Key Insights from the Delta Center’s Final Grantee Convening

In March 2024, the Delta Center for a Thriving Safety Net hosted its final grantee convening in New Orleans, Louisiana. The event brought together grantees from state primary care associations (PCAs) and behavioral health state associations (BHSAs) as well as the National Association for Community Health Centers and the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, the Delta Center’s two national partners. The goals of the convening were to facilitate peer learning, celebrate achievements, and strategize for sustaining the Delta Center work.

Attendees included Phase 2 grantees from the Alaska, Kansas, Gulf Region (Louisiana and Mississippi), Oklahoma, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania teams. On the first day, grantees shared their successes and accomplishments, workshopped challenges in breakout groups, and learned about the recent policy developments in the areas of the workforce crisis and primary care/behavioral health integration. During the second day, grantees heard about lived experience and equity from keynote speaker Keris Jän Myrick, the Vice President of Partnerships at Inseparable and former Director of the Office of Consumer Affairs at SAMHSA, followed by an equity panel and discussion, and a group brainstorming session on sustainability. Further, each team had the opportunity to practice pitching the work of their PCA-BHSA partnership to potential funders.

Key Takeaways

• Sharing power with people with lived experience ensures that policy and practice will meet the needs of the individuals and communities that primary care and behavioral health systems are seeking to serve.
• Codifying primary care and behavioral health state association partnership through concrete actions—such as shared policy priority documents, memorandums of understanding, and standard operating procedures—is a key to sustainability and especially important when there’s leadership turnover.
• Associations can be best positioned to respond promptly and effectively to new opportunities by maintaining ongoing relationships and communication with one another.
• The Delta Center has helped to bring people back together when they face setbacks in their relationship.
• Cross-state learning is extremely valuable.