Good morning, everyone. We are here to continue with the interviews for D win, CEO. We have arrived at the stakeholder and governmental panel panel interview section of today's proceedings, and we have with us five governmental and community stakeholders present to interview Mr. James White, the panelists would introduce themselves at this time,
good morning. My name is Waseem afoos. I'm the Chief Executive Officer of Le HC leaders advancing and helping communities. Morning.
Good morning. My name is David Samson. I am the CEO of mariners in
Hello. Annette Downey, CEO of Community Living Services.
Mayor Lamar titwell, the city of ecourse
morning.
Good morning. Bianca miles, youth involvement specialist for Detroit land Integrated Health Network.
Good morning.
Thanks again for all for all of you for agreeing to appear for this portion of the interview process before we started. Mr. White, did you have any questions?
I do not.
Mr. Sampson,
good morning. Mr. White, my question to you, sir is, are there any situations in working with the public authority that you would consider not worthy of transparency? If so, what would that be?
I can't, I don't see any situation not worthy of transparency. I think that transparency is a necessity for Community Trust, and also it's a necessity for employee trust. And obviously, you know, there are certain medical things and such as, you know, HIPAA requirements and things like that that I can't speak to publicly or in certain circles. But transparency from an organizational standpoint, is an absolute necessity.
Good morning, sir. Morning. Given the complexities of Mental Health and Substance misuse disorders in Detroit and Wayne County, how would you ensure that the win is at the forefront of innovative and evidence based treatments while maintaining cost efficiency, efficiency and accessibility.
Yes, and that's a very good question, by the way, it's ongoing. You have to immerse yourself in the operation. You have to meet with your CFO and understand the budget. You have to be at the table. You have to lobby and advocate. You have to work with your provider network to see what the needs are. Going back to the first part of the question to ensure that we're at the forefront. I know that we have an accreditation that speaks to the requirements to maintain quality care. It's notable that that d1 has had it for three years, I believe it's three years, and that there are some requirements in it that will help ensure that we are meeting the needs of the organization. But also, I think metrics. I think data is important. I think listening to the provider network, looking at the performance of the provider network, looking at the employee group, and ensuring, as I said earlier, that there's advocacy in Lansing, that we're working with the lawmakers, and that we, you know, attending the Mackinac conferences and having conversations. So I think there's a multi layered approach. And in summary, it starts with understanding the the finances in the organization, having a healthy working relationship with your CFO, understanding the budget, understanding the things that drive the budget, and making sure that we're meeting our the expectations there, working with your board of directors to ensure that you're meeting the expectations of the board of directors, making sure that you are fiscally responsible with the budget, making sure that the appropriate advocacy is going on, continuing to have relationships, not only with your provider group, but in Lansing with your lawmakers, to make sure that those dollars are still coming in. And Fiscal Responsibility requires that you are aware of the dollars that are going out of the organization as well as the dollars that are coming in. Thank you.
How will Dwayne engage residents and businesses in the down river communities?
Yeah, I think we have to have a presence all over Wayne County, and as it relates to the down river community, you know, I really, truly believe in needs assessments, and I believe in going into areas and understanding the needs of that specific area. With Wayne County being as large as it is, every area certainly has, I believe a need for mental health services, but those services could be very different depending on the area that you're in, and so a needs assessment would be appropriate, talking with the leadership there, like yourself, sir, and understanding the needs of that specific area community, talking to those city leaders, those community leaders and those community stakeholders to understand the needs and make The services available, and making sure that people understand that d1 is here.
My question today is, how do you plan to challenge the stigmas that are against youth mental health and continue to advocate for the importance of youth voice in the system of care?
