This is a petition urging Mayor Cherelle Parker to stop her administration’s alarming plan to strip the West Philadelphia Mental Health Consortium – a community staple, respected nonprofit, and pioneer in the delivery of behavioral health care – of our longstanding contract with the City of Philadelphia. Ninety percent of the people we serve live below the poverty line and for 55 years we have provided lifesaving mental health care and drug addiction treatment to the city’s most vulnerable.

But unless Mayor Parker stops the impending termination of our city contract quietly initiated by her administration, we will lose a whopping $3.7 million in crucial city funding rendering us no longer able to serve the uninsured. This means thousands of poor residents living in and around West and Southwest Philadelphia neighborhoods plagued by deep and persistent poverty, gun violence and trauma will be left without the vital care they need to manage their mental health diagnosis, achieve addiction recovery and maintain sobriety.

What’s more is that if the mayor allows our behavioral health contract to be terminated, we will no longer have enough funding to continue our mobile crisis operation – our nationally renowned signature program – which dispatches clinical teams to respond to psychiatric emergencies and mental health distress calls throughout West and Southwest Philadelphia. We respond to 1,200 calls a year so the absence of our mobile crisis teams in these underserved communities will be a tremendous loss and great detriment to the families who live there.

At a time when mental health advocates are pushing for expansion of our mobile crisis teams so that we can respond to even more calls annually, it would be a travesty for the Parker administration to stop funding one of the most effective behavioral health interventions available. Doing so will result in increased arrests of the mentally ill, more costly emergency room visits and hospitalizations, and worsened stigma around mental health and addiction. 

A look at the Parker administration’s impending termination of our contract by the numbers

Under the Parker plan, we will lose:

·      $1,490,795 to fund our mobile crisis teams

·      $1,394,579 to provide mental health services to the uninsured

·      $509,202 to provide intellectual disability services to the uninsured

·      $370,773 to provide addiction treatment to the uninsured

Total funding loss: $3,765,349 

Inaction from Mayor Parker will leave the poor and uninsured in West and Southwest Philadelphia to suffer!