field, and I believe John’s combination of knowledge, experience and ability to work collaboratively with consumers, families, providers and administrators will be of great value to state and local behavioral health authorities and provider organizations.  John’s seven years as Deputy Commissioner and then interim Commissioner of the South Carolina Department of Mental Health has given him a deep appreciation of and commitment to the parallel missions of providing high quality best practice services to priority consumers while at the same time assuring accountability for and stewardship of scarce public resources.”

John has thirty-five years of experience as a clinician, program manager, senior administrator and evaluator in the behavioral health and human services field.  John founded the SC Center for Innovation in Public Mental Health, and most recently served as Vice President and then Senior Policy Consultant for Comprehensive NeuroScience, Inc.  John is currently the Vice Chair of the Annapolis Coalition on the Behavioral Health Workforce, a national initiative to strengthen the quality of training, continuing education, recruitment and retention of a competent workforce. 

John has published extensively on policy issues and has been involved in the dissemination of evidence based practices, including serving as principal investigator on three federal grants implementing evidence-based practices in community mental health settings.  John is a member of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Mental Health Policy Research Network, is Secretary/Treasurer of the Board of Directors of the National Mental Health Association, and serves as a member of the National Advisory Council to the Georgetown Technical Assistance Center for Children’s Mental Health.

For more information, contact the Technical Assistance Collaborative, Inc. at (617) 266-5657 or visit our website www.tacinc.org