Yeah, exposure, mental health is not just one person's problem. It's all of our problem. When you look at it, affects everyone to some degree, whether you're directly impacted by it, or you have a family member or an associate. We talked earlier about the impact in the criminal justice system with mental health and how people are being charged with with with crimes that they are not necessarily responsible for, but we also see it with those invisible disabilities that we may not, may not know about, such as autism, and particularly young people that are on the Autism spectrum. We see that, or I've seen that in my current profession, where we are trying to engage people in a natural law enforcement manner, but some of the things that we do are triggering, so we've had to adjust how we engage citizens because of some of the disabilities and the mental health issues that they have. So this stigma that people still have in mental health, I think, is misguided because they think it's someone else's problem, but it really does impact all of us, whether it's someone who does not have natural de escalation skills, conflict resolution skills, day to day, arguments in homes, many of that has a mental health Nexus. You could argue Road Rage has a mental health Nexus. You could argue that some of the trauma that we're seeing in our young people is driven by trauma. Trauma begets trauma. And when you have a young person who is acting out in school and not attending class or or having problems getting along with people, it could have a mental health Nexus. But because that umbrella term mental health has such a negative connotation to it, that oftentimes people find that they don't, I don't have a mental health problem, but, but if we were to unpack it more and explain exactly what it means and and work through educating people, I think we will go a long way of serving our communities better. How I would go about that. I think conversation, conversation and messaging is important. Words do matter. If we consistently associate mental health with something negative, then people will walk away with a negative impression. But if we talk about it as a healthy community, building opportunity and an opportunity to feel better, advocacy and making people the best that they could be, so that they could provide for themselves and live a healthy life, should be the messaging around mental health and how we can do it together, whether it be dwin, doing, you know, community outreach and having conversations, roundtable discussions, going into schools, setting up programs inside of businesses to talk about mental Health in a very different way. I think it could all prove valuable.
Hello, some of the toughest times to be a PHP leader is when revenue gets lowered, but yet service demands and needs remain high, aside from advocacy to increase revenue, how would you approach a budget deficit situation, and what specific strategies would you utilize as the D win CEO? Should this scenario present itself? Or, in other words, how would you go about cutting costs? Yeah,
and it's something that comes up often when, when you have to look at services and and make some really tough decisions, I think the first thing that we have to do is look at if there's any, if there's any way to provide the same level of services By pulling in resources and maybe getting an efficiency and scale. So if we've got, you know, again, I'm going to speak very general, having not had the inside knowledge of the organization, other than what I have done some limited research on, if we are providing a multitude of services in the same area, one of the things we may be able to, again, gain some efficiencies and scale in, is if we were to to pull those resources in, still providing the same level of services, but with less resource drain, just starting off with really, just taking a holistic approach and looking at the entire operation, What are the mandatory things that we must deliver. What are the things that certainly we have to deliver, the things that we want to deliver, the things that we need to deliver? And looking at those like to delivers, deliverables, and breaking those out into four or five different categories, certainly the severely mentally disabled, and those other areas that we must respond to, we will, but looking at areas that may not have the same need. Training is important, but can we do it differently? Can we bring in a trainer to the facility as opposed to sending people out? Are there costs that we can save by scaling that back a little bit? Look at everything you can possibly look at before you take away services and take away personnel, and if that is, you know, efficiency and scale with bringing in direct trainers, if it's looking at the dollars that we have going out for things such as, you know, maybe we're sponsoring certain events. I know that d1 does an amazing job with DPD, and they host a lot of different events for us, and there's a lot of materials that come with that. So are there things that we can do, as opposed to passing out every individual participant at the training center, getting individual pamphlets and booklets and things like that, can we get that out digitally? I mean, just really looking at everything, prioritizing what's important for the organization, looking at, you know, the strategy, the strategic plan. Are we meeting the responsibilities of a strategic plan? And if there's any room in that plan to pull some things back while still delivering on the deliverables in the plan that
concludes this portion of the process that any of our panelists have any additional questions,
how does your current position align and Your the experience that you you've earned as a chief achieved for the police department, aligned with the CEO position of Detroit, Wayne, Integrated Health Network. And how can you bring that experience and apply it in the new role?
