Under a contract with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, TAC and the University of North Carolina’s Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health provided specialized coaching and training for Community Support Team service providers working with Transitions to Community Living participants. This statewide initiative promotes recovery for people with serious mental illness by providing long-term housing, community-based services, supported employment,  and community integration.

To identify strengths and challenges at multiple levels of service delivery and oversight, TAC completed a comprehensive assessment of community providers and Tailored Plans (North Carolina’s Medicaid Managed Care health plans). Based on what we learned, we were then able to develop curricula, facilitate trainings, and deliver one-on-one technical assistance both to direct service providers and to agency leadership. Finally, we created two toolkits to promote best practices now and in the future:

• The Housing Tenancy Support Toolkit for Community Support Teams toolkit introduces recovery-oriented language; offers tips on how to engage landlords; and includes guidance on the effective role of peer support specialists as well as many other topics. The toolkit includes fillable templates and forms that community support staff can use to enhance their services.
• Leading Community Support Teams: A Toolkit defines leadership roles and expectations; explains how to form a community support team; goes into best practices for supporting CST staff; and includes tools and templates for program oversight and evaluation.

Additionally, to enhance service quality, provider accountability, and technical assistance statewide, TAC is actively collaborating with the Tailored Plans to establish and pilot a standardized tool that assesses service quality. This tool is focused on identifying both specific strengths and areas for improvement, and enables providers and Tailored Plans to create targeted technical assistance plans. It can also inform statewide strategies to enhance tenancy support services.