City Council - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon. Sorry. For the record, my name is Ben Weber. I'm the district six city councilor and the chair of the committee for ways and means. Today is 05/21/2026, and the exact time is 03:06PM.

I have a few preliminaries to go through. This hearing is being recorded. It's also being live streamed at boston.gov/citycounciltv and broadcast on xfinity channel eight, r c n channel 82 and and phio channel nine sixty four the council's budget review process encompasses a series of hearings beginning in April and running through June we strongly encourage residents to take a moment to engage in the process by giving testimony for the record. You can do so in several ways. Number one, you can give testimony at one of our public hearings.

You can do so by attending the hearing in person and signing up on the sign in sheet near the entrance. We'll call on you in the order of your arrival. You can also testify at a hearing virtually. To do so, use the online form on our council budget review website, or you can email the committee at ccc.wm@boston.gov or email our budget analyst, Krish Machaan at krishma.chouhan@boston.gov. You'll get a Zoom link to testify.

You can also testify in person or virtually at our the last four the fourth of four public listening sessions last of which will be Tuesday May 26 at six p. M. Right here in the chamber again for that listening session test by in person or virtually. Each person what we'll do for public testimony is we'll hear from the panel and then we're gonna get a first round of questions from my council colleagues and then we will call for public testimony at that time and then go for additional rounds of questioning from my colleagues. In lieu of testifying in person or virtually at a hearing you can also email written testimony to the committee at ccc.wm@boston.gov you can also submit a two minute video of your testimony through the form on our website.

For more information on the council budget process and how to testify please visit city council's budget website at boston.gov/councilbudget. Again in person public testimony will be taken after the first round of questions we'll hear from the panel and first round of questions from my colleagues. They'll each get about maybe six minutes if you're trying to calculate when you're going to testify. Each person will be called up one at a time and you'll have two minutes to speak. And please you know at the beginning identify you tell us your name, where you're from, what organization you're with and then we'll start the timer.

And again if you're watching online and want to testify email Karish Machon it's KARISHMA.CHOUHAN@Boston.gov and you'll get a zoom link for the to testify. So, this afternoon's hearing is on docket number seven thirty three to seven forty, the Boston Public Health Commission's fiscal year two thousand twenty seven budget. This hearing will cover the topics including infectious disease child and adolescent family health violence prevention and behavioral health and wellness This is one of a series of hearings to review the fiscal year twenty seven budget. This is also our second hearing of the day with the Boston Public Health Commission. We covered other topics this morning, including recovery, substance abuse, and several others.

We also heard from EMS. Okay. These matters were sponsored by mayor Michelle Wu and referred to the committee on 04/08/2026. I'm joined by my colleagues in order of arrival. I I'm not sure who I'm gonna guess, counselor Flynn, the odds are, then counselor Louie Jen, then counselor Fitzgerald.

If I'm wrong, counselor Louie Jen will let me know. We've received a letter of absence from counselor Worrell and have also received a letter from counselor Coletta Zapata who because she is on maternity leave, congratulations to her and her newborn son, I will Parental leave. Okay. Well, if you're on maternity leave or paternity leave or parental leave, I will read and you're one of my counselor colleagues I'll read your questions for you. Nobody else get any ideas about me reading questions for them if they're just out for any other reason.

So we're also joined by counselor Culpepper. Generally we waive opening statements and we go to the panel. Just because Councilor Flynn has something to get to so we may not have questions. I'm gonna leave it to all my colleagues for a one minute opening statement. Councillor Flynn, if you want to lead us off and then we'll everyone get a chance for one minute to say something.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. Thank you to Doctor. Ojukutu. Thank you to Chris from the budget team for being here, for the important work you were doing. Doctor. Ojukutu, you were here for three hours this morning. I want to say thank you for your testimony, for your leadership, and for staying and listening to the public testimony from Boston residents. Unfortunately, Mr. Chair, I am leaving. I have to go to the South End for to meet with some constituents. I will be watching this remaining remaining meeting on video this evening or or sometime tomorrow. But I will follow-up with Doctor. Ojukucho.

We had a good discussion this morning about what we can do on HIV and AIDS, supporting people living with AIDS and HIV prevention. I want to acknowledge Doctor. Ochukuchu, that's the field that you've studied in your entire life. I want to thank you for your commitment for public health initiatives. And I also want to say thank you for your willingness to work with me on Asian health, Asian women's health, and for being a strong supporter of the Asian community as well. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Okay, thank you. And just before we go to Councillor Louie Jen, I just want to introduce our panelists. We're joined by the commissioner of public health and executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, Doctor. Pisola Ojikutu. We're also joined by the budget director for the Boston Public Health Commission, Chris Valdez. Councillor Louie Jen?

Thank you, mister chair, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here. Doctor. Oh, thank you for your incredible leadership of the Boston Public Health Commission over the years. I'm just so glad that you are in the position that you are in and that you bring such a holistic viewpoint to the issues of public health in our city. Everything from domestic violence and sexual violence to black maternal morbidity morbidity rates to issues in mass around mass and cast. Just the city is really lucky to have your leadership. And director Valdez, also thank you for being with us here today. I look forward to this hearing. There are a number of issues that are of great importance, a lot of which that I first mentioned.

Wanna hear more about the city's live long and well initiative, which is a great statement of understanding the racial health gaps that prevent us from that results in a thirty three year increasing life expectancy between black and white communities here in our city. So wanna thank you for your leadership. Wanna dive into those questions, how we have mental health response to a lot of to mental health issues. And again, thank you for your leadership. Thank you, mister chair.

Okay. Thank you. Councillor Fitzgerald?

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you guys for being here again today. Looking at the topics of this year of today's hearing of, they're all, pertinent of the moment, or at least, things coming up. I think about infectious disease with the especially with so many visitors we're gonna have, this summer. I know the the violence prevention and trauma response. My maiden speech, on this floor here was about a a trauma response. And so I'm I'm happy to look forward to hearing about the updates to that. And of course mental health, a very big issue in the different ways that we are dealing with it and learning to deal with it and how to. So thank you so much for your time here to educate us and let us ask you questions. Thank you, chair.

Okay. Thank you. Councilor Culpepper, do you have a minute opening statement?

Thank you, mister chair. I just wanted to thank doctor Ojukutu for what a great look, this mental health crisis response pilot, this is all I want to talk about. So we'll talk about it in minute, because I think it's a great pilot. I've got a few questions I want to ask you. I know we had you here this morning, but just thank you for bearing with us and all these questions. And I'll be happy to get into this mental health crisis response pilot because I think it's a great pilot that will lend to some of the challenges that we're having when it has to do with dispatch calls that have to do with mental health. Thank you. Thank you, Chris.

Okay. Thank you, Councillor Culpepper. So, I'm going to hand the floor over to the panelists, and we're going to hear from our counselors with questions and go to public testimony after Thank you.

Great. Great. Good afternoon, and Can thank you,

I just interrupt you for one second? Sorry. We there is a celebration downstairs, so we'll keep an eye on the music. People feel like they can't hear anything, let me know. We'll hope that that's not a distraction. Anyway, thanks.

Great. Good afternoon, Chair Weber and distinguished city councilors. I'm honored to be here. So, this morning, as Chair Weber mentioned, we did talk about Live Long Well, which is our city's first population health equity agenda. It's basically where our city is committing to addressing the huge and concerning gaps in health outcomes and life expectancy across our city.

We also talked about recovery services, homeless services, and EMS. So, I'm really pleased to be back this afternoon to talk about child, adolescent, and family health, violence prevention, infectious diseases, community initiatives, and behavioral health and wellness, as well as a few other issues. Okay. So, let's jump right in with child, adolescent, and family health. So, our CAF Bureau delivers education, health services, and family supports to thousands of families in Boston.

For this presentation, I'd like to focus in on engagement of youth, because that is a core priority of the Calf Bureau. In FY 'twenty six, more than 1,200 young people received clinical services, as well as training for job opportunities through the Calf Bureau. So, as you see on the slide, I've listed the programs that have specifically served youth. First, the Boston Area Health Education Center, or BAHEC, exposes and educates young people to careers in health with the goal of growing a diversified and culturally responsive health workforce. This fiscal year, BAHEC provided programming to 118 youth.

Next, the Peer Leadership Institute trains young people to be educators and ambassadors to empower other young people around sexual health, substance use, and mental health challenges. This fiscal year, the Peer Leadership Institute provided programming to more than 40 youth. Start Strong is another peer leadership program focuses on supporting young people and having healthy relationships and decreasing intimate partner violence. Much of Start Strong's work is focused on online engagement, and through its digital media efforts, Start Strong achieved more than 20,000,000 social media impressions within this fiscal year. I also want to mention the Youth Development Network.

The Youth Development Network engages young people who are at risk in activities that strengthen their connection to school and supports their progress towards educational completion. YDN, or the Youth Development Network, offers in school as well as after school programming focused on leadership and life skills, and gives young people the tools they need to succeed. So, within this fiscal year, through both case management and summer programming, as well as after school initiatives, YDN served two twenty youth. Last but not least, we manage and staff school based health centers, eight of them in total across our city. These are fully staffed during the fiscal year.

Essentially, offer medical services as well as mental health services. And we served 12 more than 1,200 students with medical services and three forty six students for mental services just within this past year. So, it's a great resource. I'd also like to share that during this summer during every summer, but upcoming this upcoming summer, multiple youth programs hosted by BPHC will convene a six week paid summer enrichment experience for young people. And during this period, they will engage in public health, training, education, exploring career growth, potential opportunities in the future, as well as doing some community service.

So, this year, I believe we have 110 students who are participating. Okay. So, sticking with the Child, Adolescent, and Family Health Bureau, I wanted to share a few additional highlights. So, health was a central focus across our commission for a lot of our work. It's part of our Live Long and Well initiative, and it's certainly a part of the Child, Adolescent, and Family Health Bureau.

And I'll talk a little bit more about other mental health work in a moment. So, this particular bureau provided many behavioral health screenings through their early through our early childhood mental health program, as well as through our school based health centers. So, early childhood mental health actually ended up serving 76 families. And as I said, our school based health centers supported a total of I think I said this three forty six students in regards to mental health challenges. Complementing these clinical services, the Youth Development Network also advanced a peer led mental health awareness program in schools through a mental health ambassadors program, which I think was very successful.

And they held their third annual wellness day where we engaged more than 300 youth in that program. So, again, great opportunities, trying to do the work in multiple areas across the city, multiple neighborhoods. I want to shift from mental health to talk about maternal health and infant mortality. So, we know that there are many challenges, many health inequities related to both issues. Both are focal areas for our Live Long and Well agenda because obviously it's incredibly important for our city, for our city's families.

Under our Healthy Start Systems Division, we have a robust array of programs maternal and infant health services with a special focus on populations where we see the greatest health inequities. So, we continue to implement our fetal and infant mortality review. I think we've spoken about this before. It is a newer initiative. The idea here is to better understand why we have an infant mortality rate that is what it is, particularly in black communities.

There is a significant disparity in infant mortality across our city that's persistent, and we really want to dig in and understand root causes. So, thank you for supporting this process through a budget amendment in FY 'twenty five. We're moving the process forward, and it's very intensive. But we, you know, are looking for the opportunity to have more information to intervene on. This past year, we did establish a data sharing agreement with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health that has taken some time to do.

We also onboarded a nurse coordinator. And then, through our Healthy Start Systems Division, we provided coordinated case management home visiting services to over 1,700 pregnant and parenting families in FY26 to promote health and wellness among pregnant women and amongst their entire families up to age five. So, it's an important way to get families, you know, on board and navigate through health systems, because that is oftentimes one of the challenges that families face. So, in addition to that, we also address social determinants of health, so food, housing, income supports. And for example, during the food challenge that we all know about and face during the federal government shutdown last November, our food pantry two families who are working with Healthy Start systems distributed food and gift cards to 9,542 families experiencing food insecurity.

I also want to mention, in regards to maternal and child health, our doula initiative connects families to a full spectrum of services, doulas who can work with families in their home, navigate them through the system, attend appointments with women and their families. So, this is sort of a full continuum of care before, during, and after childbirth. In the past fiscal year, we trained over 100 community stakeholders in supporting families, and provided doula services to many families throughout the city of Boston. So, I'd like to turn to violence prevention. In FY twenty five, as you all know, we established a new office of violence prevention that reports directly to our executive office.