So I think that whether it's CEO of d1 whether it's chief of police in Detroit, whether it's the director of civil rights at the Michigan Department of Civil Rights leadership is leadership, having worked now 28 years in the Detroit Police Department, taking one year away to run the Michigan Department of Civil Rights at a time when That was unusual, because it was at really a very critical time in this country's history, with the George Floyd protests, and not many people saw police chief going into that role. I think it'll be very similar, from the standpoint of someone will look at it as uniquely different. I believe not so much. I think that you know, that position at the Michigan Department civil rights taught me a lot going into it as a police chief and working in a very different environment, working with a lot of lawyers and a lot of investigators and civil rights matters. Majority of my staff was were lawyers and and so they had the impression that, you know, here's this police chief coming in. I was assistant chief at the time, and this will be more or less a paramilitary environment. Absolutely not. You know, as a CEO of Detroit Police Department, I'm not jumping in and out of Scot cards. I'm, I'm running an organization with 3000 people, 2000 of which are police sworn, and about 1000 non sworn from various walks of life, and so it's important to a bring what I've learned to d1 from both Michigan Department of Civil Rights and understanding that the people have an impression or an expectation that Here comes this chief with this kind of policing mindset, which is not the case. You know, you you can go through this process, and you can be selected as a CEO, you can be selected as a police chief. You can be selected through process as a director of civil rights. And those are titles, and those are big titles, but what's important are the people that are reporting to you. They are the ones that make the decision, really, if you're the leader of that organization, and there are unofficial leaders in the organization, so I think what the first thing you have to do is walk in with an understanding that it's a different organization and respect that walk in with the idea that it's not broken, but I want to help make it even better. When I took over as police chief, I was following a very popular chief, and James Craig very popular. And I came in and I had my 90 day plan, which I would bring here. I built that plan after doing an assessment of what the needs of the organization were and how we were performing. And then I picked something that I wanted us to work together on and succeed on, and that was crime. We had crime through the roof in 21 and as of last year, we were able to reduce crime in ways we haven't seen since 1966 and this year we're going to do it again. We're going to be even going to be even lower this year than we were last year's Tuesday. My allergies are so bad this year, but we did it as a team, and I can bring a lot of that here. I can come in, we can do an assessment, we can work together. We're not going to come in and be unnecessarily disruptive to an organization that's thriving, to an organization that has a good employee group, to an organization that that has been awarded for having a good employee group. And I know that there are a lot of things I don't know, but I'm smart enough to put people around me that know them and build their trust. I know that I don't know all the provider group members, but I know some of them. I need to know all of them so I can bring a lot of what I learned and some of the strategies that I have at DPD and that I had at the Michigan Department of Civil Rights to d1. You have to be patient, you have to earn people's trust. You have to work and you have to respect the team. You must respect the team. If you walk in knowing everything and the place you've never been, you will lose your respect immediately, and you will not be successful. So that's what I would bring, and that's how I would go about transferring some of those skills over to d1 right? I
know there's been a lot of dialog about the folks with mental health needs, and then I'd like to give you the opportunity. Can you talk about your knowledge, about the priorities and what you would see wanting to be advanced, related to folks with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Yes, you know, though I don't run a mental health facility, I work in a place that handles 48 mental health runs a day, and we have a CIT unit, crisis intervention team, and I've seen a number of different opportunities to improve that team coming here and looking at some of the things that I want to improve, really, They kind of align with with the six pillars, accessibility and making sure that the communities in Wayne County know of the resources that are available from d1 just really putting the message out and communicating about the the resources that are here, and I'm did not write down the second part of your question, would you mind
I was asking specifically related to folks with intellectual and developmental disabilities, like what your knowledge base is, or what you would see as priorities with that population? Specifically?
Yeah, so I have a little, well, not a little training, but I've been I'm licensed, and I've had training through college on Developmental Disabilities. I know that the mental health code allows for a number of different service providers in the network to offer services to the severely disabled, severely mentally ill, both children and adults. Beyond that, it will take some time to learn specifically about the service model for those particular groups. I know that is unique. I know that that there are resources available with the provider network, and that will spend a lot of time learning about it. Thank you.
