Crestwood was excited to once again sponsor and participate in several NAMIWalks throughout California this spring. We support the National Alliance on Mental Illness and their mission to advocate, educate, and provide support for those with mental health issues, as well as their families. Several walks took place in May in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month! Crestwood was proudly represented by our campuses at the following NAMIWalks: San Diego – April 25 Sacramento – May 9 Solano – May 9 San Francisco – May 16 Fresno – May 16 Our involvement in these annual walks echoes our Crestwood values of Family, Commitment, and Enthusiasm, as we partner with our communities to champion mental health for all! Thank you to all who participated this year, whether sharing information about our services at our resource tables or walking for the cause!

Peerpocalypse is an annual action-packed national conference dedicated to mental health, addiction recovery, and peer support. Hosted by The Peer Company, formerly the Mental Health & Addiction Association of Oregon (MHAAO), the four-day event brings together peer leaders, innovators and advocates to share expertise, skills, and lived experiences. The convention focuses on building community and pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the Peer Support field. Crestwood was excited to sponsor and attend Peerpocalypse 2026, held May 4 – 7 in Seaside, OR. Greg Parnell represented Crestwood at the event and was thrilled to lead energetic Zumba sessions each morning of the conference. Greg also shared an informational table with Sarah Farmer of WRAP Inc., who co-facilitated Greg’s workshop: “Disruption, Discovery & Balance.” Together, they shared all things WRAP (Wellness Recovery Action Plan) and Crestwood. Additional highlights included Lori Ashcraft and Eugene Johnson presenting: “Innovations in Peer Delivered Training Through Podcast Formats,” as well as Gloriana Hunter and Theresa Mast of Crestwood Recovery Resilience Solutions presenting: “Rising as Leaders: Maximizing Your Impact in Advanced Peer Roles.” It was a powerful conference and strong connections were made. We are already looking forward to next year!

Crestwood was proud to have a booth at NatCon26 held April 27 – 29 in Denver, CO. Elena Mashkevich and Ashley Brown attended on behalf of Crestwood, as well as Regina Kaiser from Dreamcatchers Empowerment Network, and Jim Ritchie from Crestwood Recovery Resilience Solutions. Each organization’s programs and services were promoted at the shared table. This three-day event provided opportunities to engage and network with several of the 5,000+ health care professionals in attendance. It also provided the chance to attend sessions throughout all three days with topics including, but not limited to, leadership principles; peer support; equity and inclusion; employee engagement and retention; and AI. The conference also offered several keynote speakers, TED-style talks, poster presentations, fireside chats and so many more opportunities for learning and engagement. Annually, NatCon brings providers, vendors, and the community together from across the nation to promote mental wellness and policy. The team was honored to attend a special networking event specifically for California attendees hosted by the California Behavioral Health Association. We look forward to participating again in 2027!

Congratulations to our Project Management Team (Laura Valdivia, Anthony Nguyen and Julia Wolverton) for being awarded the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) 2025 Silver Design Excellence Award at their Wisconsin Gala for the design of our Crestwood Selma Wellness Center’s Trauma-Informed Environment!! Direct Supply Aptura representatives, who work with our team on our campuses’ trauma-informed environments and nominated the Selma Wellness Center for the ASID Design Excellence Award, said, “This recognition reflects Crestwood’s commitment to creating a care environment that is welcoming, healing, and dignified for every individual receiving care. Your vision for blending thoughtful design with compassionate behavioral health support made this project truly meaningful. It was an honor for our team to help bring that vision to life. We are deeply grateful for the work your team does every day to support the well-being of those in your care. That dedication inspires the environments we create together, and we are proud to be your partner.” The Selma Wellness Center is a perfect and gorgeous example of our Trauma-Informed Environments Foundational Tool and how our team truly designs our campus environments to be welcoming, warm, safe and healing to support the recovery of our persons served. Congratulations again to our talented and amazing Project Management Team on receiving the 2025 Silver ASID Design Excellence Award! Through their hard work and dedication, they are making a difference in the lives and recovery of our persons served by designing our Crestwood campuses environments to not only be beautiful, but therapeutic. Well done! To view our Selma Healing Center’s award-winning, trauma-informed environment, visit their campus page at https://www.crestwoodbehavioralhealth.com/location/selma To learn more about Crestwood’s Trauma-Informed Environments visit our website at https://www.crestwoodbehavioralhealth.com/recovery-service/homelike-environments