Under this new structure, we elevated and focused our work and really built upon our public health focus to end violence in the city of Boston. Last spring, we named Isaac Yablo as the new office director. And in September 2025, the mayor's community safety team transitioned into the Office of Violence Prevention at BPHC. I want to thank Isaac, first and foremost, for directing the office, and the entire Office of Violence Prevention staff for all their dedicated work. So, I'd like to just review the five programs within the office so that everyone sort of knows the work that's occurring in the office, and then can certainly ask questions.

So, we offer capacity building and training through an initiative that works with communities to strengthen neighborhoods and prevent gun violence. We offer the life course unit. Now, this is a program that is really focused on the prevention of violence. Through the LifeCourse unit, we provide intensive case management services to individuals most at risk of being victims or perpetrators of violence. So, within the LifeCourse unit, there are three programs.

The Safe and Successful Youth Initiative, or SSYI, has long been a part of core programming. And in 2024, we expanded to meet the need for those services to address the challenges unique challenges facing younger as well as older individuals. And I think that was really important because, you know, clearly there's a need outside of the Safe and Successful Youth Initiative, which is 17 to 24. So, now we have the Promoting Potential Boston program for ages 16 and under, and the Men's Health Initiative for ages 25 and older. In addition to the violence intervention program and the life course unit, we also have the Community Healing Response Network.

And so, this program was formerly the Neighborhood Trauma Team Network. It's a coalition, if you will, of neighborhood level community healing response teams led and coordinated by the Boston Public Health Commission. And essentially, what they do is they provide community outreach, engagement, short term crisis intervention, which may include psychological first aid and case management on-site and, you know, sort of very soon after an event may have occurred, as well as longer term behavioral health services. So, it really is not just immediate, it really is expected to be a continuum that meets the needs of folks in trauma and healing well beyond the actual incident. We also have the domestic sexual and gender Violence Prevention Initiative that I have a little bit more information on, so I'll wait for the next slide.

But I will say this is a newer initiative that's doing an incredible amount of work in an area where there's great need. As you all may recognize, may have participated in, the Office of Violence Prevention developed a citywide summer safety plan that was announced in partnership with city hall and community stakeholders yesterday. The plan is produced with a process of deep community engagement and community empowerment. It's really part of the office's larger approach to ending violence in our city in a long term sustainable and visionary way. So, let me talk a little bit about the domestic sexual and gender based violence initiative.

So, as I said, newer initiative launched in early twenty twenty five. The purpose of the initiative is to both prevent and respond to gender based violence, really through coordinated efforts of many different partners and stakeholders. The program is playing a leadership role in preparing for the increased risks of domestic sexual violence and human trafficking that may be tied to large scale events and broader community conditions as we look ahead to FIFA and the other events coming up. One priority in that regard of preparedness is to increase awareness of resources so that survivors can access support safely. And you will see ads and other, you know, community education resources and bus shelters, as well as subways and all, you know, sort of transit hubs around the city.

The program is also funding family childcare providers to strengthen their ability to recognize and respond to domestic violence. In addition, through this initiative, we conducted a citywide domestic violence provider survey over the winter to better understand how the current immigration climate may be impacting communities. And so, that report is forthcoming. On at BPHC, our work is really focused on upstream prevention strategies, and we work very closely with, you know, various organizations to really think in a comprehensive way about domestic sexual and gender based violence. So, really thinking about how to connect people to resources, thinking about prevention, thinking about how to manage, you know, trauma.

And really, I think, trying to understand what in our city needs to happen in a better and more coordinated way to manage this issue. Okay. So, I want to move on to talk a bit about our Center for Behavioral Health and Wellness and some of our mental health resources. So, the Center for Behavioral Health and Wellness was launched in at BPHC a few years ago, really using, you know, ARPA dollars to do a lot of the work that we've been focused in on, and the goal was to improve residents' mental health and well-being outcomes. The focus has been primarily youth, but we have certainly been looking to expand our work and have been doing additional work in adult populations.

Most of this is done in partnership and collaboration, and a lot of it is focused in on workforce development and really training a workforce that is responsive to the needs of Boston residents. And again, focused in on youth mental health. This year, the center has also focused on social and structural determinants of mental health. So, all of the sort of non mental excuse me, non medical conditions in which we're born, grow, live, work, age, and all of the things that we know impact mental health outcomes. What is it that we can do about them to then improve outcomes, particularly for youth, but for all Boston residents in regards to mental health and well-being.

In October 2025, the center co hosted the first annual Social Determinants of Mental Health Summit in partnership with Northeastern University's Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research. And the goal there is to maintain this coalition of partners across the city who are interested in addressing the mental health crisis that I think, you know, our country is facing in a very holistic way. So, that's an ongoing process. We continue our work of trauma informed school transformation with healing center engagement across BPS school sites, and this year enrollment went to 121 school personnel who are participating in trauma informed training. So, that's great.

I want to talk a little bit more about workforce development in regards to mental health. Well, this is the community led mental health crisis. I'm going to come back to that, and let's see. Yeah, Let's talk about the behavioral health workforce expansion. So, as I said, one of the key challenges in our city, in most cities, is not having enough behavioral and mental health providers.

And not only not having enough of them for everyone who needs care and treatment, but not having a workforce that's truly diverse racially, ethnically, as well as linguistically. Just a culturally responsive workforce. So, one of our major goals through the center is to change that for the city of Boston. And as I mentioned, these efforts have been ARPA funded, so they've been investments that we've been working on for the last couple of years, but I do want to mention it to this group because I know that there is a ongoing a lot of ongoing questions and concerns around mental health and what are we going to do. So, the idea was let's train the workforce, let's partner with long term institutions with ARPA resources, and then maintain that workforce over time in various positions as needed across our city.

So, I think that we've done a good job in putting together partnerships. On this slide, you see the cumulative impact of these initiatives over the past few years. We have a partnership with Franciscan Children's, the Children's Wellness Initiative that started in June 2023. It's ending now, but essentially 10 BPS schools in the last fiscal year have participated in programming and done training. And all of this is sort of school based behavioral health work with school based health clinicians, really scaling them up so that they can provide services to our BPS students.

And they've served over time more than 300 BPS students to date, and hopefully that will continue. We also have a very strong partnership with UMass Boston, which we call Transforming Boston Access to Mental Health. We've trained 43 mental health counselors, 142 therapeutic mentors, and seven school psychologists. All of them are enrolled and supported by the program via stipends. The hope being that they will stay in Boston at various sites so that their impact will last well beyond the funding.

We also have 191 UMass students in behavioral health who've been supported and trained via a stipend process. In total, more than 1,900 clients have been served and 1,000 youth, and that's by mid of twenty twenty six. In addition to these external partnerships, we've been working to enhance our own services in house. So we have, as I mentioned, the Boston Area Health Education Center. With our funding with with the center, we have 50 summer program participants, 74 academic year program participants.

Currently, 124 students are enrolled in the program. They're really spending their time understanding what a mental health behavioral health career actually looks like, and hopefully we're going to give them a springboard into, studying further, you know, actually developing a career trajectory for young people who we hope will stay in Boston. And amazingly, there's been a hundred percent completion rate of enrolled participants. Okay. So let me turn back to the community led mental health crisis response, as I know that came up in our first session.

And I just want to provide an overview and really an update. So we're moving ahead with a pilot to implement a peer led mental health crisis response model. The pilot aims to reduce reliance on police, public safety, carceral response for behavioral health crises. We're hoping to improve outcomes for residents who are most impacted by policing efforts and also expand access to culturally responsive crisis care. So, this pilot, just so everyone is aware, is designed to complement, not replace, other behavioral health and emergency response in public safety efforts.

This is meant to enhance what we have available for our residents. And as you heard in the meeting this morning of Boston EMS, there are other things happening. Certainly, the best team, other approaches that are actually happening. But I just want to be clear that this is meant to enhance the work. So, we, over the course of several years, have really engaged very intensively with community partners to draft an RFP, and that RFP will be issued in the next few weeks.

It's soon. It's going to happen soon. And the hope is that we'll be able to launch a pilot in fall of twenty twenty six. And that pilot will because of just the amount of money that we have, will exist and be implemented within one neighborhood in Boston, and then we'll see how things go, evaluate it, and potentially look at trying to allocate funding to continue that work. So, just to emphasize again, I really think that this pilot in this community led mental health crisis response program is the result of community engagement, community empowerment.

It's, I think, incredibly responsive to community needs, and we're really excited to see what comes in from the RFP.

Okay, so last slide. I know I've had a lot. Oh, sorry, two slides.

Okay, so let me talk about infectious diseases. We did talk about infectious diseases a bit earlier, so I'm just going to kind of go through this quickly. Obviously, as a health department, we work in disease surveillance, investigation of cases, as well as clusters or outbreaks. And certainly, we fund a continuum of HIV related education and care through the Ryan White HIVAIDS Program. And we do a lot of community and provider education, both related to HIV and other communicable diseases.

This year, our focus has really been on preparedness, working internally with our Office of Public Health Preparedness, as well as our communications office and the office of emergency management. And with EMS, it's sort of a a really robust team. We're all focused in on FIFA World Cup and the major events, and we spoke earlier today about hantavirus and Ebola and how we're preparing and making sure that we're on all of the, you know, closed calls, which we have been invited to as a major city. Clearly, there's no imminent threat here in Boston, you know, as it stands, but I think that all of this reminds us that we need to be prepared, and we need to make sure our capacity is built and that we are we continue to be a city that's that's highly resilient and, you know, can address these needs in a robust way that keeps our residents safe. This year, we strengthened early detection of infectious disease threats by expanding our neighborhood level wastewater program.

We talked a little bit about that earlier. I want thank the council for their support of this initiative in the FY26 budget amendment process. Again, wastewater is an important tool for us. It's early warning. A lot of cities don't have it at the neighborhood level.

Right now, we're looking for flu, COVID nineteen measles, RSV. We have a whole list of other infectious pathogens that we will be looking for as we enter, you know, FIFA World World Cup and then into the summer. So, we are working on and managing, co leading incident management team throughout the city, as well as with the state, again, doing a lot of preparedness efforts for summer and, you know, beyond, I would say, because all of this is about being prepared for anything that may come. And I think that we're I think we're doing a good job in terms of preparing ourselves, as well as, you know, our partners and other folks around the city to manage anything that may arise. Over the past year, we've certainly seen a number of federal actions.

I mentioned this earlier, restricting vaccine access and sort of anti vax sentiment. What we've done in response is we have tried to provide accurate evidence based health information to Boston residents. We've done a lot in terms of communication and media, providing multilingual ads or education education resources resources for for residents, residents working working extensively extensively boots boots on the ground with community partners and trying our best to combat misinformation. In addition, we partnered with BPS and with BCYF, as well as community organizations to host 27 free vaccine clinics throughout the city to ensure that residents had access to vaccinations, whether that be for respiratory viral infections or childhood vaccines. So we are going to continue this work as long as we are, you know, able to, and we're actually just, you know, planning for the fall, going back to school, and then into the respiratory viral season.

Okay, so this is now the real last slide. So, I just want to say a few words about our Community Initiatives Bureau. A lot of what they're doing is incredibly important, particularly around Live Long and Well, given, you know, the preponderance of chronic disease as a factor leading to premature mortality in our city. So, the Community Initiatives Bureau works to prevent illness and promote health by working in tandem, in partnership with communities from environmental and occupational health to chronic disease prevention and control. On this slide, I've just mentioned a few of our programs that I know a number of you all know about already, but we have the Breathe Easy at Home program that addresses asthma and unhealthy housing conditions.

So, really looking at social and structural determinants that are exacerbating asthma and sending people to emergency department. How do we address that? We partner with ISD. We work with renters and landlords providing free home inspections to identify problems. We also have a very strong tobacco prevention and control program, which works to decrease the impact of smoking and vaping on the health of Boston residents.

And in FY 'twenty six, we conducted 1,200 merchant inspections, issued seven zero one permits, and resolved 32 general tobacco complaints, as well as 40 secondhand smoke complaints. Also, in FY 'twenty six, we launched a new learning collaborative and expanded training programs focused on nutrition and physical activity for young children. Again, that's critically important, and it's within our Live Long and Well agenda. So, lastly, I want to talk about something that isn't as everything has been important, but I want to talk about this because it's sort of urgently important in regards to access to care. So, as we know, through one big beautiful bill, OBB3 or whatever you want to call it, the federal government is seeking to limit the availability of health services for those residents who we know are most vulnerable, and particularly through MassHealth or Medicaid.