Just one last question relative to the one that I asked earlier, Mr. White, and I appreciate the response, and you mentioned in a couple of your answers of what your current role is, and I understand that as it relates to transparency, where you've had to be sort of not divulge as much information as you needed to regarding a police matter, what's the difference between a public authority and the police department in terms of being transparent? Yeah,
so oftentimes there's a lack of understanding in policing as to why we don't release certain information, and it can be quite complex. It could be anything from the fact that we are not the the group that's handling the investigation, actually, I'm thinking of one right now that I don't want to go into too much detail, because this is public, but we had a situation where, very generically, there was a shooting where our officers did not shoot, and so as a result, that's a homicide investigation. And as much as I can talk about the fact that there was a shooting, I can't release any information because it'll compromise the investigation into the case. And so the prosecutor, we have to submit a warrant to the prosecutor. Prosecutor has to review the warrant, and anything I say is public. And so there are times when people have a perception that, well, you should be more transparent about it. I can't, because I'll compromise the case, and the case will not move through the judicial system. Now on, as it relates to transparency on things that I can't control, I made a precedent setting policy on releasing all video involved and officer involved shooting within 45 days. And I didn't just pull that out of the air. We looked at best practices around the country. And some agencies had 60 days. Some agencies had 90 days, some agencies had 30 days, and we chose to use 45 days because it gave us an opportunity to look at all the facts and circumstances around the case, get all the video assets, including store videos and things like that, and but when you talk about transparency, the perception is everything right now all the time, and it really isn't that easy. I'll give you an example with like ring doorbell systems. A lot of people think that, well, just get someone's ring doorbell and let it go. No, you have to get a search warrant. You have to submit the search warrant, and then you have to pull the information from the search warrant, because if you just pull it and you use it, it can, you can compromise the case, so not to get into leads too far. I just wanted to level set on the different transparency requirements, the things that I can control Absolutely I will. There are things that you just can't talk about, and I'm sure in this organization, transparency is important for Community Trust, but there also needs to be a policy around who communicates about what and when. I don't want to be out there, you know, saying things or speaking out of turn, having not been privileged to the employee handbook on who discusses what in the organization. You know, transparency for this organization may center around one group. Maybe there's a comms team that talks about what's happening in the organization. Perhaps the board of directors has a key point that speaks on the organization so and as much as I think transparency is important, I think it's equally important that the right people are talking about the organization at the right time, and that's not something that's afforded to everyone for a variety of different reasons. I
There's nothing further that concludes this portion of the process. Thank you, Mr. White, can
I go back to the earlier question about specifically, as it relates to adults and children with severe disability? So you know as as a person who has limited training in that particular area, I do understand the importance of it, and I understand that there needs to be specific training around it, but absent that training, at this point, I really don't have much information on that particular demographic, other than to know that is covered in a mental health code, that our authority is derived from the mental health code, and that it gives us the authority to offer treatment. It also we also have a number, and I said this earlier, of service providers in the network that specialize in that area,
lots of people would be willing to help you gain knowledge. All
right, thank You.
Rick, recording stopped And
a recording in progress.
Good afternoon, everyone. We are continuing with the interviews for CEO of the Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network. This is our second candidate for the community stakeholder panel, Mr. Hunter. Mr. Hunter, you're going to be asked a series of questions by our fire member panel. At this time, I'd like for them to introduce themselves, starting to my right
Good afternoon. My name is Waseem Mahfouz, and I'm the Chief Executive Officer of Le HC leaders advancing and helping communities.
Good afternoon. My name is David Samson. I am the CEO of mariners in
Hello. I'm Annette Downey. I'm the CEO at Community Living Services.
Good afternoon. Marilyn Mar titwell,
city of ecourse. Good
afternoon. Bianca miles, youth involvement specialist for Detroit. Wayne, Integrated Health Network.
Thank you all for coming today and being a part of this process. Mr. Hunter, you've
already been given your instructions. Did you have any questions before we started?
I do not.
Hey, Mr. Hernandez, your first question is, are there any situations in working with the public authority that you would consider not worthy of transparency. If so, what would that be?
In the 20 years that I've worked at mental health, community health, I think we have prided ourselves on being very transparent, very open, and to make sure that we are always operating at the highest level when it comes to ethics. So I think that transparency should be prevalent. It should be the way that we do business. We should incorporate and embrace corporate compliance as a part of our normal culture. One of the things that I put in place, historically with the organizations that I worked for and worked with, is to have a corporate compliance resolution and make sure that it is signed by the leaders every year and that it is part of the onboarding packet for new employees, so that everybody understands that everything we do should be able to pass the scrutiny test. If we're working for the public, then the public should know what we're doing on their behalf. And if we have things that are private, then they should be private from a legal standpoint, like HIPAA, so there are some boundaries, but we should operate very transparently. We should say, hey, if I'm working for you, you should be able to scrutinize my job. If I am doing this on behalf of the people of the county of Wayne, they should be able to ask questions and see how we do what we do. And I think that what we would end up with is more support from the community, because when it comes to bureaucracy, everybody doesn't understand the process. So they're stuck with innuendos, they're they're stuck with stereotypes and stigmas. And we should continue our effort to make sure that those things and those barriers are gone. They shouldn't be a part of the process. So if you are a person that is living in a city that is a very small population of the 47 cities or so in Wayne County, you should still be able to raise your hand and ask a question and know confidently that you're going to get an answer from Detroit Wayne, because we exist for that lonely person is back there by themselves, and I think transparency is a hallmark of what we're doing. There should not be any quote, unquote secrets. We should be able to operate openly. Thank you, sir.
