The Hogg Foundation has launched a new grant initiative that we are calling Well-being in Rural Communities. It’s focus is five rural counties in Texas: Bastrop, Brooks, Nacogdoches, Titus and Victoria. Its goal is to support collaborative learning, planning and action to transform mental health and well-being in those communities.

This is an ambitious goal. For it to succeed, we must advance in our own understanding of how to build bridges with rural communities. Our guest, Dennis Mohatt, is a former member of the Hogg Foundation’s National Advisory Council. In this episode, he draws on his long and deep experience in rural communities to help us flesh out what it means to be involved in these communities, and what the right kind of involvement looks like.

Recovery to Practice (RTP) was launched by Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) in 2013 aimed at infusing recovery principles into six behavioral health professions: psychology, psychiatry, nursing, social work, peer support and addiction counseling. In 2015, the Hogg Foundation launched its own RTP grant program to disseminate the recovery curriculum throughout Texas. Since then, six organizations have received funds totaling $1.7 million.

One grantee is the University of North Texas (UNT), Department of Disability & Addiction Rehabilitation. Program coordinator Carrie Breedlove, MS, LPC, joins the podcast to discuss how to bring recovery-oriented principles to the field of substance use.

June is PTSD Awareness Month. One group in particular, veterans, has a huge stake in our advancing understanding of PTSD and ways to treat it. There are 1.4 million veterans in Texas, and while many military families are resilient, some struggle with behavioral health concerns.

The UTHealth Trauma and Resilience Center just opened its doors at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. This first-of-its-kind center takes a team-based, integrated approach to the behavioral health needs of veterans and their families. Dr. Jair Soares joins us to talk about the vision for the new center and what it means for understanding of PTSD.

During the last couple weeks of March, a series of package bombings shook the community of Austin, Texas and made national headlines. This tragedy hits close to home for many in Austin, including us here at the Hogg Foundation. In response, we co-organized an event, called Hope for Healing, which took place in East Austin—the area of town where a number of the bombings occurred. The event offered dialogue, healing and connection, as well as candid conversation about what many of us experienced.

One of the featured speakers was Joseph Parker, Senior Pastor of David Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Austin. In this conversation, he share his thoughts on the role faith has to play in community responses to, and ultimate recovery from, trauma.

Last year, when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston and other communities in Texas, “resilience” was a hot topic. For those of us interested in transforming how communities promote mental health, resilience is more than just a catch-word, but a phenomenon that needs rigorous study and nuanced understanding. What do we need to know about resilience, how is it fostered, and what does fostering resilience commit us to doing?

Helping us to answer these questions is Wendy Ellis, the project director of the Building Community Resilience collaborative at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. She is joined by Lourdes Rodriguez, director of the Center for Place-Based Initiatives at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin.

Episode 60: Mental Health in the College Classroom by Hogg Foundation for Mental Health

At just over 20 years old, the Bexar County Community Health Collaborative has evolved into a powerful enterprise that brings a synergistic approach to solving critical community health needs. It's also a model of an organization with a proven track record of managing the challenges of collaborating across sectors. Elizabeth Lutz, executive director of the Collaborative, along with board members Bob Ferrar and Pilar Oates, join us to discuss what their organization's success has meant for the people of their community.

In Texas, there are more than 120,000 recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program initiated under the Obama administration that provides administrative reprieve from deportation proceedings to qualified young people who meet certain criteria. Many of those young people are now on our college campuses, going about their lives as students. With DACA's fate now up in the air, it's time to take a look at the mental health needs of DACA students, or Dreamers, as they're know.

Joining us for this important conversation is Sebastian Colon-Otero, a counselor at the Counseling and Mental Health Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He discusses his work with DACA students, how he understands his role as a therapist, and how to have a healing conversation in uncertain times.

This is the second part of our conversation with Dr. Christen Smith about the effects of police violence and other forms of inequality on the health of blacks in the U.S. and beyond. Here, we put the Hogg Foundation's own home city, Austin, Texas, under the microscope for a conversation about the relationship between inequality and health. You are highly encouraged to listen to Part 1. Thanks for listening!

“Health” is not something that exists in a vacuum. The Hogg Foundation is driven by our conviction that a more just world is also a healthier one. That’s one of the reasons why we talk so often about the “social determinants of health.” The World Health Organization defines social determinants as “the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life.”

For blacks in the U.S., a key social determinant is the community impact of unequal policing. In this episode, Dr. Christen Smith, an associate professor of African and Diaspora Studies and anthropology at The University of Texas, and the host, Ike Evans, sit down for a wide-ranging conversation about the impact of inequality on the health and well-being of blacks in the U.S. and beyond, using recent events such as the tragic death of Erica Garner in December 2017 as a backdrop.

The episode is broken into Parts 1 and 2. We hope you listen to both!