In response, the Mayor's Healthline significantly expanded outreach and enrollment efforts, especially in languages other than English, helping Boston residents to get health insurance and access services. The Mayor's Healthline supported the Health Connector and Medicaid open enrollment recently in 2025, and I think that was something that they did on an expanded level, you know, really, you know, amplified a lot of the efforts that they've done in the past, and were very successful hosting events across all 23 Boston neighborhoods. And just as an FYI, we did see a 30% increase in health insurance enrollments in FY 'twenty six, with more than 1,100 individuals needing to be enrolled or re enrolled into health insurance. Okay, so I think well, I should also say that we partnered with Age Strong for Medicare open enrollment also. So I talked about Medicaid and Mass Health, but also Medicare is an area of concern.

So, I think I'm going to stop there, and I'm happy to take any questions.

Okay. Thank you very much, Doctor. Ojikutu. So, we've been joined by, I think, Counselor Braden or Counselor Santana, you no, maybe. Madam President Braden, Counselor Santana, Counselor Durkin. I'm just going to point. Okay, Counselor Santana, were here first. Because we do have folks who want to give public testimony, we're going to go to counselor questions. I'm going give each person five minutes, which is a little less than usual so we can get to a round of public testimony and give people a chance to ask questions. So, counselor Louis Jen, five minutes.

Thank you, mister chair. Thank you, doctor O for your presentation. The school based behavioral health, there are eight centers. I know is it Boston Line Academy, Madison Park, Brighton, and the Burke? Do you know what the other schools are?

I do. Okay. Just hold on one second. I don't wanna misspeak. Okay. So we have nurse practitioners and behavioral health at six. So Boston Latin Academy, Brighton, Holland, Madison Park, New Mission, and Snowden. We just have behavioral health at Ruth Badson and another course eau College.

How do you choose which schools?

You know, this has been on it's ongoing, you know, because it's not that these are the only school based health centers. We just staff and manage these eight. And of course, there are resources at all, you know, BPS schools.

Right. Like every high school should have a psych has a psychologist. That's Everyone has a social worker.

So I will need to find

out a little bit more about the history here as to why it's these particular schools that we that we manage.

Yeah. I mean, I'm happy that they're that they exist at these schools. Yeah. Just wanna make sure that it's resources that we can get to all of our young people. I wanna talk a little bit about sexual and domestic violence. Is that that initiative, is that where Kim

Yes.

Sits? Okay. Thank you. And I'm I'm grateful for the work that she's done. Can you speak a little bit more to the survey that was done regarding domestic violence and immigrant populations during this time? I know the data is forthcoming, but what do you think that we'll glean from that?

Well, I think we'll glean some very important information that hopefully, if we have the funding, we can, you know, act on. We actually have Isaac Yablo who is here, and I'm just gonna have him come down for, you know, to answer nuanced questions. So Oh, Isaac, you can come around and sit. Come around.

Isaac Yablo, everyone.

All of that cut into my time though, so like

Wait, wait, wait.

I was going

to say. Hold it. I'm going pause. Pause. I can't add seconds. I don't I'm not that technical agent.

All I'll Doctor. Yablo, please.

I'll pause until Mr. Yablo.

So about the survey, I don't have the specific answer about the survey, but I can certainly get back to you with that answer.

Okay. Can you tell me since I have you, doctor Yablo, I this question is for you, doctor O. Mhmm. Obviously, if we had more money, like, we'd be doing a lot more things. But, like, what is what is on your like, not in this budget? And I'm not even saying, what is on your wish list that we could have money to do? Like, what what work that is is going underfunded or unfunded that we need more money and more attention either in the city or in partnership with outside folks who can help us Mhmm. Invest more in in an area.

So I I'll say just from my own experience more as a physician. I'll just say that, you know, awareness is a big one. Destigmatization, so that, you know, people will talk about what they're experiencing. I think there should be more resources, places for people to go. What do you mean? So, if you're experiencing domestic violence, more places for people to actually

Yeah.

Go that are safe and that people can bring their kids to if needed. Yeah. You know, people who can navigate them to all the social determinants to resettle their lives. Yeah. Because that's one of the reasons why people don't leave. Yeah. You know, if there's nothing for them to go to and who can help with economic opportunity and and, you know, and I'm not just saying this in a gender way, gendered way, but, you know, for women, for other folks who are in very difficult relationships. So, think we just need more resources overall. The other piece Oh,

go ahead.

Oh, no, was just going say one other piece. I think a great part of this initiative and what Kim is doing is really understanding the specific needs in our community in Boston, and bringing the partners together. You know, because I can't tell you even as a physician who's practiced in the city for twenty years, how many who are the different people who are offering services? Know? And that's something that I should know, especially because I have been caring primarily, honestly, for women living with HIV who are oftentimes in very challenging circumstances. So, I think that would be a great thing. And to make that sort of a widespread understanding,

I think But it would be I'm sure, Isaac, there are other things.

Yeah, would just say prevention, always going further upstream. Think in the context of the work that Kim is doing, which is really amazing work, more information sharing and ensuring that folks are focusing as much on prevention as they are intervention and recovery.

Thank you. That's also cutting into my time.

No. I'll tell them to stop. When

doctor Ojukutu, you mentioned more, like, housing is, like, one of the biggest issues generally for our city, but also when it comes to those who are facing intimate partner violence. I was just talking to a mom whose kid goes to school in the South End, but because of a domestic violence situation is now in Quincy, and she's completely uprooted from her life. We have women who don't leave and and people who don't leave intimate partner violence. I have so many questions that I wanna ask you in so little time. Like, how often are you interacting with the housing needs of those who are experiencing domestic violence?

Well, I would like you to to talk in terms of the program. Like, is Kim partnering in Utah?

Yeah. So situation. I actually had a really good conversation, and thank you for the question. Really good question. I had a con conversation with Kim about this yesterday and just making the distinction between an organization that is serving individuals that are experiencing domestic sexual or gender based violence in the real time versus an organization that has the capacity and they're trauma informed in their approach to serving people broadly, and they have the capacity also.

So what we're doing right now is we're working to establish a direct services arm, of the DSG initiative that will enable us with the capacity to essentially work directly with community based organizations that have that skill set. We we obviously have the office of housing stability. It's not necessarily connected to everything that we're talking about right now, but Danielle is someone that I work very closely with. And when when applicable, we we tap into housing stability as well.

Thank you.

Do I

have one more question? Yes. Thank you. I just wanna also, doctor Gabbalo, thank the neighborhood trauma team last year. My office is dealing with a number of unfortunate young deaths after death, and the neighborhood trauma team just showed up in ways not not always ones that involved gun violence. And so I just wanna thank your team for for the way that they showed up. Definitely.

Thank you.

Yeah. And I I also wanna thank I see the peace of suits in the house. Thank you for all the work that you do interrupting violence and bringing peace across our city. My last question, I'm sure my my colleagues will ask about mental health, but the budget book describes the community based violence intervention and prevention initiative as working with returning citizens in office well, returning to the the folks returning home from incarceration and healing services in prison and in the community. How is the BPT working with the office of returning citizens to work with those who are coming home, you know?

We have we have an almost identical population. I mean, it is an identical population. Our office is primarily focused on individuals that have been connected to violence in the past while ORC takes kind of like a broad stroke, and they work with anyone that is returning home. There are individual situations and cases that we collaborate on. I don't really wanna get into the specifics, but we do have an active working relationship even more so considering the budget situation.

And then but more broadly, I would reference the life course unit as well. So with CVIPI, we work directly with The transformational prison project, and then We Are Better Together. Those are the the contracted partners on that specific initiative. But then even more broadly, our life course unit led by Roy Martin. They are recently, as of, I believe, March or April of this year, officially a community partner of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections.

Which one? TPP?

Oh, no. No. No. This is internal. This is the life course unit

Okay.

Led by Roy Martin. So we're an official partner of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections. And so now, in addition to having a a caseload of individuals that are on the street, we have individuals that are currently housed in the in the Department of Corrections as well.

Thank you, doctor. Diablo. Thank you, mister chair. Yes. I wanna support and uplift the questions. I know councilor Culpepper is gonna ask around mental health in Nubian Square. I think it's an important issue. Want to thank those who have come out for public testimony. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Yeah. Thank you very much. Sorry. To to everyone who's here, I want to make sure we can hear the the the questions and the answers and the public testimony. So we'll we'll continue. My sense is that the the loudest part may be over from the celebration. But if it starts up again, we're just gonna take a brief recess because I I mean honestly, wanna hear the conversations and try to figure out a better way to do this. But let's just plow ahead right now five minutes. Councillor Fitzgerald.

Thank you. Thank you everybody for being here again. Isaac, welcome down. Let's talk about the mental health pilot for a second. A couple weeks ago I had a chance to sit down with the Boston People's Response and hear about that and it seems very similar to what they're proposing in RFP.

And so I know when talking to them, that we we needed a and and a lot of the things align with sort of what you know, some of the things that we were talking about, the similarities of of how to approach these issues and how they align with what we do, except, you know, I think mine sort of brings in law enforcement and theirs is trying to say without it. I know they said they need $4,000,000, I believe, if I was correct, if I remember that right, right, 4 mil? How much is this mental health pilot, how much are we funding for this to do? How much does that cost us?

It's 1,700,000.

1.7, gotcha. And in which do we know which neighborhood? You said we're going

No, try and it's it really going to depend on who applies through the RFP.

Got you. Got you. Okay.

The RFP itself, though, is targeted towards Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury.

Yep. All right. Great. One thing I had a conversation with them about is the safety aspect of that. In sending people out without any of the proper security and putting those that are going any clinicians going out, how sometimes these things can turn violent and not having the proper protection with you.

And, you know, I think about the most recent one was at Northeastern where the man was struck with the sword. Right? And so there was a clinician there, but obviously, it was attacked. Right? So it was like, there are these moments that do arise where it's, you know I I just told them I want you guys to think seriously about the people that were that you would put out there to be safe because there there are gonna be some situations that might not be and you could be trained in the clinical part but not in the safety part. How are we going to or how will they know which situation they're going to and if or not it will be dangerous? Because I just want to make sure no one gets hurt

in this.

Absolutely. I think we're all wanting the utmost safe approaches to be I think my concern is similar to yours. I would say that, you know, one, we don't know what people were going to propose, you know, in this RFP. Our hope is that it would include, you know, triage, appropriate triage of circumstances. And some aspect of it would involve escalation to public safety and some contact, you know, whether it be by phone to somebody in public safety, somebody who has those sort of skill sets, as opposed to going at every situation as a peer led, non public safety involved approach.

That's how I would look at it. And I understand that there may be challenges to that, but I think we need to look at these proposals very carefully and, you know, find what we think is, you know, going to meet the needs and is also going to be safest.

Great. Thank you. I look forward to that and I look forward and the RFP goes out it's out or is

No, it's not out yet. It will be out soon.

It will be out soon. Understood. Thank you. I look forward to that. With an implemented hopefully in the fall.

Yes, Gotcha.

Isaac, now that you're down here, just wanted to talk about violence prevention because lately in parts of my district, if not directly abutting my district, there's been an uptick in some issues. Right? So I think what people wanna know is that does that is that predictive of the rest of this summer? And and I hope not. And what are we taking from this recent spat and sort of through the Office of Violence Prevention, both at the Boston Public Health Commission and yourself, How are you guys working together from what we've seen, what we've been doing that that has worked very well, to when we get this little uptick in issues, and how we adapt to change that, and have we learned anything from the last couple of weeks of what we saw and do we feel confident going into the summer.

Yes. Thank you so much for that question. So, I actually just left a weekly forum, that I coordinate that's focused on, a review of incidents of community violence. Yesterday, we did a press conference. We are still down both in total number of shootings, victims, homicides, both compared to last year and compared to the five year average.

I did speak to commissioner Cox about any relevant trends that we need to be focused on. He did say to me it was a bad week. But I don't think that this past week or the week before was anything to say more broadly about, certainly not the summer, but at about any macro level changes that we should make. Our strategy is is working. Certainly, during the summer months, we have to prioritize being more even more strategized, say, during than during winter months when everyone's on the inside because most people are outside.