Given the complexities of Mental Health and Substance misuse disorders in Detroit and Wayne County. How would you ensure that D win is at the forefront of innovative and evidence based treatments, while maintaining cost efficiency and accessibility
in the 20 years that I've navigated this network, this very network being able to manage cost and provide high the high quality of care has been most successful with the right processes. So if we take the time to develop our workforce and to develop our standards so that we have the processes in place when we have any hiccup in the road or we have a vacancy because turnover is so expensive, then that gives us the opportunity to make sure we have efficiency and a fast turnaround when we're teaching people what this industry is about and what it does. So when we want to look at managing the dollars, sometimes there'll be highs and lows, because the money can come in faster one year versus another, but if we have the right processes in place, then we will be ready to respond when we're called upon. It's almost like the firefighter model. So we make sure we got enough funding to cover it when there's not a fire, so that when there is, we don't run out of water. We don't have a pumping machine that doesn't work. But we make sure that we're educating people along the way. Because when you think about funding, we say, Okay, where is it going to come from? Well, we have to educate the legislators. We have to educate the people that are not doing this every day. So that's why, historically, I've spent time in Lansing and before the appropriation committees, not asking for money, but just to educate. And when I would sit there and I would give them all the information about what we do here in Wayne County, they would say, Mr. Hunter, but where's your ask? And I'm like, Well, today I don't have an ask. I really just want to educate so that we make sure that we are covering all facets of integrated healthcare, including substance use disorder, so we don't have that silo over here anymore, and we don't have mental health over here, and then we're trying to fund them both when we know there's efficiency in the synergy of them running together. So I think that we got to really make sure that we are paying attention to our processes, making sure that we are training people on them, educating the community on them, and educating our legislators on them, and then we will have a process that is efficient and sustainable.
Thank you.
How would D win engage residents and businesses in the diver communities? D win will educate and interact with the downriver community by spending more time down there. A lot of times, it's polarizing to be in the city of Detroit, and when working with teen Wellness Center for the last 20 years and being one of the largest mental health providers, my vision has always been beyond our block, like, how do we bring this innovation? How do we bring these services beyond us? And so for the last two years, I've been working with the pisp in Monroe, trying to make sure that we get people that need the care because they were inefficient and deficient in having a crisis stabilization services. So they were calling us and interacting with us, and we were sending our staff down there to help them, and we wanted to just make sure we stayed connected. So what do we started to do was to educate. We started to empower. We started to say, here's how we do it. This is not a competition. This is not us versus them. So again, all the way down river, in that remote place that we may have perceived as remote prior to today, we want to make sure that we are consciously on purpose reaching out to them so that we can get sort of like the momentum that we got with working with Pastor Miles in E course, and putting together housing for the veterans and and putting together grocery stores and listening and paying attention to the social determinants of health so that we can duplicate that everywhere, not just ecourse, not just on the east side of Detroit, not just on the west side of Detroit. Because when you think about taking care of people in this industry and this network, then we have to address every piece of it and every person. When the outgoing CEO was in this seat, he made a statement at one of the annual meetings that was really profound to me. He said, Folks, I have 40 something mayors that I interact with in this seat, and when he said that, it spoke volumes to me. And I said, and made a conscious decision at that moment to make sure that I was not only supporting d w but praying for D Wynn. And it gave me this, this vision of the battle. As long as the banners were up, we will win the battle. And so if your hands are tired, then each provider, each one of us, had to get in there and help shore it up so that we can win when it comes to people's lives. And we made sure it's not a competition. It's not Hey, don't think about them, because the greater concentration of us are is here, let's go and find that one person, that one vulnerable citizen, whether it's a child or an adult, and let's reach out to them. And so that's why I've spent time even up north trying to say, Hey, how can we from Wayne County even affect change there? Even affect change in the up and working on initiatives with the legislators to say, Hey, I know we have boundaries, because we're doing all of this in Wayne County, but as a provider and as a thought leader, if we're going to be that leader, then let's make sure we're sharing the information that we're getting. Let's make sure we're sharing the data that is coming out of what we're doing so that we can share that wealth and make sure that we're changing lives everywhere, not just in the places that we're most familiar with, in the places that are just our nucleus, but we make sure we're touching every Outer County and every outer city.
How do you how do you plan to challenge the stigmas that are against youth mental health and continue to advocate for the importance of youth voice in the system of care.
