The state’s Department of Health and Social Services will allocate an extra $1.4 million of CARES Act funding to Haines while the community recovers from the natural disaster.
The money will go through Juneau’s Bartlett Regional Hospital, but the support services will be provided in Haines.
Bradley Grigg is the Chief Behavioral Health Officer at Bartlett Hospital in Juneau.
“The state looked at us as a crisis provider in that we were going on site already,” he said.
“And what they did was, to get money on the street, they could basically amend one of our grants to rather than go through a longer formal process, and trust us to work with the community partners to distribute this money in a way that should be so SEARHC is at the table.”
Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium runs the clinic in Haines. But Bartlett had a crisis stabilization and emergency psychiatric services grant already in place. And Grigg had already consulted with SEARHC and made reservations to send support to Haines.
He and a team of behavioral health specialists came to Haines immediately following the disaster to support the school and community. The team will remain in Haines through this Sunday.
“The grant basically covered the travel of my cost for two weeks of my teams to be on the ground, which I have a team up there now. And then the rest of the money is going to be distributed throughout the community to support short term and longer term, where we can, to ensure that families who have been impacted by the heavy rains and the floods last week, this funding will directly support them,” he said.
Grigg will be in meetings this week with SEARHC and the Haines Borough to finalize plans for how the remainder of the $1.4 million will be spent.