A huge congratulations to the team of authors Lori Ashcraft, Patty Blum, Chris Martin, Gene Johnson, Rita Cronise (Rutgers), Sean Karyczak (Rutgers) on their article, Peer Employment Learning Center (PELC) Pilot Project: From Mental Patient to Peer Support Provider being published in the national Community Mental Health Journal! The article highlights the PELC’s training, evolution and sustainability and found, “The PELC pilot provides a blueprint for workforce development in restrictive settings. It demonstrates that with rigorous training and a supportive organizational culture, the transition from “mental patient” to “peer professional” is not only possible but serves as a powerful mechanism for system-wide recovery.” Having this article published in the Community Mental Health Journal is an impressive honor and shines national attention on the PELC and its importance. Well done everyone! Read the full article here.

Crestwood representatives joined Nevada County officials, state and local partners, and community members to celebrate the groundbreaking of the new Deer Creek Behavioral Health Center located at 950 Maidu Avenue in Nevada City.  This is a major step forward in expanding access to local mental health care. The 16-bed campus offers a Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF) for short-term treatment and a Mental Health Rehabilitation Center (MHRC) to support individuals experiencing acute mental health needs.   Nevada County Behavioral Health selected Crestwood through a competitive request for proposals process to lead the design, construction and operation of the campus. Deer Creek Behavioral Health Center is expected to open in late fall of 2027.   https://nevadacountyca.gov/m/newsflash/home/detail/8666

Crestwood is pleased to announce that our Selma Wellness Center, located at 3800 McCall Avenue in Selma, CA,  officially opened on March 16, 2026!  The Selma Wellness Center is a 40-bed, justice-informed MHRC program, created through a public-private partnership between the California Department of State Hospitals (DSH) and Crestwood.     The Selma Wellness Center focuses on serving justice-involved individuals who often face disproportionate risk of violence, overdose, and suicide so this is why it is critical to provide them with mental health recovery services. The staff is trained in rich interdisciplinary management of behaviors, as well as evidence-based practices for this population.  Tour the Selma Wellness Center Visit the webpage for Selma Wellness Center to see all the photos and learn more.

Read the full article by Lori Ashcraft and Patty Blum on BehavioralHealthNews.org