I'm sorry, can you say the beginning part one more time?
How do you plan to challenge the stigmas that are against youth mental health and continue to advocate for the importance of youth's voice and the system of care.
Not too long ago, I was told that the governor reached out to MDHHS, and MDHHS reached out to me and said, Hey, can team wellness help? This is a emergency, and it was for the juveniles and JDF at that time, there was a lot of publicity around the overcrowding, and what we did is stepped up our advocacy and and created a program to help not just the overcrowding, but to make sure we're preparing these youth for success, so that we are advocating with them and saying, Listen, you're going to be better. A lot of times in our industry, we have heard, if you've been here a long time, that recovery is impossible, that you will always be in whatever the next stigma is. But we said, No, you can recover. Because recovery is we're going to change the definition of it. You don't always have to be a product of your environment. If that's not a positive environment, we're going to give you a path to success. So we developed a juvenile program, a juvenile restorative justice program, so that they can see themselves therapeutically in a different light, not punitively, but therapeutically, so that you can see, even though I may not have this example in my home, in my domicile, I can begin to see it in action when it's being modeled by the program I'm in, when it's being modeled by the therapy, by the therapist and the treatment team, and I'm out of an environment that is so polarizing when it comes to putting youth, youth and adolescents in prison. And that's where we had them in the prison. And so we said, well, let us go into the prison and let us provide treatment to them while they're in that prison, so that we can give them the tools and begin to foster more into that building block of them, so that they can see themselves differently. We also took the show on the road and traveled the state of Michigan saying, listen, youth are aging out of foster care, in our care, in our network right here in Detroit, Wayne every day. So people are turning 18 years old or 19 through 26 every day, and if they're just going from the stark reality of being in foster care and that trauma to the new reality of being an adult and no support. The next day we are we were finding that they were falling by the wayside, and then ended up in our hospitals and then ended up trying to commit suicide. And we began to say, Wait a minute. We got to focus on them as early as possible. So don't wait until they're 18. No, we got to catch them very, very early. So we started participating in the school initiative as well. So we put therapists in the schools, and at first, we were met with a lot of bureaucracy, but deem worked very, very hard to make sure that we had a path to so that we can advocate for them even while they're in school. So we would want to continue that initiative. We would want to make sure that when we see the youth that we're serving when it comes to all the social determinants of their health, their mental health, substance abuse, then we want to make sure that we're sensitive to that, and we're sensitive to the parent. I had a parent, say, two weeks ago, when their youth was in the program and had done some things, still acting out. We went to the parent and said, Hey, we need you to help us, because the student is doing x. And the parent's response was, Well, I had them when I was 1615, years old, so what do you expect me to do? I don't know what I'm doing. And we said, well, great, because here's what you're doing, you're going to come and participate in some services as well. So we're going to wrap our arms around you too, because we understand that this, addressing this youth by themselves, is not the answer. We got to address the culture. We got to address the influences from their natural supports. We got to address every influence that is coming to them. And when you look at this world we live in today, a lot of the influence is coming digitally. So what are we doing about that? Then we're going to make sure that we are on the digital forefront too. We're going to make sure that we have the apps in place. We're going to make sure that we have the the telehealth AI. We're going to make sure that we're using all of those tools as well, so that we are combating the things that are pulling them in the wrong direction. Because at the end of the day, we want people that are going to have civic capital and going to be citizens that are on panels like this. Eventually, they're going to tell their story about how they came through their trauma, but now they're living and thriving and making a difference in people's lives, and we're going to put them on display, their stories, not them personally on display, so that we are again educating the legislators, so that again, that person sitting in obscurity knows they're not alone, they're not so different, that they can too get strengthened and find themselves around a network that really, really cares. And when you've been in this industry as long as I have, and as I said earlier, and you started with a company where the when we opened the doors, the front desk was a cardboard box, that kind of passion is what will drive D win to make sure that we are on the forefront, that people are looking to us to be the leaders for our youth, for our elderly and for the people that are just the most vulnerable around us every day, no matter what part of the spectrum they find themselves on, we want to make sure that we are that leader that they're coming to if it touches health Care in any manner, so nobody is left behind.
Some of the toughest times in being a PHP leader would be when revenue gets cut or lowered, but service demands and needs remain high. Aside from advocacy for increased revenue, how would you approach a budget deficit situation, and what specific strategies would you utilize if you were chosen as the D win CEO? How would you cut costs?
