KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Knoxville and Knox County leaders both committed $50,000 to United Way, for a total of $100,000, taking a step towards forming the Alternative Response Services Task Force.
The United Way of Greater Knoxville is tasked with facilitating the group, which will review findings from an earlier exercise meant to investigate ways the community could better serve people involved in the criminal justice system, and help them connect with resources if they have mental health or substance use needs. The findings came from the "Sequential Intercept Model" report.
The task force also comes after years of discussions in the Knoxville City Council about forming an "alternative response team" that would respond to calls involving people in mental health crises without police officers. Instead of sending police, alternative response teams would pair medics or EMTs with mental health experts to respond to calls for help.
Advocates, mostly from the Knoxville HEART group, repeatedly pushed to form the teams after the Knoxville Police Department began its co-responder program. The program pairs mental health experts with police officers for calls involving people in mental crises. It previously reported success, mostly responding to calls involving people in distress and connecting them with resources instead of arresting them.
In January 2024, the city council hosted a workshop involving providers of health care, mental health care, homelessness services, social services, housing services and more to discuss ways the community could improve how it helps people identified in the Sequential Intercept Model exercise.
After that workshop, the city said it "expressed a strong interest in the city creating a task force to work on the next steps for an alternative response program."
The task force with the United Way will include stakeholders from the county, city and community organizations. A list of its members and where they are from is available below.
- Brent Seymour - Knox County Mayor's Office
- Russ Jensen - Knoxville Mayor's Office
- TBD - Knox County Sheriff's Office
- Bryan Evans - Knoxville Police Department
- Brad Anders - Knox County Emergency Communications District E911
- Leann Human-Hilliard - McNabb Center
- Brittany Bonner - Knoxville HEART
- Allie Cohn - Knoxville HEART
- Moira Connelly - Knoxville HEART
- Steve Hamby - Knox County Health Department
- Steven Cross - UT Municipal Technical Advisory Service
- Lisa Higginbotham - Knoxville-Knox County Community Action Committee
The Memorandum of Understanding with the United Way will return a report after a year that details how the city can better serve low-income people and uninsured people. The report will also include strategies to improve "community-based response to mental and behavioral health crisis in Knoxville and Knox County." If the county and city want to organize a workshop to discuss the report, the United Way would also need to help facilitate that workshop.
The MOU was signed on May 30 by Mayor Indya Kincannon's chief of staff and on May 29 by the United Way of Greater Knoxville.
A statement about the MOU from a Knox County spokesperson is available below.
"We are at the beginning of the process. We don’t know what we’re going to find, but we all know there is a better approach than locking up people in a mental health crisis.”