A San Francisco Clinic Shows Promise in Treating Drug-Fueled Public Breakdowns https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/09/us/san-francisco-drug-mental-health-clinic-lurie.html?searchResultPosition=1 A former Goodwill thrift store now houses an urgent care clinic for people experiencing mental health breakdowns in public. A new facility at 822 Geary Street in San Francisco includes small bedrooms, medical exam rooms and a laundry area. Credit...Minh Connors for The New York Times By Heather Knight Reporting from San Francisco Nov. 9, 2025 For years, they have been a disturbing part of daily life in San Francisco. People stumbling into rushing traffic. Screaming incoherently. Threatening strangers on sidewalks or while riding the bus. What has never been clear is where to take people in the throes of a mental health crisis or drug-fueled hallucinations. Emergency rooms are crowded and chaotic. Jails are intended for people who commit crimes, not those having breakdowns. Sobering centers can provide a space to rest, but do not always offer longer-term care. All of those places often send people back to the streets after a few hours, their cycles of despair continuing. But now, San Francisco is trying something new. In a city known for bureaucracy, it is remarkably straightforward. And if its early success continues, the program may serve as a model for other communities trying to find a middle ground between “live and let live” and “lock them up” as they try to address drug addiction and mental health issues on the street. A facility at 822 Geary Street — in a neighborhood locals call “the Tendernob” because it sits north of the gritty Tenderloin and south of fancy Nob Hill — has morphed from a shuttered Goodwill thrift shop into an urgent care clinic for people having public breakdowns. San Francisco paramedics responded to a 911 call about a woman splayed unconscious on a sidewalk. They roused her and offered to help, but she declined and walked away. Credit...Minh Connors for The New York Times It is always open. It is always staffed with a nurse and several mental health specialists. A doctor is always on call. Police officers, paramedics and street crisis counselors can drop off people who need help at any time. People in crisis can walk in themselves, or be brought in by family members or friends. As of Oct. 1, the state has certified it as an alternative to emergency rooms, which means that ambulances can drop people there. The facility is voluntary, and people can leave whenever they want to, but the aim is to make the patients feel comfortable and decide to stay. The staff also treats patients’ low-level medical needs, prescribes anti-psychotic medication, gives them access to laundry facilities and showers, and provides space to rest. Case managers can connect people to longer-term help, such as a methadone or buprenorphine prescription to fight opioid addictions or a bed in a residential treatment center. The stories of people the clinic has helped so far are heart-rending. There was a homeless woman addicted to methamphetamines who had climbed down onto subway tracks searching for cigarette butts. She hears voices and yells in public without knowing she is doing so, she told caregivers at 822 Geary. They said she is now in a 90-day residential treatment program and on medication. A homeless man, also addicted to drugs, was having delusions related to artificial intelligence and the Church of Scientology, but is now sticking to a treatment plan that includes medical care and counseling, staff members said. The city is partly reimbursed by Medi-Cal, California’s health care program for low-income people, and also uses funds from a business tax approved by voters to pay for homeless services. The facility opened in late April, and new data from its first five months showed that 344 people were admitted, and 88 went on to enter residential treatment programs, a higher percentage than other city programs achieve, the mayor’s office said. Tests for drugs, pregnancy and Covid-19 laid out in an examination room. Credit...Minh Connors for The New York Times The rest returned to their own homes or the homes of family members, or entered a homeless shelter or hospital. Twenty-six people left against medical advice, and 45 were cleared to be discharged, but did not say where they were headed. Keith Humphreys, a Stanford professor who specializes in psychiatry and behavioral health, said most cities offer people experiencing mental health crises and drug addictions just two extreme options: emergency rooms or sobering centers without medical care. He said he was not aware of other cities offering this kind of middle ground. “Innovations that work seem obvious in retrospect,” he said. An examination room. Credit...Minh Connors for The New York Times Mayor Daniel Lurie won his seat after promising to make the city’s streets safer and cleaner. The Covid-19 pandemic and the fentanyl epidemic had proved to be a double whammy, emptying downtown office buildings and turning some sidewalks below them into open-air drug markets and homeless shantytowns. Two people, on average, were dying every day of drug overdoses, a number that remains stubbornly high. There were 38 drug deaths in the city in September. Mr. Lurie insists that sometimes simple solutions work the best for problems that seem intractable. “For years, we’ve overcomplicated things in San Francisco,” Mr. Lurie said in an interview. “We want to meet people where they’re at, and if they’re ready to get treatment, we want them to have it quickly.” London Breed, the former mayor who lost to Mr. Lurie last year, purchased the building that now contains the clinic in late 2021 for $6.3 million. She said it would house the city’s first supervised consumption clinic, where drug users could smoke or inject under supervision. The idea was to get drug use out of public view and to avert potential overdose deaths by having trained specialists on hand with Narcan. But the city attorney told Ms. Breed that the idea was legally dubious, and she never opened the clinic. Her administration instead came up with the idea for an urgent care clinic for people having public breakdowns. But she did not open that version either, fearing it might anger neighbors and harm her re-election chances. So the building sat empty until April. Isaac James, a paramedic, speaks with a person seeking help for addiction in San Francisco. Credit...Minh Connors for The New York Times A person seeking help with addiction checks into 822 Geary Street. Credit...Minh Connors for The New York Times Supervised consumption sites exist in New York City and Providence, R.I., and Burlington, Vt., is close to opening one. But they have not advanced elsewhere in the United States, and Mr. Lurie said San Francisco will not open one on his watch. “It’s not legal,” he said. “It’s not happening.” President Trump has pushed states to go in the opposite direction: opening involuntary treatment centers for homeless drug users. Utah is developing such a plan. Mr. Lurie has tried to avoid antagonizing the president, and said last month that he and Attorney General Pam Bondi have agreed to form a partnership to “combat fentanyl and hold drug traffickers accountable.” The refusal to consider a supervised consumption site and the commitment to a partnership with the Trump administration are part of the Lurie administration’s shift to more moderate drug policies. Mr. Lurie has also supported more arrests of dealers and users and has ceased the practice of handing out free fentanyl smoking supplies unless counseling is included. He has also stressed that recovery is the city’s top goal when it comes to drug policy. Without the patients, 822 Geary Street could be mistaken for a nail salon. Two lines of blue lounge chairs sporting throw pillows and blankets face each other under exposed beams and high-end lighting. It sounds like a library, with people talking in hushed voices. There are a couple of small bedrooms, medical exam rooms and a laundry area. Lockers up front store people’s belongings — no street drugs or other contraband are allowed inside. On a recent day, two women slept in lounge chairs under blankets, both with the red, bloated hands and arms that are telltale signs of injection drug use. A man sprawled on a couch watching TV. Isaac James, a paramedic who has assisted people having public breakdowns in San Francisco for several years, said that it helps to have a new place to take people in crisis. “It’s not the hamster wheel just moving people from one place to the next,” Mr. James said on a recent afternoon, as he sat shotgun in a van that zipped from one street crisis to the next, answering 911 calls. At 3:30 p.m., the team received a call: A man who suffered from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder said he was spiraling. He was trying to stay off drugs and feared that he was about to relapse. The paramedics took him to 822 Geary Street. “Thank you, guys,” the man said. He and Mr. James fist-bumped their goodbyes. The man entered a treatment facility the next day. Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California.

The Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association (PRA) held their 50 th Anniversary Celebration and conference at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, November 10 – 11, 2025. It was a very exciting reunion of pioneers and leaders in the field of psychiatric rehabilitation who had not been together like this since the last in-person conference in 2018. Over the two days, there were three informative panels (research, public policy, and peer support) and 16 amazing workshops. Overall, three main themes were woven through the two-day event that represented the current practices and most urgent needs in the psychosocial rehabilitation field: Peer Support Transition Age Youth Policy and Advocacy   Crestwood was a Gold Sponsor of the event. Speaking was by invitation only, so we were honored to be asked to deliver both a workshop and to participate in a panel discussion. Crestwood’s two presentations fell under the first area listed above – peer support. Alyssa Torres, Peer Support Specialist at Crestwood Fallbrook Healing Center, participated in a panel focusing on “ The Centered Peer: Avoiding the Drift, Embracing the Mission .” While this was the focus of the panel, questions also included other challenging issues currently being experienced in peer employment. Alyssa did a great job of representing West Coast concerns, which were somewhat different from the situations in other states. It was interesting to see the variations in how peer support is implemented in different types of facilities in different geographic areas. Patty Blum, Alyssa Torres, and Lori Ashcraft from Crestwood presented a separate workshop on the advantages of Peer Support Specialists (PSS) working in crisis settings titled, “The Magic of Peers Working in Crisis Settings.” The workshop was well received, and the team provided several handouts to enable attendees to go deeper into understanding the innovative practices that have been developed with peers in a recovery-oriented crisis setting. The theme of Transition-Aged Youth began with a panel of researchers followed by many informative workshops. On the second day, the theme of Policy and Advocacy was set in motion by a panel of experts discussing “Federal Policy Shifts and the Future of Recovery.” This panel provided time and space for the audience to ask questions and talk with experts about current issues. Finally, to round out the theme of Advocacy, Mark Salzer, a long-time friend and colleague of Crestwood presented, “A Just and Necessary Mission: Centering Community Inclusion in Psychiatric Rehabilitation Advocacy.” Of particular interest was a workshop entitled “INSET: Psych Rehab for People Who Don’t Want It,” presented by Melissa Wettengel, MPH. Rita Cronise, a colleague and researcher from New York State, who came along to support the Crestwood team, introduced us to Melissa, who is operating a program in Long Island (New York) that is very much like the new program Crestwood is offering in San Francisco for people who are uncomfortable in traditional treatment settings. Melissa will be doing a podcast with us, and there may be more opportunities to collaborate with Melissa and this innovative program, so stay tuned. A special thank you to Pam Norris who accompanied the team, cheered us on, and helped support us throughout the event. And of course, thanks to Crestwood for supporting this event and making it possible for us to attend, present, and participate. To see photos of the 50 th  Anniversary Celebration, please visit PRA’s website: https://www.psychrehabassociation.org/50th-anniversary-photos

