Longmont’s OUR Center is receiving $165,000 in funding from the American Rescue Plan Act, the center said Thursday.
The funding will contribute $55,000 annually — over the next three years — for the creation of support groups, said Marc Cowell, the center’s executive director.
“We’re going to be spending the money on providing two Circle of Parents groups — one is going to be English-led, and one is going to be Spanish-led,” he said. “Circle of Parents is an evidence-based program that offers a supportive environment that’s facilitated by a trained facilitator, but it’s led by the parents and caregivers.”
The groups won’t have a set curriculum — participants will guide where discussions go, Cowell explained. The groups will also offer childcare.
“Basically it just provides a safe place where parents and caregivers can just come and openly discuss successes and challenges that they’re having raising children — share ideas, and support each other,” he said.
By unifying community resources, the OUR Center helps people achieve self-sufficiency by connecting them with rent assistance, childcare, food assistance, health care access and other resources.
The organization conducted a survey among its clients in late 2022 to find out what families need as they recover from the pandemic. One of the top issues parents cited was mental health support, Cowell said.
“A couple of things really stood out at the end of that survey — one of them was that 62% of respondents said they were really struggling with coping and managing stress and anxiety — and that’s for themselves, and for their children,” he explained. “We also saw that 60% of families said they would like to have support around promoting healthy social, emotional development.”
Around 57% of respondents said they were struggling to cope with anger, isolation and depression, Cowell said.
At the height of the pandemic, OUR Center was unable to provide many of the resources needed to help those struggling with generational poverty and mental health issues.
“We’re rebooting some of our two generational work, so this funding is perfect to help us kick-start these efforts,” Cowell said.
The center will also set aside a small portion of the American Rescue Plan Act funding to help support its frontline employees with mental health services.
“Our community-facing staff have been absolute warriors over the past three years — they’ve helped thousands of families navigate some very difficult situations … and it’s taken a pretty incredible toll on our team,” Cowell said.
The support services will help the employees with “shedding their secondary trauma that gets built up over time, and help them combat the compassion fatigue,” he explained.
The American Rescue Plan Act, which was signed into law in 2021, established pandemic recovery funds for municipal, county, state and tribal governments across the country. Out of Boulder County’s allocation of $63.3 million, $11 million will go to mental health and social resilience programs, said Marnie Huffman-Green, the county’s manager of the American Rescue Plan Act Mental Health and Social Resilience Project.
"We are excited to let the people of Boulder County know that these ARPA funds will go toward programs and services that strengthen system transformation for communities most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic by ensuring that any door is the right door to get mental health support," Huffman-Green said in a news release.
The mental health funding will go to local nonprofits, organizations, associations and the county’s two school districts.
The county created working groups and released community surveys to determine how the funding would be spent. Residents’ top post-pandemic concerns were mental health, social resilience, economic challenges and housing affordability, Huffman-Green said.
“Community members will have more ways to receive the holistic support at the not-for-profit agency where they feel most comfortable, and the goal of these grants is to lessen stigma associated with seeking mental health support,” she said in the release.