We know that between ten to 2AM, between Friday and Tuesday morning, that's when most of the violence occurs. And so that's where we are channeling most of our activity. For example, this weekend, my entire well, the entire office is always on point with this, but particularly the life course unit and then the community healing response network are are prepared to respond as Memorial Day has seen incidents of violence in the past. But I am confident both in the preventative work that we are doing, but then also the intervention and response work. I want to give a shout out to our partners that are in the crowd, the Peace Institute that are doing amazing work in the community as well, as well as other partners.

But yeah, am very confident as we enter the summer.

Great. Thank you. And I know that needs my time. And thank you for shouting them out. Was about to do the same. Always like to have them in the room. I do have a trauma response question, but I understand my time is

up. Thank you, Jim. Okay, thank you. Councillor Culpepper, you're up. We're doing fine

Thank you, Mr. Chair. First round. Good to see you again, Doctor. Oh, and Chris, and Isaac. I want to just talk briefly about the community led mental health response pilot. So are we looking for the community mental health agencies to respond to this? And are we looking for them to house the program within, like, Whittier Street Health Center?

So what I would say is that I think we are open to options. I personally would like to keep options open because I think there may be some strategies where housing it in a variety of different places might be useful. The RFP was written with some flexibility around, some of this work. So, So, I think that there are options open.

Is that 1,700,000 for just the first year?

No, it's 1,700,000 for twenty two months.

For twenty two months?

Yes.

And when we think about this model, this pilot program, and we look at community oversight and the different Mhmm. Impacts, how do we anticipate this would actually service the community? Would it be set up like the police department where they would get calls to a dispatcher and the dispatcher would then send them someplace or recommend someplace. How how how are you thinking that?

So I think that there would be a triage process, so that would involve a call. And Okay. We had been speaking with Isaac's team just because of, you know, they work on a system very similar to that where they are notified, you know, their shots fired or penetrated trauma. Therefore, this is the pathway you're going to go down and people are deployed. It's quite possible that that is the way that it's going to go.

We're not necessarily scripting pre RFP all the details. We want to see what people will come up with. There are other, you know, examples in other cities. But there will be a community advisory board that will, you know, look at this and have, you know, evaluation, you know, some role in in that that process so that it stays in line with what the original thinking was.

And the board will consist of predominantly community mental health experts?

I think that we should be thinking about community members and many of the people who, you know, have been engaged and interested in this and, you know, involve people with lived experience. And certainly, think it's there's no reason, you know, not to involve people with, you know, mental health experience, you know, behavioral health experience in the board. But that hasn't been scripted. So the pilot

is separate. The board would oversee the pilot, and the board would be set up by your office or by the mayor's office. Mhmm. How how would that work, the actual board that will over that will have oversight?

Right. So we, as the health department, will be I I don't necessarily use the word oversight per se. I mean, we will be managing the contract with these Right. With this group, whoever it is that sort of wins the RFP, wins the bid for this. And we will be monitoring it over time and have evaluation procedures in place. But I think, particularly given how community engaged this process is, it would behoove us to have a community advisory board, and that's how this is designed. That

they And who would be set it up? Who would set it up?

We would set up the And community

you would make the appointments to the board, and the council, you'd give us one or two appointments to the board?

Oh, yeah. Well, I I think think we should discuss all of that. I'm you really know, we're at the stage where it's taken us a long time to get here, there's been a lot of discussions, a lot of concerns. I think we've addressed a lot. We're at the point we have this RFP. I think the details we need to work out.

Okay. Okay. Good. And, you know, we've got that hearing order, and hopefully Mhmm. We can get that hearing done soon so Yes. We can discuss some of Good.

Make sense.

Some of the concerns at at the hearing. I did wanna good to see Isaac working with you. He's in your office.

Oh, Isaac reports to me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I report to Doctor. O. No.

A great compliment to your office.

Oh, absolutely.

We've worked with yeah. So Isaac, I have a question for you.

Yes, sir.

You know, what I'm gonna ask you about summer preparation for youth violence. What are you doing now to get prepared for the summer?

A ton of different things. So let me start by saying a lot of the work that we're connected to as it relates to youth employment, I'll start there, is run through our partners at YOU Boston. And so, recently, we partnered with them to strengthen their capacity to employ remember, the young people that I'm focused on. I mean, I, you know, I prioritize all young people, but particularly young people that have intimate contact with the criminal justice system. Those that are survivors of community violence directly, those that come from families where community violence has been present, and those that have familial ties to community violence and or group related violence in the city.

And so our approach, is to prioritize employment for those young people between the ages of 14 to 24, so working directly with YOU. So there's that. And then another large thing that we're we're we're prioritizing, is space activation, both, one, to prevent violence and to reclaim space within communities that have experienced violence, but also to destigmatize any negative thoughts that folks might have connected to such spaces. And so a lot of the spaces that we're going to prioritize, as we have been prioritizing, are the spaces where young people are known to congregate. We actually just got contacted in in councilor Fitzgerald.

They'll keep you in the loop about this, but we just got contacted by South Bay to do a space activation event for young people down there. Harambee Park is certainly a place that we're gonna be

Within South Bay?

One more time?

Within South Bay?

Yeah. Yes.

That's a great place to start. Yeah. I mean, that no. That's a great place to start. Of course. South Bay. Yeah.

So within South Bay, Moakley Park, within your district, certainly Madison Park Fields, the Nubian Square area, parts of Grove Hall, so particularly the Crawford Park area

this Washington Park, yeah.

Washington Park as well, yeah.

Okay. And we'll pick that up, conversation up later. I wanna talk more about that. Sure. That's a great idea. The space is a sensation.

Okay. Thank you, Councilor Culpepper. We'll we'll we'll have a second round. Okay. Just wanna get to public testimony.

No problem. No problem.

Councilor Durkin, five minutes.

Thank you so much, chair. And thank you so much, doctor Jakutu. Everything that you represent and everything that you're doing at the city is the bright spot of what we could be doing. Even the parts that feel not so positive are ones where we're trying to meet that challenge. So I just want to thank you for all the work that you do.

And I've never personally apologized to a chief for missing a hearing, but I'm really sorry for not being able to join this morning because I just everything that you do, just really want to thank you for all the work that you do and the work that's represented by your entire cabinet. So one thing that's very personal to me and personal to a lot of folks in the city is the work to curb cardiometabolic diseases and preventable cancers. And I know through the live long well agenda and the catalyst program, there's such great work going on. I want to thank the Atrius Health Equity Foundation for all the work that they do. I understand that there's a $5,000,000 installment that is scheduled for 2028 focused on Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan.

I'm curious. I know that there are, they file a nine ninety, which is their, what, private Mhmm. You know, foundations. And that means that 5% of their asset value needs to go to grants and charitable operations every year. So that's given their assets, that's $4,500,000 a year.

Given that, I know they had great $10,000,000 commitment to the city, I'm curious your conversations with them and they're funding great work in Brockton, they're working on a lot in Eastern Massachusetts. I'm just curious sort of what the conversations have been about even expanding those programs because I think the more resources we have access to, the more that we can do everything to curb the three main reasons why people preventable deaths in the city of Boston, are heart disease, cancer, and overdoses. So

thank you, counselor Durkin. I really appreciate a lot of the work that you're doing and the support that you've given to public health. I wanted to start by thanking all of the staff at the Boston Public Health Commission. We have more than 1,400 people. You met, obviously, lots of or you know a lot of them, right? And we had lots of EMS folks here this morning and but across all of our bureaus,

we have some wonderful, very dedicated individuals who are doing this work. So with Live Long and Well, we have

a full $10,000,000 commitment. 5,000,000 has been allocated, you know, if

you will, to these four Catalyst Award winners. They've just finished their year of sort of planning for their projects, and most of their work is in Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan. So as you said, there's another 5,000,000 on the table for 2028. In terms of asking for additional money, you know, I have had talks and I presented to the Atrius board, and I think they're very excited about the work that we're doing. Just so you're aware, we're actually doing this work on a national level.

So we have a project called Cities Lead, where we're taking our work here in Boston, and we're helping other people to design really comprehensive programs for our cities. So it's for the 15 largest cities in The US, which I think is is really great. We have talked about, well, you know, if this works out, can we, you know, increase the, you

know, the the amount of money that we receive? And I just don't know that we're there yet. They wanna see how well things go with this first 5,000,000 and even the second, and then we can ask for more. But I I hear exactly what you're saying. There are, you know, other opportunities to look for funding, we're certainly pursuing them.

Absolutely. And I think the health of the greater Boston area is also important to the city of Boston. This is really a regional approach and I wanna thank Atrius Health Equity Foundation for their work and encourage their partnership at Ebony Point and grateful for all that they do. And so, obviously, we just permitted a brand new cancer hospital at 1 Jocelyn Place in in the Fenway. And I'm curious how you think about the determination of need funding and how we can partner, with, you know, that state requirement.

There's gonna be over $20,000,000 available, to you know, for a lot of things, for workforce development, for health care. How can we as a city think strategically about how to solve these preventable death outcomes as we're we might not have, you know, a 100% of the resources available at our disposal, but those funds will be available to solve the problems of the day. Mhmm. So how do you how are

you thinking about that?

I think

I think a big part of Live Long Well is partnership and collaboration. So, we've had a longstanding partnership with Dana Farber. I mean, you know, really decades of their investing in both cancer prevention, screening, and diagnosis in the city of Boston. They've also been a part of, you know, our housing acquisition fund and all, you know, many other really important initiatives, including, you know, the firefighters' cancer screening most recently that you sponsored. And just a lot of work that they're doing is

I believe that they have just

a very strong anchor mission. You know, they really are invested in the surrounding community. So I I think what the way that we're approaching this is, you know, we're building strengthening our partnerships. So what we're doing is working with them to hopefully invest collaboratively. So it's not just Dana Farber, but it's also maybe MGB or they're we're working with the Atrius Foundation or we're looking at other foundations to sort of pool our money to move things forward. And just so you're aware, Dana Farber just recently allocated $1,000,000 for us to focus specifically on community outreach and cancer screening. So they're doing the work, we're going to, you know, enhance the work by, I guess, catalyzing other people to come to the table, which is, I think, the purpose of designing a program like Live Long and Well.

Absolutely. And I just want to get this question on the record of its possible chair. I've been out with Mary Anne Ponte and and and just understanding sort of like the street outreach work that is going on. One thing that's come to my attention is just how little folks are paid to go out and do some of the most important work in the city. So I know while you're not involved in the collective bargaining work that will go on, I just wanna advocate for street outreach workers to make more.

Because essentially, every single issue that we're dealing with in the city of Boston that we're paying others a lot of money to also deal with on the flip side, we're not dealing with at the root, or we're not we're not valuing that work with actual dollars. So I just wanna say that my advocacy is that street outreach workers should make more money and I mean, how do we keep people in jobs that are incredibly meaningful, but but really push their family to the brink in terms of what they're able to afford and and how long you're able to stay in a career that is so meaningful. So thank you for and I know you will advocate on their behalf as well, but I just wanted to put that into the record. Thank you, Chair.

Okay. Thank you. We agree. Okay. So I've I've got a couple questions here from Colette counselor Colette Zapata from district one, which I think we're going to cover quickly. Okay, so in the proposed budget, what resources or staffing are being allocated toward the Domestic and Sexual Violence Prevention Initiative? How much total funding is allocated to the initiative, and how does it compare to recent years?

Okay. So, I think that's a great question. I'll just say that, you know, again, newer initiative, we're working on a lot. I'm going to bump it to Chris to provide the exact numbers so that you have it on record.

If That portion of the office is at just over $300,000 with two FTEs assigned to it, and that's been pretty consistent from the previous fiscal year. Okay.

Okay. Next, what additional investments will be made for data collection, identifying trends, and connecting victims with trauma informed care, such as centralized dashboard? Are you getting it for drink spiking incidents?

Okay. We sort of talked about this.

Female Sorry, I'm going skip that one then.

That's okay.

Because we talked about it this morning. Okay. There's and then what community safety programming under with community safety programming, moving under BPHC, what are the investments in the next fiscal year supporting outreach workers, trauma and forced services, youth engagement, and violence prevention efforts? And based on current data, are additional resources needed in communities like Charlestown and East Boston?

So, I'm going to give that to Isaac.

Yes. So, with the funding that moved over from the mayor's office to the health commission, that funding has been used to stabilize and bolster programs that are currently operating. A lot of the funding has gone to the VIP initiative, which, through this funding has been able to expand from five neighborhoods to 10, including both Charlestown and East Boston that represent, the Councilors District. And so, with that, we're also doing work, with our space activation stuff. So, we just did an activation in the Bunker Hill development.

