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Press Release - Granite House and Mosaic Community Services Merge to form Largest Community Mental Health, Housing and Rehabilitation Program in Maryland
June 30, 2008
For More Information,
contact: Karen Koenigsberg
(410)-871-0008 or
karenk@getconnectedcc.org
WESTMINSTER - Carroll County based community housing and psychiatric rehabilitation program Granite House, Inc. and Timonium based community housing and rehabilitation program Mosaic Community Services, Inc. will merge into one organization, effective July 1, 2008, resulting in the largest such program in the state. Both Mosaic Community Services, Inc. and Granite House, Inc. are subsidiary organizations of Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Foundation, the parent organization of Sheppard Pratt Health System, Maryland's largest provider of mental health and special education services.
Granite House has been a premier provider of mental health services to adults in Carroll County since the 1970s. The Boards of both organizations determined that the most efficient and client focused outcome was to combine the assets and operations of Granite House and Mosaic Community Services, both of which serve residents of Central Maryland – Granite House in Carroll County and Mosaic Community Services in Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and Howard County.
"Nationally, slow growth in funding for vital public mental health services, along with increasing technical and regulatory demands, has resulted in a trend toward the development of larger, more integrated human service agencies,” said Spencer Gear, Executive Director of Granite House. “Our Board welcomed this merger as an important step in ensuring that Carroll County continues to enjoy sustainable, high quality services to consumers of public mental health services. Our hope is that the infrastructure improvements arising from the merger will enable us not only to keep the services we have, but also to add services more easily as they are needed by the community.”
As a result of the merger, all of the employees, programs and assets of Granite House, Inc. will become part of Mosaic Community Services, Inc. Granite House will maintain its services at its current location at 288 East Green Street in Westminster, providing behavioral health programs that include community housing, psychiatric rehabilitation and outpatient mental health services to individuals with mental illness. Mosaic also operates a medical day care program and mental health programs for children and adolescents. Jeff Richardson will continue as Executive Director of the combined organization. Spencer Gear, Executive Director of Granite House, will continue to be active in the Carroll County services, but joins Mosaic Community Services as Chief Systems Officer. The combined organization will have annual revenues of $25 million, a total of 500 employees and serve approximately 6,000 clients.
For more information on Mosaic Community Services, visit www.mosaicinc.org.
New resource center helps
connect families
By Erica Kritt, Carroll
County Times Staff writer
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
The Get Connected Family
Resource Center is a new program
that has helped a child with
autism find a place to get his
hair cut, helped a mother with
depression and provided a family
with social networks to join.
The service is free to all
Carroll County children and
adults up to age 25 and their
families.
Alyssa Taylor-Free of Hampstead
needed to find something for her
9-year-old daughter Alivia to do
this summer.
“I was at wit’s end,”
Taylor-Free said. “I felt she
needed to get out of the house
and be around people her age.”
Taylor-Free contacted Get
Connected, and the employees
found a camp for Alivia to
attend.
The employees at the center are
called family navigators, and
they work with each family to
provide resources to meet their
needs.
“The idea is to make it so that
they are not doing all the
running around and getting doors
closed in their faces,” family
navigator Rhonda Johnson said.
The navigators have dealt with
difficulty in their own lives.
For example, one of the
employees dealt with depression
in her family, while another has
raised a child with a
developmental disability.
“You feel like a failure as a
parent and you think that people
are going to judge you,” program
director Laura Rhodes said. “We
won’t do that here because we’ve
all been through that
ourselves.”
In the past two weeks, Johnson
estimated the center has
received 30 calls. Get Connected
came about from a growing
complaint in the county, Rhodes
said.
“Parents were getting very
frustrated when they were trying
to find services for their
children, and there are lots of
services out there, but parents
have no idea where to look, who
to call,” Rhodes said.
The Local Management Board,
which promotes the well being of
children, got funding from the
state to provide a grant for the
program.
Granite House was awarded the
contract to implement Get
Connected as an independent
program.
The organization is slated to
receive $118,286 for this year,
according to Mary Scholz,
manager of the Carroll County
Local Management Board.
Get Connected also has a
computer station available for
parents and children to use, a
lending library and a culture
navigator to help foreign
parents learn what is available.
“What they are used to from
their home countries is a lot
different from what’s available
here,” Rhodes said. “[The
cultural navigator] will help
explain anything to them, yes
you can call the school system
and challenge them, yes you can
call the police for this or that
issue or how to open a checking
account.”
www.carrollcountytimes.com
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