ST. PAUL, Minn. – Foundations for Success, a collaborative of more than 100 community partners, has established a network of much-needed mental health services for young Ramsey County children with a five-year, $2.6 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Foundations for Success will offer mental health services for young children prenatal through age five in Ramsey County that were previously unavailable or in short supply. Services will represent the full continuum of care including prevention, early identification and intensive treatment. More than 10,000 Ramsey County children a year, for a total of up to 50,000 children, will be screened and receive opportunities for early intervention where needed. This new system of early childhood mental health care also provides training for early education professionals.

“People do not realize that as many as 10 percent of even very young children experience mental health problems. Without intervention, these children are often at risk of being expelled from their early childhood settings for behavior difficulties, and/or can experience developmental problems, and eventually, significant mental health disorders,” explains project coordinator Catherine Wright of Community Action Partnership of Ramsey and Washington Counties, the lead partner in the collaboration.

According to Wright, fewer than 20 percent of children with mental health disorders receive the help they need, and many eventually end up in special education, dropping out of school and/or in the corrections system as a result. Those children lucky enough to get help often do not receive it until they are in crisis, and their academic and social development has suffered irreversibly.

“The cost of not meeting children’s mental health needs as early as possible and providing the appropriate treatment is enormous, in both human and economic terms,” says Louise Brown, director of the Children’s Mental Health Partnership, an advocacy group and one of the partners in Foundations for Success. “Providing early help makes so much sense – it more than pays for itself, improves educational prospects and prevents needless suffering.”

Initial funding of $2.6 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will support the Foundations for Success collaborative and its plans to establish a continuum of services over the next five years, as well as its efforts to attract other funding sources so that services can be sustained long term. 

“Our multi-year grant to Foundations for Success follows an extensive community planning process and over a year of pilot programming. The end result is a committed group of people and organizations who can make a significant impact on improving the mental health of our children and fill a much needed gap in prevention and treatment services in Ramsey County,” said Polly Talen, Knight Foundation’s program officer for St. Paul and Duluth.

“We are excited to have Knight’s support of so many partners coming together for this effort. It reinforces the fact that early childhood mental health is a critical component of child development and child health,” said Wright. “We expect this collaboration to serve as a great model for comprehensive approaches to mental health.”

Project partners include early childhood and mental health professionals, state and county administrators, parents, school district administrators, special education program staff, health professionals, state and local elected officials, child care providers and members of cultural organizations.

The collaborative is being led by Catherine Wright, special services coordinator and manager of health, mental health and special education for the Head Start programs of Community Action Partnership of Ramsey and Washington Counties. Community Action Partnership is a nonprofit agency offering a wide variety of services to low-income people living in Ramsey and Washington counties.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes journalism excellence worldwide and invests in the vitality of St. Paul and 25 other U.S. communities.