We've done Maverick Square. We continue to focus on primarily in Charlestown, the Bunker Hill development in East Boston. It's the Shore Plaza and Maverick Landing areas and Maverick Square areas

as a whole. Okay. Okay. Thank you. And then can you clarify the health commission's role in addressing the public health impacts from persistent noise issues? And are there opportunities in fiscal year twenty seven to improve coordination and communication around these cases? There is sometimes confusion around BPHC's role versus licensing ISD, BPD and three eleven.

So, think that's an important question. Obviously, is an important quality of life issue, certainly a public health issue. Within our Community Initiatives Bureau, we have an environmental and occupational health division. They respond to noise complaints in collaboration with other partners. So, with BPD, if it's escalated, ISD, Public Works, and the licensing board, as well as others.

For excessive noise issues, residents should absolutely call or lodge a complaint with 311. It will be routed appropriately and responded to, to whichever of the appropriate agencies that I just mentioned. There is the BPD party line also that people should be using to directly connect with BPD if people are having large parties or events. Local police districts are obviously available to deal with noise and disturbances, especially at night. Just so you're aware, and I think Councilor Coletta is mentioning, you know, a specific event, we have been in touch with her about that issue and looking at how to route and maybe educate the public about how to best reach out to folks, which, as I said, is is 311 first and foremost.

But certainly for allowed parties you can call the VPD party line.

Okay. Thank you very much on behalf of Counselor Kalezawada. I'm just going give myself a couple minutes and then we'll go to public testimony next. So, just my office worked with Michael Reich at Harvard School of Public Health to look at and his grad students to look at maternal health, infant mortality rates. Their suggestion with working with the Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center was like a stipend for food while mothers were expecting. So, we looking do we already do anything like that in the city? What can we do to support work like that if you think it's worthwhile to pursue?

Oh, it's an absolutely it's a critical issue. And it's really those social determinants of health that are driving some of the infant mortality disparities that we see. I mean, have an infant mortality rate that's, you know, between two and three times higher amongst black women and black babies versus white. And that's, you know, just completely unacceptable, even though our overall infant mortality rate is low. It's that gap that doesn't even make sense, and a lot of that is about, you know, adverse social and structural determinants of health.

So, through our Healthy Start Systems program, we do have a strong connection with families and, you know, both pregnant individuals and their families, so not just the pregnant individual, to do home based care, to work with them, to provide them with housing, housing supports, as well as food. And certainly, you know, Shirley's food pantry is designed to be within Healthy Star systems. That is a robust support. And I think I mentioned that even in the period of food insecurity, we were providing additional supports, additional gift cards for people to access food. So I agree that more needs to be done, but we are doing, I think, good work in that area.

Yeah. It it Well, anyway, maybe we can talk about a pilot for or something. I mean, try to work on that for the future. Think I mean, study that they came I mean, their work, I thought, was pretty convincing that this is like one very practical, you know, reachable sort of solution for, you know, maybe, you know, at least on a pilot basis to try to

see To if prove can make a nutrition security. Correct. Understood.

Yeah, it would just be it would be like just money for food essentially, you know, after you know, when someone's pregnant through six months after delivery or something.

So, have thought about, you know, sort of a universal guaranteed pilot specifically targeted towards individuals who are pregnant and their families up to a certain age. And just that cash transfer in there's already been pilots, but doing it doing one here in Boston maybe just specifically related and tied to our programming might be a a great way to say that these are the the little things Yeah. Because it's not it probably wouldn't even be that expensive to do that would help, narrow that divide, that gap.

Okay. I think Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center could help with that.

It's a

great health center. Absolutely.

Okay. In terms of the community led mental health response. So is that the the the pilot? Is that are you looking to contract with one organization with the one point seven for the twenty two months?

That is that is the case. Yes.

And then what is the idea for you know, is there coordination with BPD? Is there a how is

that We've been talking to be we have been contemplate. We have been talking to BPD about the community led design because there should be coordination. We shouldn't be operating systems in parallel. We should be strengthening an entire ecosystem to address mental health issues. I think we have pieces and, you know, we just we want them to be coordinated.

Well, so how would that so a call comes in, someone calls 915, someone calls this different number, like, how do you imagine this playing out? Maybe this is still

Well, I think some of this is still being cooked. But if you look at the RFP, it does talk a little bit about having, you know, triage, and there has to be a place where, you know, you have people who are call takers. And I would think that some of this really needs to be discussed and led by, communities discussing how this actually unfolds because this is really meant to be a product of community and community needs. And I think that we can get a lot out of actually studying this particular intervention to see if it's something that can be scaled up.

Okay. And I guess how do we measure success of the pilot? I mean, what are we looking for? Like, when we get to the end

of the Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that there are a number of ways to evaluate success. I mean, it's going to be in one community. So, that right there gives you some geographic boundaries. You can just think about, you know, satisfaction with responses in the community, you know, and just process indicators, like how many calls did peers take, what were the outcomes of those calls, and compare to what was actually outcomes of interactions with people who are, you know, emotionally disturbed previous in previous years and under other circumstances. So I think

there are lots of ways that we could actually evaluate a pilot, especially one that again is is geographically bound like that.

Okay. And then just a a budget question. So is this coming out of contractual services? Where where is the money for the pilot in your budget?

Well, I guess ours is constructed a little bit differently because we don't have the same cost categories as the city. So we would call this a subcontract on ours our side.

Okay. Okay. And then so there's 1,700,000 in that there for this pilot?

It's over a couple of fiscal years, but yes, it is there.

So is it half for fiscal year '27? Or is it 1.7 now, 1.7 later?

So it's twenty two months. So, I think it's meant to be, you know, $1,000,000 and, you know, then whatever's remaining in the rest of the time.

Okay. Yeah.

Would be in the, like, fiscal year 2018. Exactly. Okay. Okay. Well, thank you. Just know my colleagues probably have additional questions, but we do have folks here for public testimony. Going go to testimony. I'll just get through that. Again, you know, we have do have a two minute timeline or time limit just because we've got a lot of folks who want to make their voices heard. Just, you know, we're never gonna get through everyone if people go way over.

Just acknowledge that you've heard the the the beep and that you're gonna wrap up or I have to like, you know, interrupt people, which I definitely don't wanna do. So we're gonna start out with the Peace Institute, Alexandra Clementina. So we'll start there. Yes. So okay. For public testimony, you can use either of these microphones. If you're on the taller side, I definitely recommend the one on my right. Just and then get, you know, this is like eating ice cream. You just want to speak very closely into the mic, then we'll be able to hear you. So, tell us your name, where you're from, what organization you're with, if you're with one, and then I'll start the clock.

Well, thank you all for the opportunity to testify today. I'm Alexandra Durellis, I'm co executive director of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute. And I just want to share for more than three decades, the Peace Institute has supported families and communities impacted by murder, trauma, grief, and loss while working to transform society's response to homicide and cultivate cycles of peace throughout the city of Boston. Historically, victim services often end once a victim dies.

Families are then left to navigate overwhelming grief, trauma, funeral planning, court proceedings, financial hardship, public systems largely on their own. The Peace Institute was created because families deserve long term care advocacy and healing even beyond that first moment of sympathy. Since 1996, the city of Boston, Boston Police Department, hospitals, the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office, and community agencies have consistently referred survivor families to the Peace Institute. Over time the Peace Institute became an essential part of Boston's trauma response infrastructure helping to build and strengthen the collaborative systems that exist today. Today that work continues in close partnership with the Boston Public Health Commission's Community Response Network.

Together the CHERN and the Peace Institute form a coordinated homicide response system that ensures families and communities impacted by homicide receive immediate and ongoing support. CHERN responds on the front lines to incidents of community violence and the Peace Institute survivor outreach team provides critical behind the scenes direct care and long term support for survivor families. When a homicide occurs in Boston, our SOS team is brought into the coordinated response. Referrals come from the Boston Police Homicide Unit, Family Resource Officers, BMC, Beth Israel, Tufts New England Medical, and Mass General Brigham, and the District Attorney's Office. Within the first seventy two hours after a homicide families are connected to an SOS coordinator who guides them through burial and funeral planning, victim compensation, crisis stabilization.

Research demonstrates the financial cost of a single homicide. I'm gonna just end with I heard the beep. We respectfully ask that the city continue investing in this life saving infrastructure by supporting both Boston Public Health Commission's request and the Lewis d Brown Peace Institute's request of a three year commitment totaling $1,000,000 annually.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you, chairman Weber and vice chancellor Fitzgerald and honorary members of the committee. What makes the Peace Institute unique in this support for families does not end once immediate crisis is over. Families continue receiving support through healing groups, workshops, leadership development, and advocacy opportunity, and reentry support when applicable. Families are impacted on both sides. And to the survivors of homicide victims network, a community share of shared experiences where survivors find healthy healing, connection, and purpose.

We also support and organize our unsolved homicide ambassadors, family members who continue to seek justice and ensure that a light continues to shine on our loved ones' cases through public awareness, advocacy, community education, remembers an ongoing partnership law enforcement and city agencies. Many survivors led organizations throughout Boston were first nurtured and fiscally sponsored by the Peace Institute, and many of those leaders are now trusted partners within the community healing response network. This is what community infrastructure looks like. Although approximately sixty four percent of homicides we serve reside in the city of Boston, the city can currently contributes a small portion of what it costs to provide these comprehensive service. The needs of survivors families do not end after a funeral and neither should the city investment in the system that supports them.

These families are your constituents, your neighbors, and part of the fabric of our community. Too often, homicide and its aftermath is treated as an epidemic events. They are not. Homicide response by public health, public safety, and public education is an ongoing part of community health and community healing. The impact of homicide does not end with police investigation nor a funeral service.

Families continue carrying the emotional, financial, psychological, spiritual, and consequences for years. Across generations, a compassionate and effective city response must recognize and invest in that long term. I know my time is up. We have letters, and we also have our homicide response tool. And within there, we do have a map as to how this work is done within the city, division of violence prevention, and the CHRN, formerly Boston Trauma Response Center. So thank you again so much, and we hope that the Boston Public Health Commission get the funding that it needs to continue to do the amazing work. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you, miss Cherry. Okay so next up is the people's response campaign. I don't know Ms. Takanami, don't know if you can call people up. Don't even have to be on here if you wanted if you're inspired and you want to testify even though you haven't signed up. Just get in line. Just introduce yourself and you get two minutes again. Like, we want to hear from everyone, so try to keep it to the time.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you to the counselors, doctor Otakutu, Isaac, we went to high school together, and team. My name is Amantla Sip. I am a faculty member at Boston University School of Social Work and the co coordinator of Boston People's Response Campaign.

I'm here today because Boston deserves a better response when folks are in crisis. The Boston People's Response formerly known as the mental health crisis response model was built by this city. In twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, Boston based organizing groups successfully pushed the city to fund the development of a true community led crisis response. The city school, Boston liberation health, and 14 core community members answered that call. Spending upward of a year designing a model and pilot with real input from residents, providers, and organizations across the neighborhood.

Though some of the elements mentioned by doctor Ojukutu are quite similar to our model and response pilot, I would be remiss if I didn't identify that the pilot the two pilots are different. What we built reflects a clear conviction that mental health crisis response must be free, available twenty four hours a day, accessible citywide, and must not involve law enforcement in any way. It centers the communities who bear the greatest cost when crisis response goes wrong. Those who are bipoc, undocumented, disabled, unhoused, young, queer, and trans people. Responders would reflect those communities and bring lived experience to that work.

The scope is broad in design. Mental health crisis, wellness checks, substance use concerns, intimate partner violence, community trauma, conflict de escalation, neighborhood based response teams, a central dispatch hub, a dedicated line with no ID collection and no automatic 911 diversion. This is Boston's model and we believe an investment of 4,000,000 is imperative now more than ever. My colleague Amy will speak more about why we're here today. Thank you.

Amy?

Thanks, Amatala, and thank you all. Go ahead. Good afternoon. My name is Amy Takanami. I use she, her pronouns.

I'm a resident of District 6, a social worker, and a steering committee member of the Boston People's Response Campaign. So after our model and pilot were designed and presented to the city in 2022, as Amatala just outlined, our campaign was formed to organize and advocate for the full funding and full implementation of what was so meticulously designed by and for our community. Since launching in 2023, our campaign has grown into a powerful base of Boston residents, many of whom are directly impacted by the current role of policing and mental health crisis response. This includes young people, black, indigenous, and other people of color, disabled people, queer and trans people, immigrants, and working class people. Our campaign also includes social workers, nurses, public health workers, and other health care workers who believe a non police, non carceral response is urgently needed.

