By DAVE RANNEY
There’s nothing fancy about Sunshine Connection, a street-level program in Topeka that offers people with severe and persistent mental illnesses a safe place to spend their days.
“We don’t even have a sign out front,” said Judy Thompson, the organization’s do-everything director. “Everybody here has a mental illness,” she said.
“We all know what it’s like to be in a state hospital or in a group home or in a nursing home. We have some people who’ve been in jail. But this is our place, and we’re here to support each other.”
Three days a week, about 40 people come to Sunshine Connection to take part in a variety of peer-led groups, have lunch, socialize and find help in doing whatever they need to do.
“They rely on us for all kinds of stuff,” Thompson said, referring to the program’s five-person staff. “We make sure they’re OK and have whatever they need, things like buying groceries or getting their prescriptions filled.”
Sunshine Connection is one of 12 consumer-run organizations (CROs) in Kansas. The programs are part of a state-funded network of services for adults whose mental illnesses may not be severe enough to warrant hospitalization but who need additional support to live in community settings.
Last week, CRO directors learned their funding from the state for the new fiscal year was being cut between 12 percent and 17 percent.
“Our budget was $130,200 for the year, and we were barely making it,” Thompson said. “Now we’re losing $16,000. I don’t know what we’ll do. The only thing left to do is to cut meals or salaries, but I’d hate to cut salaries because we haven’t had raises since 2009.”
Sunshine Connection, she said, already must sell one of its two vans because it’s no longer affordable.
“People are really stressing out about it because it’s going to be a lot harder to get them to the grocery store or to their doctor’s appointments,” Thompson said. “We’ll be teaching them how to ride the bus, but a lot of them have had bad experiences on the bus and they don’t want to take it.”
Almost all of the program’s participants, she said, are living at or below the federal poverty line and few have cars.
In the state fiscal year that started Thursday, the 12 CROs will divide almost $829,000.
Previously, they’d shared $970,000. Angela de Rocha, a spokesperson for the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services, said the reduction was a small part of the 4 percent across-the-board cut in state agency operational budgets that Gov. Sam Brownback put into place before the start of this year’s legislative session.
Legislators later endorsed the governor’s plan, carrying through the across-the-board cuts in budgets passed for FY 2016 and 2017. The Kansas Constitution requires the state to balance its budget each year.
Despite the cut in CRO funding, KDADS “believes they provide worthwhile services” and hopes they will be able to find alternate sources of revenue, de Rocha said.
“They’re all doing really good work.” Still, she said, KDADS, the Governor’s Behavioral Health Planning Council and CRO leaders are looking for ways to make the programs more efficient, more effective and potentially eligible for other sources of funding.
The Center for Community Support and Research at Wichita State University and the Kansas Consumer Advisory Council are helping the CROs meet these challenges, de Rocha said. Nearly 70 percent of the CRO budget, she said, is state-funded. The remainder is federally funded. Charles Bartlett, a KDADS project coordinator who also oversees consumer affairs, said CROs can play a vital role in a community’s network of behavioral health services.
“The idea is for this to be a truly consumer-helping-consumer support system, one that the state can help provide the financial support for infrastructure-type things while also working with them to help each other become more integrated in their communities and not just be a component that’s separate from the larger overall system,” he said.
Richard Stitt, who has run Morning Star Inc., the CRO in Manhattan, since it opened 10 years ago, is unsure how he’ll handle the funding cut. “We’ll probably have to cut back our hours or lay somebody off,” he said.
“Either way, it’ll affect our services.” Morning Star’s annual budget, Stitt said, is dropping from $59,000 to $51,000. Almost all the money, he said, is spent on rent, utilities and payroll. “Our main purpose is to provide a safe, drug- and alcohol-free place for people to receive peer-to-peer counseling, to get them away from stigma and isolation, and to keep them out of the hospital,” he said.
“We like to think of ourselves as a barrier to going back to the hospital.” The cut in CRO spending comes on the heels of KDADS announcing last week that it had suspended involuntary admissions to Osawatomie State Hospital after the hospital reached its maximum census during renovations.
Stitt and Thompson said that as the CROs begin providing fewer services, more people with severe mental illnesses may need crisis-intervention services or admission to the state-run hospitals in Osawatomie or Larned. Marvin R. Sebring, 67, said he was a patient in Topeka State Hospital when it closed in 1997.
He appreciates the resources at Sunshine Connection. “I don’t ever want to go back (to a state hospital),” he said. “Sunshine (Connection) has been really good to me. It’s kept me from having to go back. When I have trouble with my anxiety or when I get frustrated and irritable with people, the people here help me.”
The state’s mental health advocates opposed the cut in CRO funding. “The CROs are key players in issues having to do with recovery and self-determination,” said Amy Campbell, executive director with the Kansas Mental Health Coalition. “We absolutely want them to operate effectively.
The question now is whether we’ve impeded their ability to do that … to be effective. I don’t know the answer to that.” Lawmakers also cut $20,000 from the $80,000 initially set aside for the Kansas Consumer Advisory Council’s annual conference. In recent years 300 to 400 CRO participants from across the state have attended that event.
Dave Ranney is a reporter for Heartland Health Monitor, a news collaboration focusing on health issues and their impact in Missouri and Kansas.