On October 27, 2025, Crestwood hosted an Open House for our newest campus – the Selma Wellness Center! Located at 3800 McCall Avenue in Selma, the modest exterior gives way to a beautifully appointed and Trauma-Informed environment just inside the doors. The Selma Wellness Center is a justice-informed Mental Health Rehabilitation Center (MHRC), where up to 40 individuals at a time can receive services in a welcoming, home-like environment. Crestwood will provide psychosocial rehabilitation to individuals referred and screened by the California Department of State Hospitals (DSH). These are individuals who are struggling with mental health challenges and who need competency restoration services, as found by a judge. The Selma Wellness Center will be a place to find hope and healing. Upon discharge, individuals will be transferred to DSH for their next level of care. At the Open House and Ribbon Cutting, several people spoke about the critical need for this program. Special guest, Congressman Jim Costa, addressed the need for mental health services in the Central Valley, noting that too often, fear stands in the way of people talking about mental health issues. He said that the MHRC will be a safe place where people can openly talk about their fears and challenges. Costa presented the Selma Wellness Center with a Special Congressional Recognition from the United States House of Representatives. The Selma District Chamber of Commerce also presented the Selma Wellness Center with a certificate of recognition in honor of the ribbon cutting event. Selma Mayor Scott Robertson addressed the need for services in Fresno County, warmly welcoming the partnership with Crestwood and saying that, “Places like Crestwood make all the difference.” Crestwood Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President, Patty Blum, spoke at the Open House celebration, thanking everyone for their efforts and partnership to make this vision a reality. “This is a building and a space that’s going to allow healing and wellness every single day,” she said. More than 100 people attended the Open House and toured the campus. Our Crestwood Executive Leadership Team was present, (including George Lytal, CEO; Derek Dobbins, President; Maria Stefanou, CFO/EVP; and Patty Blum, COO/EVP), along with members from our Start-Up and Home Office Teams. The Selma Wellness Center will be officially opening to persons served soon!

Crestwood Champion Healing Center team prepares for their Out of the Darkness Walk Crestwood was proud to sponsor several American Foundation for Suicide Prevention “Out of the Darkness” Community Walks this fall.   October 4: Santa Barbara Out of the Darkness Community Walk October 19: San Diego Out of the Darkness Community Walk October 25: Sacramento Out of the Darkness Community Walk   These walks are a time to come together as communities and rally around a common cause. Together we help shine a light on the importance of mental wellbeing and suicide prevention. Our Crestwood Champion Healing Center staff shares their experience of participating in the Santa Barbara Out of the Darkness Community Walk:   It was truly a beautiful and impactful experience, walking together along the beach and through the UCSB campus, surrounded by a sense of hope, connection and community.   There were a few speakers who shared their stories of loss, strength and healing. It reminded us of why it is so important to talk about mental health and to support one another!   We had the opportunity to choose beads that represented our personal connections to suicide. It was a simple but powerful way to honor loved ones and show our support.   It certainly was an emotional and inspiring day, and we are so grateful we were able to experience it together as a team!