Today, you're gonna get to hear from many of our members about why we are urging you all to fully fund this pilot at $4,000,000. We've also been in ongoing relationship with the Boston Public Health Commission, particularly the Center for Behavioral Health and Wellness, where we believe this pilot and model could be housed. And while you heard from doctor Ojikutu's presentation that some funding indeed has already been allocated toward a different pilot, we at BPR believe full funding is necessary to run our pilot. A pilot that stewards the original community led design process and that can demonstrate the proof of concept needed to ultimately win a full citywide response. Thank you for your time.

I urge you to invest in our collective health and our collective safety by fully funding our pilot at $4,000,000. I'm gonna pass it to my colleague, Khalik, to share a little bit more about why our model is really important in this sociopolitical moment today.

Thank thank you. Thank

you, Amy. So good afternoon. My name is Khalik Williams. I am the executive director at the City School, a Boston based nonprofit rooted in Dorchester that has been developing young leaders for racial and social justice for over thirty years. I'm here today to urge you to fully fund the $4,000,000 pilot for free non police non carceral community based mental health crisis response.

I want to talk about why that matters specifically for young people. John Hopkins review of forty years of research found that police contact is consistently associated with adverse health outcomes for black youth including sadness, anger, fear, stress, and hopelessness with effects that can follow young people into adulthood. When young when a young person first first meaningful encounter with some level response to the mental health crisis involves police, we risk turning a moment of vulnerability into the beginning of a very different kind of story. Think back to your own childhood. What was weighing on you?

What were the things happening in the world around you that shaped how you felt about your safety, your future, and your place in this country? I think about my own experience growing up in the aftermath of nine eleven and what that did what that and what that did to the way this country treated whole communities of people. Now imagine that multiplied many times over and you start to get the picture of what today's young people are carrying. They grew up in a pandemic whose full effects on their development we still don't completely understand. Studies are already documenting significant setbacks with research showing students are still behind the equivalent of one to one to five months of school compared to pre pandemic levels and 50% increase in the number of students performing significantly below grade level.

They are watching our country seemingly tear itself apart with people being taken off American streets and sent to unknown places. They've seen the city at large being targeted by the federal government. They are watching a new war unfold in Middle East. That is a tremendous amount to hold. What young people need, what all people need is a response that meets them at this moment. We care and not criminalization. And I see my time is running but I would just like to say so we are asking for you to invest $4,000,000 in this pilot to situate within the Boston People's I'm sorry Boston Public Health Commission where it can be accountable to the community it serves. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay. I'm just I have Maya. I'm sorry. I'm just gonna mispronounce everything. I think that's I'm not sorry. Okay. After Maya, there's somebody with last name that's like it starts with a v, then star Nunez, Shaila Wang, Esther, Celia, Lugo, maybe. Okay.

Alright.

Hi, Boston City Council and BPHC. My name is Maya Melischercai. I'm a resident of JP Of District 6. I've been involved with the BPR since being a part of the facilitation team for the design process. I've been a licensed independent clinical social worker in Massachusetts for close to fifteen years.

I'm currently a practicing therapist, clinical supervisor, and social work professor. I wanna speak today to the anticipated positive benefits of the BPR model. Firstly, for therapists, many of us have experienced intense pressure to forcibly hospitalized someone or call the police when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis with our licenses and positions being threatened if we don't. This puts providers in a position of wanting to support in consent based ways that won't escalate harm, but we risk our careers if we do. This is the case because there are currently no fully consent based non police crisis response models for the city of Boston.

So there are circumstances, for example, in which clinicians end up choosing to forcibly hospitalize someone who is suicidal in order to protect their job despite the fact that research shows that forced hospitalization only increases risk of suicide after hospital discharge. If the PPR model was a program we could call, therapists also wouldn't be putting people's lives at risk. As a content warning, I'm going to briefly name an experience with suicidal ideation. I've navigated having to support someone who was who was at risk of actively committing suicide, and at the same time, was considering death like God if they came to that. What would you do if this might sorry.

What's I'll start over there. I've navigated having to support someone who was at active risk of committing suicide, and at the same time, was considering death by cop if it came to that. What would you do if this was someone you were currently supporting and had an impossible choice to make? There might be support within someone's own community, but there are no safe options for a city program you could call and rely on in this moment or numerous similar crisis moments. The fact that suicide by cop is even a consideration speaks a volume to the volumes to the violence, not safety of our current response system.

I also wanna add that we often hears about safety concerns for responders, and I think it's important to name that the vast vast majority of folks experiencing mental health crisis in my experiences are directing harm against themselves, not others. Hold secondary trauma from some of the circumstances I've navigated with folks. If this is the level of repercussions and fear that I hold as a provider, the impacts on family members, friends, folks experiencing mental health crisis themselves must only be significantly more pronounced. With PPR oh, finishing up. With PPR, there'd be more trust and community members could share more openly because they wouldn't fear these repercussions.

This is truly a life and death matter. A life and death matter for only $4,000,000 in the upcoming budget. This is a simple choice. Reject the current budget and then add in full funding for the BPR pilot, force mayor Wu to reinvest more public money back into the budget, and then invest in additional life referring programs. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon everybody. Thank you Maya and everyone who's gone so far and thank you to everyone who's going to go because it's hard to get up here. Appreciate everyone's vulnerability. My name is Tara. I use she her pronouns, Tara Venkatraman.

I use she her pronouns and I'm a resident of District 5 in Rossendale. I'm also the director of programs and strategy at the city school, a long time youth worker and organizer in Boston, and a very proud member of the Boston People's Response Steering Campaign Steering Committee since 2022, believe it or not. I'm also a licensed independent clinical social worker, a social work supervisor, and I've been practicing as a therapist for the last six years. I wanna echo that everything my colleagues have said and are going to say about why we need the Boston People's Response Campaign. I'm actually here to share that our campaign is advocating for this pilot in the context of a much broader fight around the budget.

We are part of a much larger budget coalition alongside Better Budget Alliance and organizations that are fighting for school year jobs funding to be restored in the budget among many other things. As a campaign with that is advocating for real support for folks in mental health crisis, I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that this currently proposed budget will increase mental health crisis for young people and community members across the city amongst other groups. The current proposed budget completely eliminates the school year jobs program for almost 2,000 young people in the city, cuts funding for essential services for immigrants, for queer and trans residents, for eviction prevention, and for food access. We need to be clear, the city of Boston has the money for what people need. Boston has over 1,000,000,000 in reserves, up to which more than half can be used.

The parking meter fund has a remaining 40,000,000 of its total 86,000,000 that can be used. What we are asking for is a fraction of that money. We understand that this funding is meant to be used in the case of emergency. Right now this budget proposal has created a state of emergency. We are here in a state of emergency. Communities that are already under attack by the federal government are fighting for essential services right here in our city. School year jobs provide essential mental health services for young people and so do all of the other things that have been struck in this budget. So the Boston people's response I did hear the time. I'll wrap up. The Boston people's response campaign is calling on the Boston City Council to reject this current the current budget proposed by the mayor and to stand together to insist that we need more money added to this current budget.

Amending the budget this year is not enough. And so we are calling on all of the city council to include 4,000,000 for our pilot in the final version of this budget. We urge you to exercise your power, represent your constituents, and insist that this year's budget meets all of our essential needs. Thank you.

Hi. My name is Star Nunez. I use she, her pronouns. I'm 18 years old, I'm a resident of District 7. Growing up, I watched people around me struggle silently with mental health. Trauma, instability, and pain that most people never fully see. I was 11 years old when I lost the trust of police. I was 11 years old when I lost a family member to a police officer who didn't know how to handle a mental health crisis. 11, I hope today that number sticks with you. I was a young person and that affects you more than people realize.

It changes the way you see your community. It changes the way you see safety because safety is not just about your policies or punishment. Safety is knowing that when someone is breaking down, there is someone trained to help them with compassion. There have been so many moments in my life where I wish people had access to support earlier, before things became too severe, before people hit their breaking point, and before situations turned into something traumatic for everyone involved. A lot of people in our communities are carrying pain every day and still trying to survive.

Young people are carrying anxiety, grief, family instability, housing insecurity, violence, addiction around them, and so much emotional weight that nobody talks enough about. This is why I'm asking the City Council to reject the budget and fully fund BPR. Because to me this is about humanity and I would hope that you have it. It is about giving people the chance to be met with care during some of their hardest moments. It is about building a city where people are supported before tragedy happens instead of only reacting afterwards.

What we need is prevention. I want a future where my generation and young people grow up feeling like pain isn't something that has to be invisible, only noticed when it becomes an emergency. Boston has the opportunity to choose compassion and I really really hope you do. To choose prevention and to choose your people. I hope you do. Thank you.

Good

afternoon counselors. My name is Shilyu Wong. I'm a District 6 resident in Jamaica Plain and a family nurse practitioner at community health center here in Boston. I will be speaking on behalf of myself today, in support of a non police, non carceral community based mental health crisis response pilot in the city of Boston. Many of the patients I work with are members of communities here in Boston who are actively oppressed, policed, and disinvested in by members of our local, state, and federal governments.

When it comes to seeking support in the middle of a mental health crisis, often with very little physical and social infrastructure around them, their only option is to turn to the very institutions that they've experienced repeated violence and trauma within, including our law enforcement agencies and our medical system. I have had numerous patients share horror stories about being detained by the police in the middle of a mental health crisis and it being a toss-up whether they're getting arrested or brought to the ER. When they're brought to the ER, often by police or EMS, they're then sectioned, which is being legally detained, in a hospital for psychiatric treatment against their will, forced into situations in inpatient psychiatric facilities where they are not given clear information about what medications they're being injected with and how long they're being forced to stay in these units for. My patients are not a threat to public safety, have never harmed others even in the midst of psychotic episodes and deserve the support and gentleness that we all do in the middle of a scary and challenging experience. This is what the Boston People's Response Model would allow for.

It would allow for neighbors and peers and community members with shared lived experiences to support and meet them where they are, emotionally and physically. This is a model of care and mental health support that would foremost prioritize consent and agency and dignity. As a primary care provider with a large panel of, patients with complex psychosocial needs, many who are understandably mistrustful of the institutions that I just named, having access to a resource like this to give to my patients and to call on myself would be a huge weight lifted off my chest, knowing that my patients are going to be provided a community based support that honors their lived experiences and respects their choices. Again, this is what the Boston People's Models response could allow for. I urge you to reject Mayor Wu's current budget and fully fund the pilot at $4,000,000 for the f y twenty seven budget year.

Thanks.

Okay. On my list, I've just I've got Esther, Christine, Mitchell, I think Maria Fang and Happy. I don't know. Maybe I think that's Osa Zua, but Okay. I could be Whenever you're ready.

Hello, and thank you for this opportunity. My name is Esther Saraluque. I'm here like everybody else before me in support of allocating this 4,000,000 to fully fund the pilot for and very importantly, a non police, non carceral community based mental health crisis response model. I'm a resident of Roxbury. I've been in Roxbury for twenty years, and that's how I'm connected to the Boston People's Response Campaign.

I come here both with my personal experience and also like many other people who spoke before, professional experience. Personally, I'm here sending and I can I can't help thinking of a dear friend who last year we had to support through some of what my friend just talked about being sanctioned against their will and being having to face criminal charges after having a mental health crisis because of a domestic violence situation? Professionally, I've also been a trauma and domestic violence counselor for over fifteen years. I also currently work as a court interpreter, a certified court interpreter. And I can tell you, I spend my days hearing hundreds and hundreds of cases and situations that should be dealt with as a mental health crisis and end up being not only criminal charges, but also several times, especially in the last year with people being deported as a consequence of something that was a trauma or a mental health crisis.

I think that there's also the other thing that we need to think about. It's not only what happens when police are called to response to situations that are mental health situations, but also what happens when people don't actually call and they don't seek the help that they need. I've also seen those. I can tell you there's a lot of people that do not call because they are afraid to call, and they probably should be calling for help. In these situations, what happens is that there's already a whole community of people.

