By John R. Corlett, President and Executive Director Alex Dorman, Research Fellow City of Lakewood Mayor Megan George announced in May that Lakewood would be implementing the Safe Place Initiative. It’s a community-based approach to safety and policing developed first by the Seattle Police Department in 2015 that seeks to assist victims of hate crimes,...
Sandwich Caregivers: Holding it All Together
Bathing and grooming, managing medications, toileting assistance and wound care may pop to mind when you hear the term “caregiver.” These activities are very much under the umbrella of caregiving, and so are dropping off groceries once a month, mowing someone’s lawn, or giving a ride to a doctor’s appointment. 12 of Ohio’s 88 counties...
Bots and Benefits: How is AI impacting Ohio public benefits programs?
In a previous blog exploring AI, we talked about the usage of AI tools in behavioral health, as well as funding in the state budget for digital therapeutics. While AI has significant application in performing serious tasks such as mental health treatment, there are also basic uses of AI that function on a lower level....
ARPA in Cleveland: an update on the landscape
The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) was signed into law by the Biden Administration in 2021. This legislation is meant to address the negative economic and health effects that were caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Here at Community Solutions, we have shared our policy asks related to ARPA and what we hope these funds will...
Why is mental health care so hard to find with private insurance?
The Center for Community Solutions recently partnered with the Community Counseling Center of Ashtabula County to examine the behavioral health needs in Ashtabula County. One thing that came up in nearly every conversation we had with community members and stakeholders was the difficulty of finding behavioral health providers who accepted private insurance. Our community survey...
Rural Poverty and Rent Burden in Appalachian Ohio: A Dangerous Crisis
By: Kyle Thompson, Policy Assistant and Alex Dorman, Research Fellow Poverty is a significant problem that impacts many different communities, families, and individuals across America. In Ohio, over thirteen percent of the population lives in poverty, and roughly 30 percent of the population lives near poverty (earning 200 percent of the federal poverty line). In...
Leadership District Fact Sheets: Examining Stephens’ House District 93 and Huffman’s Senate District 12
The Center for Community Solutions recently released profiles for Ohio’s state legislative districts. We do this as a public service and make the profiles widely available. They include demographic, economic, education, and other data. While we caution against comparing one district against another (sample sizes can be small and lead to large margins of...
Did we undercount Medicaid numbers? Four examples of data limitation.
The Ohio Legislative District Fact Sheets are the most comprehensive and reliable collection of data points on conditions facing people in each Ohio Senate and Ohio House district in the state that we are able to produce. Still, every statistic carries some level of uncertainty and these Fact Sheets are no exception. It is important...
Racism in Medical Journals: An Interview with Dr. Faye Gary
My colleague, Taneisha Fair, recently opened a conversation on racism in medical journals. As a follow-up, I spoke with an expert in publishing on psychiatric nursing and vulnerable populations. Dr. Faye Gary, an expert in psychiatric nursing, has built her career on advocating for vulnerable populations, including Black women. As a Black woman herself, she...