photo by: Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center

The Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center and DCCCA team members celebrate a new partnership to expand Mental Health First Aid training across Douglas County.

A new partnership aims to expand training in Douglas County to help more people recognize warning signs and provide immediate support to someone experiencing a mental health crisis.

The Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center and DCCCA are teaming up to offer public and private training, expand outreach efforts, and increase opportunities for community members to gain lifesaving skills to help respond to signs of mental illness and substance use challenges.

“This is kind of like CPR for the mind,” Emily Farley, chief advancement officer for Bert Nash, told the Journal-World. “Mental health has become such a huge issue in our community, and if we can teach people how to talk about mental health and wellness … we’re going to save lives with this.”

Bert Nash has offered mental health first aid training since 2008, when it was one of seven pilot sites in the United States selected to offer the program. For almost 20 years, the program has given teachers, parents, healthcare professionals, first responders, employers, and community members the skills to act as the initial help given to someone experiencing a mental health crisis before they are guided to professional care.

“If people know how to interact and how to react in a crisis situation, maybe the crisis becomes a little less critical, and it just becomes more of a stepping stone to the next helper,” Farley said.

When former CEO David Johnson retired in 2017, an endowment fund was established to sustain and expand mental health first aid in the county. It funded a full-time instructor position, and in 2018, Julia Gaughan became Bert Nash’s first dedicated mental health first aid instructor.

Gaughan retired at the end of 2025, and Bert Nash was left to decide how the mental health first aid program would continue. In response, Farley said CEO of DCCCA Lori Alvarado reached out to Bert Nash to explore how the two organizations could work together to further the program’s reach, since both organizations had offered mental health first aid programming.

Chrissy Mayer, chief development officer at DCCCA, said the organization began offering mental health first aid in 2020 with the intention of training new mental health first aid instructors across the state. At DCCCA, there are currently about 12 mental health first aid instructors between their staff in Kansas and Oklahoma.

“We’re both trying to do the same thing here with getting more people access to mental health first aid,” Mayer said. “This is something everyone should have.”

With this new partnership, DCCCA will be providing a larger pool of certified mental health first aid instructors statewide training experience, administrative coordination, and expertise in substance use prevention and recovery. Meanwhile, Bert Nash brings the extensive experience of administering the training and funding from the endowment.

The organizations will work together on training, share instructors when needed, coordinate scheduling and participant support, and work together to reach more community members across Douglas County and surrounding areas.

Farley said this partnership will make a difference if, for example, Bert Nash staff are unable to host a training session, DCCCA could host one instead. The same goes for the opposite situation. There are other ways both organizations could step in for each other, too.

“Someone could take mental health first aid, and they could have a DCCCA employee and a Bert Nash employee teaching together,” Farley said. “It might just be a Bert Nash staff member, but DCCCA is helping coordinate for us.”

Mayer said this partnership is important because it’s to support the work already happening in Douglas County, and the two organizations often have the same clientele.

“We know that substance use and mental health are often co-occuring issues,” Mayer said. “And so we really just want to be intentional about coordinating and really enhancing the capacity of both organizations to make a broader reach.”

People interested in signing up for training in mental health first aid or learning more can visit https://www.bertnash.org/mhfa or https://www.dccca.org/program/kansas-mental-health-first-aid/.