You have some of them here. There's many that are not here who already respond to these situations informally, you could say. But they are the people who are there providing the first response for mental health crisis, for trauma crisis, for domestic violence situations. So this is why I not only know that this model can work. I think it's also an opportunity for the city to put the budget behind, you know, a lot of what we've heard here, this concern for people, for trauma survivors, for domestic violence survivors to put the budget behind that.

And I heard the beep wrapping it up. And to actually fund a model that will support all those people that we've been talking about for the last hour.

Okay. Thank you.

Hello. My name is Maria Fong, and I'm here today to share testimony in support of fully funding the pilot for the non police, non carceral community based mental health crisis response model. I'm an elected member leader of the Boston People's Response Campaign as well as a freelance artist and a youth worker in Boston. I work in Dorchester, Chinatown, and Seaport with high schoolers who want to make art and make change. The latest 2023 CDC youth risk behavior survey found that forty percent of high schoolers report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness with rates particularly high for young women and queer youth, fifty three percent and sixty five percent.

Our city needs more supports for our young people. The young people I work with will certainly not call 911 to get this kind of help. In the midst of my own mental health crisis, I pulled up the new 988 number but the prospect of calling a stranger who could be anywhere in the country was intimidating. I was worried they would be transphobic. I was scared that if I told the hotline operator what was really going on in my brain, I would be picked up by an ambulance, taken away, further isolated and pathologized and be sent a bill from the hospital afterwards.

So, didn't call, my mental health got worse. When people don't get help, it gets worse and many times we see folks in crisis get killed by police. Police who are supposedly there to help but usually they make it worse. In contrast, the community based model would have responders who are based in their own neighborhoods with relationship and connections to the community as opposed to responding to citywide calls. The community based model would hire primarily people of color and people with lived experience managing mental health crisis.

These key differences would increase relationships. I'm strongly advocating to the city council to reject the mayor's current These proposed budget and make this investment in our city's mental health. I urge you to believe in the power of neighbors helping neighbors and along with funding for arts, youth jobs, and queer and immigrant organizations, this pilot will make us stronger and healthier. Thank you for your time.

Okay. Thank you. Whenever you're ready.

Hi. My name is doctor Christine Mitchell. I'm a graduate of Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and the director of the Health Instead of Punishment Program at Health in Partnership, which is a national public health nonprofit. I'm testifying today councilors to vote to reject the mayor's budget that cuts $20,000,000 from youth jobs, housing, immigrant support, and more. Amending the proposed budget is not enough.

As you've heard, it must be rejected. In addition, I'm asking city councilors to advocate for $4,000,000 for the 2027 budget for the implementation of a non police, non carceral, community led mental health crisis response model pilot. For the last decade, I've done research evaluating these types of programs nationally, and there are clear patterns to what our communities need. Mental health crises and police response to them disproportionately affect marginalized communities due to the systemic racism, ableism, and failures of traditional crisis response systems. People with untreated mental health needs are 16 times more likely to be killed by police than those without.

Most recently in Boston, police tragically killed Jacob Graves and Stevenson King, both of whom were experiencing mental health crises and whose deaths could have been avoided through city investment in crisis response alternatives. In 2018, the American Public Health Association identified police violence as a public health crisis, calling for public health solutions that allocate funding from law enforcement agencies to community based programs that address violence and harm without criminalizing communities, including mental health intervention. Research shows that alternative models are both more effective at meeting the needs of people in crisis and more trusted by the community than traditional policing. A 2023 study based on interviews with people with serious mental illness found that non police response is their most preferred choice. More than half of the participants in the study noted that they would want a non police response when they, a family member, or a friend are experiencing a crisis.

And yet, the current Boston City budget proposal allocates $484,000,000 to BPD and no investment into a non police response. So I'm asking today that the city council invest the requested $4,000,000 into the Boston People's Response. Our city has the opportunity to be a national leader in mental health, and I urge you to make that investment. Thank you.

Hi. My name is Happeo Suzuwa, an eleventh grader at New Mission High School and I am a resident of District 3. I'm here to speak in support of Boston People's Response, a community based organization focused on mental health crisis. Too often when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis, the default is calling the police. But police are not always trained to handle these situations in a way that leads to safety or even healing at all.

That's why programs like BPR, Boston People's Response are so important. This model offers a non police community based based response that focus on care de escalation and real support instead of punishment. Investing in this approach will help create safer outcomes for teens like me and everyone in general. It reduces harm and ensure that people in crisis receives the kind of help that they actually need. I also urge the city councilor to reject the mayor's the mayor's budget completely, send it back to the mayor and advocate for the 4,000,000 for Boston people's response in the final budget.

Our communities deserve real investment in care safety and mental health support. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Thank you. Yeah I've got Sarah, Yasmin, sorry I gotta put my glasses on. I'm not sure of Williams then Nyung Kim. Whenever you're ready.

Good afternoon city councilors. My name is Sarah Onke. I use theythem pronouns and I'm a resident of Dorchester in District 3. I am a social worker and have been an enthusiastic member of the Boston people's response since 2023. As someone who has lived experience with mental health crises, both my own and those of loved ones and has worked as a mental health practitioner, I stand firm in the truth that a non police, non carceral, community led mental health crisis response is something that the people of Boston desperately want and need.

I have witnessed loved ones firsthand being met with police violence when they called for mental health support and I myself have not reached out for help when I really needed it out of a deep seated fear of police, state sanctioned violence and a loss of autonomy. When we are having mental crises, police treat us as threats to be put down, have us hospitalized against our will or incarcerate us, instead of treating us as human beings in need of support. Consent and safety are paramount in mental health care and we urge you to help us prioritize it. As a Muslim and Arab, I have also seen the negative impact of police, state sanctioned violence and surveillance on my ethnic and religious community. All Bostonians especially people of color, immigrants, disabled folks, queer and trans folks, and working class folks deserve to reach out and receive affirming mental health support without fear or hesitation.

They deserve to know that they and their loved ones can call for support without wondering whether the response will lead to injury, incarceration, or death. They deserve to know that they will be met with gentle consent based care and genuine support. If all of this isn't compelling enough, our report cited research that police as first responders cost four times more than community response models such as ours. Therefore, I am fervently asking city councilors to reject the mayor's current proposed budget and then allocate 4,000,000 from the final 2027 budget to support our pilot. This amount is a drop in the bucket compared to the almost 500,000,000 mayor Wu wants to allocate to the police. Please help us make Boston safer and more just. Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Yasmin Bailey, I use she, they pronouns and I'm a registered voter from the District 4. Today, my testimony will conclude one thing, for counselors, counselor, to reject mayor Wu's proposed budget and add full funding for BPR, Boston people's response, back into the final budget. That's $4,000,000 in case you forgot. First point, I believe that the purpose of a city budget is to provide funding for the maintenance and inclusion of public services, community needs, and infrastructure.

The previous mayor administration started this three pronged research pilot program for a mental health crisis response. They looked to the Boston Police Department to better their mental health response for a community led design group to create a pilot program and for a co response model to happen which that included police and mental health care workers working together. As stated previously, the City School of Boston Liberation Health put in a bid for the RFP for the community led design group. We got it. And for the past four to five years, community leaders and members have collaborated extensively on the creation of a community led non carceral, non police fully funded mental health crisis response pilot that's backed by research, backed by community voices, and backed by a vision for a future in Boston that is one centered around safety, care, healing, and growth.

It would be great to have the city of Boston specifically follow through on their preexisting investment. This research project in the previous mayor administration gave funding to community groups in order to do this work, gave funding to community members to do that work. And it's a bit strange that now there is no continuation to see the that creation of that pilot program to see it happen in our experiences and what we need. Almost out of time and I'll wrap up. Moments like these where we are here to share our voices and where we are here to hear about what our community is doing is an important reminder that we are most impacted.

And since we are the most impacted, you will need to fund the services that can address our needs because that is the purpose of a city budget. Thank you so much.

Hi. My name is Sherry Williams. I'm 16 years old. I'm a member leader of the Boston People's Response Campaign associated with the city school, and I live in District 5. Time and time again, people of color people of color have been failed by those who are meant to protect us.

Why should my skin color, my neighborhood, or the health issues I'm experiencing affect how I am treated by the police or my access to adequate mental health care? Suicide is the second leading cause of death in youth age 15 19. According to your Health of Boston report from 2024, from 2017 to 2021, black adolescents experienced higher rates of mental health emergency department visits across multiple age groups 10 through 14, 15 through 17, and 18 through 19 than white youth of the same age group with the highest rates observed among black female youth. As a black female myself, I deeply feel that you as city councilors should be doing more to make sure the youth who will one day be in your shoes are fully taken care of physically and mentally by being given their human right to adequate health care without risk of incarceration. In the seventh grade 2022, I started attending Boston Latin School.

Two days after the first day of school, a ninth grade student jumped in front of a MBTA train and although not injured, it was still devastating to hear about. Then in eighth grade, a student got sent to the hospital because she had an allergic reaction to a vape. My friend was also doing self harm in the bathroom because of family issues and the school psychologist had no interest in listening to her and would have likely called the police only further endangering her. Furthermore, the constant police surveillance at Forest Hills that has increased in the past couple of years only puts youth more on edge in an area where they should feel they can hang out and be free to be a child. Although I do know I no longer attend Boston Latin anymore, had my friends or I had access to BPR, the Boston People's Response, resources would have been able to be provided for substance abuse, depression and suicide preventing and treating their pain in a way that is community based and equitable.

Clearly since you work in the Boston Public Health Commission you are aware of the catastrophic mental health crisis that is prevalent among the youth in the city. You simply don't want to take immediate action towards fixing it. If you truly cared about the people who live in your communities, you would do your actual job listening to us, the people affected by mental health crises, and fighting to make our lives better by rejecting Mayor Wu's budget and then adding funding back in for initiatives such as the Boston people's health Boston people's response mental health crisis pilot. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello. Good evening, city council. My name is Nayoung. I'm 30 years old and I'm a full time psychotherapist and a Boston resident. I reside in Dorchester, Massachusetts in District 3 on Pawtucket Land and I'm a proud community organizer with this campaign and a member of Boston Liberation Health and Runners for Justice in Palestine, Boston.

We are asking city councilors to reject the mayor's current proposed budget and then add to approve an amendment for $4,000,000 for the final 2027 budget for the implementation of the non police, non carceral community led mental health crisis response model pilot. My clients should have the option to explore warm lines and interventions outside of the carceral system and have access to multiple options. As a psychotherapist and clinical social worker who also holds the title of mandated reporter, I fully believe that what people need are community connection regrounding not law enforcement. I strongly believe this model to be an asset in the community once implemented as this will allow people to access a system of care that's tangible, responsive, local, and community driven. In my experience both living with people in a d b crisis and mental health crisis, a local third party intervention that's in person and not a hotline would have made a monumental difference in not just supporting the person experiencing the crisis but also me and others who are witness and didn't have the supports and groundings to know what to do at the time.

A third party without weapons, knowledge about the community, and someone who's trained in peer support to help ground and respond was needed. In addition, for me, it's about holding people we've lost, whether Saeed Faisal in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sonia Massey in Springfield, Illinois, or other Korean Americans just like me from Koreatown, LA, Young Young, and Victoria Lee from Fort Lee, New Jersey. Rest in peace to the lives senselessly lost in a moment where they needed connection and support. We need alternatives, not more police, not more prisons, not more systems that don't affirm agency and humanity. $4,000,000 is absolutely nothing compared to Mayor Wu's recent allocation of $480,000,000 plus for police.

The research proves it, our lived experience proves it, that we need alternatives. Black Bostonians, disabled Bostonians, LGBTQ plus Bostonians, immigrant Bostonians, unhoused Bostonians, Bostonians of color deserve this and deserve to have their humanity, safety, and concerns about their fears and wishes affirmed and responded to. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. I've got Ariel Ellison, I think Charming Solomon. Okay. Whenever you're ready.

Thank you for allowing me to share my testimony. My name is Ariel Ellison, and I live in the Fenway Kenmore District District 8. I'm an incoming junior at Northeastern University and a member of the Boston People's Response Campaign. I'm here to ask our city councilors to reject the mayor's current proposed budget, and in the final budget, fully fund the pilot for the non police, non carceral, community based mental health crisis response model at $4,000,000. This campaign is important to me because of my personal experiences and firsthand exposure to the implications of mismanaged mental illness.

