Our Mission
Our goal is to ensure that every school in Georgia is equipped to provide evidence-based behavioral health services for their students, improving the well-being of Georgia youth and their communities.
Our Story
We are a collaborative of advocates, public health professionals, legal, and policy experts dedicated to the cause of mental health.
Timeline
2018
The Georgia School Based Behavioral Health Collaborative was founded in 2018 with three organizations, The Carter Center, Voices for Georgia’s Children, and Georgia Appleseed, coming together to align their school-based behavioral health work, decrease fragmentation and inform policy to advance the development and sustainability of SBBH in Georgia. Resilient Georgia joined the collaborative a few years later.
2019-2020
Beginning in April of 2019, the collaborative hosted three School Based Behavioral Health regional community forums in Atlanta, Albany, and Dublin, Georgia. The final forum was held in Dublin in February of 2020. Through these forums, the collaborative was able to engage with school administrators, school social workers and counselors, parents, and community youth organizations to share evidence-based models for school based behavioral health and discuss regional concerns including the obstacles to sustaining and expanding SBBH and best practices that address them. Challenges that were raised by schools and providers and then prioritized by the Collaborative were:
- Sustainability of prevention programming as the necessary foundation for SBBH
- Lack of support by some schools’ general counsel
- Parent engagement
2020-2022
During the time between 2020 and 2022, the collaborative continued to work together and separately to develop, compile, and disseminate evidence-based resources, as well as advancing policy to support the implementation of SBBH services across the State.
Voices for Georgia’s Children worked with the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities (DBHDD) to create a social media awareness campaign called ‘Free Your Feels’ which targets awareness raising and stigma reduction within school settings.
Georgia Appleseed developed a guide on models of School-based Behavioral Health for schools seeking to implement school based behavioral health services, as well as legal resources for schools to assist with the establishment of an MOU with behavioral health providers to implement programs, and guides for children with behavior and learning challenges that provide students, parents, and other caregivers with tools and information to access needed services.
The Carter Center created a briefing on evidence-based and best practices in mental health promotion and prevention for communities and philanthropy. Resilient Georgia began development of the trauma-informed care training roadmap. The collaborative also co-hosted one of Voices for Georgia’s Children’s virtual town halls, “School-Based Mental Health: A Virtual Town Hall.”
2023
In 2023, community members in McIntosh County school district reached out to the collaborative for advice and assistance in addressing their community’s youth mental health needs. Collaborative representatives from The Carter Center, Resilient Georgia, Georgia Appleseed, and Voices for Georgia’s children convened with the local school superintendent and administrators, as well as several community organizations and health centers to discuss strategies for filling the needs through resources available in their community. The outcome of this one meeting included connecting of resources and the endorsement of a SBBH federal grant which the community received.
The Georgia Collaborative presented at the annual meeting of the National Center for School Mental Health in 2022, 2023 and 2024.
2025
As the collaborative enters its 7th year, we are continuing to map the implementation of school-based behavioral health in Georgia, develop, compile, and disseminate evidence-based resources for schools and develop policy priorities that support the development and sustainability of SBBH. Summer 2025, the Georgia SSBH Collaborative, in partnership with Georgia Regional Education Service Agencies (RESAs), will convene regional forums to continue to engage,school districts, students and families, and State and local organizations on building a community that supports school-based behavioral health.
The Georgia Collaborative presented at the annual meeting of the National Center for School Mental Health in 2022, 2023 and 2024.