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