My struggles with anxiety and depression began in elementary school with what started as panic attacks that landed me in the ER. It took over ten years to reach an assessment and diagnosis. As a daughter of a Hispanic immigrant, the cultural norms that stigmatized asking for help and being labeled as mentally ill were instilled at a very formative age. I often felt helpless and desolate, unable to access medication and therapy as a minor due to my lack of parental support. In addition to my own struggles, I watched close family and friends receive aggressive interventions from law enforcement or refrain from seeking treatment and attempt suicide.

The fear of being met with the police response is a widely shared concern amongst many youth and is why this program is essential towards ending our mental health crisis. My uncle's bipolar disorder had a very important impact on our family. I vividly recall watching his manic outbursts while being ill equipped to navigate these episodes, which forced our reliance on law enforcement. On multiple occasions, he was sackled and arrested by police for his erratic behavior and verbal hostility. These events reinforced the harmful idea that had been internally established, the fear of being mistreated for needing, seeking, or receiving mental health treatment.

They also further discouraged my parents from allowing me to obtain the support I needed as they felt the repercussions outweighed the benefits of being labeled mentally ill. These violent and lethal interventions have yet to change change as the data shows 25 of fatal police shootings are responses to mental health crisis. Most recently, Jacob Graves was shot and killed by police on April 4 at his residence during a crisis response. As a Northeastern student and a member of this campaign, I am deeply committed to advocating for our community. I ask for your consideration to support this initiative and fully fund the response model. Promoting alternative response measures that have been successful in other communities can prevent the inevitable escalation of violence when relying on police interventions and reduces stigmas towards seeking help. Thank you.

Okay.

Hello. Hello. My name is Charming Salamang. I'm the program coordinator at Unname Youth Organizing Network. I'm a resident of Dorchester, and I'm a member leader here at Boston People's Response.

Just like everybody here, I've also showed up to ask city councilors to fund and approve $4,000,000 for the implementation of the non carceral community led mental health crisis response program. And I'm a youth worker, so I've had the privilege of working with many young people directly impacted by crisis. I'm in community with many loved ones who are directly impacted, and as a Boston resident, I've had my hand share of experiences witnessing many people also struggling with crisis on the street. I've seen people struggle with mental health episodes, violence, substance abuse, illness. I've seen the way that people have felt safer and are more responsive when community members are showing up and de escalating instead of police.

There's always this point of argument when we're meeting with city councilors, where they love the model. They're like, yeah like I love what y'all are talking about but by default they're like, let's just hand it back to police. Let's train the officers. Let's amp up our trauma informed care. Let's teach some mediation, etcetera.

And to me personally, that's a clear indicator that you're not listening. You're not in community enough with people who are impacted every day by crisis and you don't have a basis of understanding trauma, black trauma, queer trauma, disabled trauma. The role of police is to respond to immediate threats and we often mistake it that crisis means that someone is a threat and that is not true. Crisis becomes a threat when there is a poor response to it. Seeing police officers crisis can further dysregulate your nervous system, further induce panic, extreme behavior because of the history of police, the countless murders that have happened globally, and because of the role of police is to identify and response to threats.

And mental health crisis again is not a threat. Community has asked for a safe for a safety system beyond police. Meaning that someone's orientation to responding isn't to put a gun to their bodies, isn't to throw them in jail, isn't to send them to an institution, and it isn't to decide what solutions best work for them. Instead community time and time again, they're asking for community members who look like them to respond with care, to address the root of what's happening, and to build what safety looks like for them and co build that. So if you don't fund this program, I think it's a disservice to the city, it's a disservice to young people, it's it's a disservice to queer people.

It's a disservice to everybody in this room. Yeah. So please fund us. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. I've got Sharique maybe, Chacon. Sorry if I'm mispronouncing that right wrong. And then Joaquin, I saw walk out. I don't know if you wanna grab Joaquin. Okay.

Good afternoon, city councilors. My name is Shanique Chacon. You were close. You were close.

Handwriting. I think it's miss Takanami setting me up here with

wrote this down?

It's totally okay. But I'm Shinichakon and I was born and raised in District 6, but recently moved to District 5. I'm the director of admin and ops at the city school and am a member of the Boston People's Response Campaign. I'm asking city councilors to reject the current f y twenty seven budget and add the funding of $4,000,000 in for the implementation of the non police, non carceral community led mental health crisis response model pilot. Unfortunately, we currently live in a time where there is great distrust in the law enforcement.

We have an overwhelming amount of data that shows that this distrust is due to experiences with police harassment. A Harvard study in 2024 surveyed 1,407 Boston residents of numerous ethnicities on their experiences in the general nature of contact with law enforcement. This study found that two out of five black Bostonians feel a deep distrust due to their experiences with police harassment. This same study also found that four out of five Bostonians show showed police harassment is also predictive of symptoms of trauma, especially so for Boston's black men. Now this response model is not about race.

It is about the safety of Boston's residents. This model works to address and solve the mental health crisis we are facing in this city. The data shows that the ways law enforcement are performing is actually making the crisis worse. This model will not only lessen the plate of the law enforcement so that they can focus their time on violent or criminal crimes, it will also help to rebuild the residents trust in the city's ability to keep them safe and address mental health crises in a restorative or transformative ways instead of a punitive one. This model was intentionally built to address mental health crises in a clinically proven way with professional healthcare workers who have actually studied and practiced on how to address conflict.

We can be the city that cares about mental health, the mental health of our people. We can be the example to the rest of the nation that Boston knows how to address this crisis while not contributing to it. Again, I urge you to project the current fiscal year twenty seven budget and add the funding of $4,000,000 to the community led mental health crisis response. Thank you.

Okay.

Good afternoon. My name is Joaquin Atala Gutierrez, and I'm 17 years old from High Park in Dorchester. I'm here with the Youth Justice and Power Union to demand funding into the Boston people's response as they are a very important tactic to address the mental health crises that happen in Boston. Both my parents are psychologists and therapists, have been raised and I've been raised in a household that helped me realize how serious mental health is. As a young man of color, there's a huge stigma around mental health.

The society teaches us to push down or to push our feelings deep down inside and to not be vulnerable. But when one pushes down their their difficult feelings, the feelings come out in harmful and violent ways. One example is this of one of my very close friends who got involved in gang violence due to the need for money in this expensive city and stole $3,000 from his father and started carrying around firearms. When confronted, he completely lost control. Instead of calling the police and putting him in jail, we called upon a community organization to look after his mental health, and since then he has graduated from high school and not been involved in street violence since.

Police showing up at mental health crisis did not make anything better, it just escalates the situation and strikes fear in the person that is already mentally unstable. In the country, a study shows that people with mental illness are 10 times more likely to get shot by police. Rather than people with guns, we need community members who are trained to deal with mental health crises and care about the person and their community to not arrest or shoot them when what they need is help. As a Palestinian Mexican American, my people are facing genocide and apartheid system and mental health is worse than ever and so is safety. So the city funding Boston people's response is funding the mental health and safety of our communities.

I demand the city council to reject this proposed budget by the mayor. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Sam.

Thank you

very much chair. I'm actually here on behalf of the Boston Saving Lives project today and part of what we wanted to address is the fact that currently there are no CSOs for the fire department or EMS. And as part of the non police response, we think that some of what the city can be doing is empowering some of the agencies that people do have trust with. Not to say that we don't wanna have more CSOs with BPD, but I think that that conversation is gonna be had more tomorrow as we start talking about body cameras. So, one of the things I wanted to really look at is that only 4% of the street's budget is actually in the operating budget right now, we're not spending that much on parks.

And as we really think about mental health, coming from a family where my mother was a doctor of internal medicine and my godmother was the head of NIH, I know a little bit about mental health and I think one of the ways that we can address mental health is by first of all making sure that the youth do have jobs, I actually support what you hear the youth saying and making sure that they actually feel welcome here in our city. We're spending $1,700,000,000 on schools but we see hospitals closing. We don't have Boston City Hospital anymore. We don't have Carney Hospital anymore and yet we have a a capital budget of 1 of $4,000,000,000. So one of the things I'd like to see us do is maybe get some of our health professionals, some of our partners here in the city that can actually create wraparound services, maybe partner with their group that they're advocating for because I don't believe in false narratives.

Obviously, we're friends, but that's one thing I wanna make sure that we don't get into is false narratives. I think you can do both. Obviously, we we recently saw the crisis on Memorial Drive and so you know God forbid something like that happens, obviously we would need you know our police to to deal with that crisis. But the police aren't needed for everything. I would much rather see our police at our annual Thanksgiving cook off worrying about what kind of turkey and what kind of dressing they're gonna be giving to the community than worrying about if they're acting appropriately. Thank you very much.

Okay. Thank you. I don't know if there's anyone else from the People's Response Campaign who is inspired to give remarks. You don't have to. Thank you very much. You know, it's really powerful and just showing up in numbers. I know, you know, my fellow counselors may not have been here to hear everything, but I think just showing up in numbers and speaking out on something. So, I just I have a couple just questions for the panel, and then we'll wrap up. Just in terms of so, it's like you want to do a community led mental health, you know, response. Like what in the data made you want to do that?

Do we have you have the data on like how many calls the police were responding to that are mental health calls in Boston in a year? What the outcomes of those are? And you know, what is the you know, what's the harm that you see that you want to address?

So, I don't have all of

the data right in front of me.

I want all the data.

Right. I mean, I don't have it all in front of me. Certainly, emotionally disturbed patients who have mental health crisis, We see that a lot in our city, and we want to improve the response. So, I have the data here. Some of it's in the background for the RFP, and we can send that to you so you have it in front of you.

Okay. And then, so when I talk to police officers, often they say, Yeah, I don't want to respond to mental health calls. It's very difficult, and you know, they would rather have people who are trained to kind of handle it. You know, some others are like, Well, we are trained, and you know, but I think generally they would like that sort of taken off their plate. I mean, so I don't know. What is your how have your conversations been with BPD around something like this?

So, I think that the key here

is actually what

the those people who you know, the groups are saying, what the community is saying, that we want alternative responses. It's not that there aren't some responses. It's not that we don't have, you know, the best team and other folks who are doing these, you know, engagements with people. I think that there needs to be different ways to manage people who are having mental health crises. And I think that this would not intend to replace what's already there, it would be to strengthen it.

And we have had conversations with BPD. It sounds like they are, you know, at least interested in participating with this, not being involved in this per se, but actually realizing that it should be part of our, you know, our toolbox, if you will, the group of interventions that we have. And this needs to be evaluated here in Boston. It does work in other settings, and there is evidence to suggest that it has been implemented in other cities, and it's effective. So, I think that it's valid, it's evidence based, and we wouldn't be putting out an RFP if we didn't think that it was something that we should do as a city.

Okay. And that is my I think my last question just in terms of like other models that are successful. Don't know if it's Seattle or like what have you seen that and what does their success look like?

There are a number

of programs that are out there.

One is in LHIN. It's called the LHIN Calm Team. I mean, I can send you the list of, you know, references. Maybe that would be helpful if you'd like me to do that after afterwards.

Dennis Yes, that would be fine if I could get that. We'll just request that information. I think we have some other counselor information. Okay. Well, it's you know, again, you know, I think it's something that we want to see and we want to fund.

Guess we'll have to talk to my colleagues about you know how to go forward with this. Know like I just want to thank the People's Response Campaign for really showing up and caring about something that I think you know most of the counselors you know, like the idea of. I know some people, they want the police involved, which is defeating the purpose of this. That's not me personally. I want to see a system like this work that, you know, is going to A, help people, keep people out of, you know, criminalizing their, you know, mental health issues while also keeping the responders safe at the same time, you know.

And every time we read about somebody who's having a mental health crisis and they end up being killed, you know, by the people who are there to supposedly help them, it's like, you know, it's outrageous and it's like crying out for response. Mean it seems like BPHC also has the same reaction to that and they're working on it. Maybe, you know, we have to work together to figure out where meeting the community needs. So, again, thank you everyone for showing up. This is what makes this body work.

We need information and we need your input to function. And so, you know, it does make a difference even if maybe you don't always feel that way. And I want to thank, honestly, Doctor. Ojikutu and everyone from BPHC for staying. Sometimes the panel ists leave when people speak, or they don't even look at the speakers. So you've engaged, hopefully we can continue this and get to something where we I want someone in, I don't know, Iowa City, where I went to law school, to be like, you know that program in Boston? That was amazing. We need to do that, too. So, yeah. So again, thank you very much. And this afternoon's hearing is now adjourned.

Thank you.