Nobody likes to hear the word budget cuts whether you're in the private sector or whether you're at home or whether you're in the public sector, but what we have to do is be very, very, very proactive. So d win before we even get to a place where we're talking about budget cuts, we have to make sure that we are on the forefront and doing everything necessary for sustainability today, while we are at our times where we are not talking about budget cut. We got to make sure that we're doing what it takes to have a system that is going to survive any economic ups and downs. When we talk about becoming a CCBHC that is putting us in a position where we are ready to receive augmented funding, it's alternative to the funding that we're receiving today, so that puts us in a better position. We are definitely looking at the time that we will be supporting our youth, so we're planning for their future. So that should bring the cost down. If we're not putting youth in hospitals, and we don't have to worry about them going to the emergency room when it's not an emergency, when they become an adult or before. So when we're being proactive, when we're being preventative, we all know that's the best medicine. So being sure that we have the processes in place today, so that if we had to cut somewhere, we would want to cut the places that are not going to be detrimental to anybody's life. And we want to work backwards from there. So we want to preserve life first, but we want to make sure that we're doing the right things with the money as good stewards today. So we got good money today. Let's make sure we're building a system that is sustainable when that same money is not there, or if it's different than the way it's coming in today. And if you've been a provider as long as I have in the last 20 years, our times of money coming in has gone up and down. And you can remember the times when we would get unfunded mandates, and you can remember the times when we would get told when we're not doing that anymore. And so what do you do? And so what we've done is said, okay, then we have to make sure that there's an alternative path. And I remember one of the things poignantly was the support of permanent supportive housing went away. So as a provider that was relying on permanent supportive housing to help people along that continuum of care with their behavioral health and substance use disorders, we said, what do we do now? And so we had to pivot and look for other funding sources for that housing. And so we were able to leverage things like working with hand more and working with HUD, of course, but then they had waiting lists, and then we said, Okay, well, let's think outside the box. Who else is really vested in these same lives? And we recognize that there was some synergy with the commercial insurances. So we had some commercial insurances that were really focusing on social determinants of health, and we said, Okay, well, let's partner with them to help fund some of this housing if the member was eligible and had that coverage. So we got to be thinking ahead of the curve. We can't wait until we get there, because if we wait until we get there, it's going to be too late. We're going to have to cut deeper than we would have if those times didn't come. So I think if we're prepared, and we're thinking outside the box, and we know our vision and where we're trying to go for the future, I think we can handle any of those ups and downs that may come.
That concludes this portion of the selection process, did the panel have any further questions?
I know you spoke about the needs of the people that we serve with mental health needs and substance use. I'd like to give you the opportunity to speak to your knowledge base on what you think the priorities would be for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
I think that we often, and me too, with the same mistake, because we it's so hard to say IDD, so we lump them all together. But let's think back a few years ago, when there was we were so siloed as a network, where the IDD were being funded here, mental health was being funded here, substance use disorder was being funded here, and the work that we went through to tear down those silos, because we recognize that we have to do this together, that it doesn't matter which door a person comes in, so even if they come in the IDD door, even if they come in the Sud door, it doesn't matter what the cultural background is or what socioeconomic place they're coming from that we address them as one. Because one of the things that I really, really try to do is get rid of the notion that there's competition in this network. When people say that provider is a competitor of that provider, I'm quick to step up and say, I disagree. There's so many people to be helped. There's so many people on all of our no show rates. There's no way we can consider ourselves competitors. We are partners. And one of the things I'm most proud of is the partner wall that we built. So at every clinic, there's a partner wall, and it includes IDD Sud, it includes government agencies, it includes the state it includes federal agencies, other providers, and it showcases who we're working with. Because none of us can do this in a vacuum by ourselves, and so we want to make sure that we attend even and promote the success stories of our IDD consumers when when they have the the programs where they're showcasing the work that they've done, when they're showcasing the entrepreneurship that they that they have, we should embrace it all, and that's What I'll be preaching make sure that we're embracing every single person that needs help from us, so that we don't forget and we don't accidentally overlook anybody, because everybody is just as important. There is no this diagnosis is more important than that diagnosis. Every life should have the same value to us, and I would make sure that we're doing that.
Further questions. Mr. Hunter, did you have any questions? No, that concludes this portion of the selection process. We'll take a short break. Actually, we're going to break For lunch. You
