TESTIMONY
Medha Ghosh on Fiscal Year 2025 Preliminary Budget's Impact on Mental Health Initiatives for Asian American Youth
2:21:19
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126 sec
Medha Ghosh highlights the deficiency in the New York City Fiscal Year 2025 preliminary budget for mental health initiatives serving Asian American youth.
- Emphasizes the need for sustained funding of the mental health continuum from the Fiscal Year 2024 budget.
- Advocates for a mental health care model that integrates direct services and school-hospital partnerships.
- Stresses the importance of both nontraditional and traditional mental health care forms to ensure comprehensive care.
- Calls for improved language service support for asylum seeker communities facing language barriers.
- Urges for increased collaboration between the city and community-based organizations to identify and address mental health and language service gaps.
Medha Ghosh
2:21:19
Good afternoon.
2:21:20
My name is.
2:21:21
And I'm the senior policy coordinator for health at CCF, the Coalition for Asian American Children's Families.
2:21:27
Thank you very much, Chair Narcis, for holding this hearing and providing this opportunity to testify.
2:21:32
Found in 1986, the CIA for its nation's only pan Asian children and family's advocacy organization and leads the fight for improving equitable policy systems funding and services to support those in need.
2:21:43
This preliminary budget for FY 'twenty 5 fails to fund key initiatives that were fund the FY 'twenty 4 adopted budget, including $5,000,000 in FY 'twenty 4 for the mental health continuum.
2:21:54
That mental health continuum is an innovative evidence based model for supporting students with significant mental health needs by integrating a range of direct services and developing stronger partnerships between schools and hospitals based mental health clinics.
2:22:06
We want to stress in partnerships between In particular, the social emotional needs of API Young people in our New York City Public School System to emphasize importance of maintaining funding for the mental health continuum as well as ensuring the budget properly supports mental health care for our youth.
2:22:21
To ensure to month for mental health care for all, the city needs to invest in developing a continuum of care incorporates both nontraditional and traditional forms of care, identify a range of access points, and luxury defines safety away from the absence of crime, towards a presence of wellness across communities.
2:22:36
We would also like to uplift the need for more language service support in our hospitals for asylum seekers community.
2:22:42
We've heard from many APAC communities that are crossing the southern border and then arriving in NYSE and phasing huge language barriers.
2:22:50
For instance, we have spoken with groups, working with families coming from Afghanistan, requiring language support in far as to see, pushed out.
2:22:56
It is critical that our hospitals have enough language service funding to support that additional language need of asylum seekers.
2:23:03
CDC is grateful to already be partnering with h and h on issues of language access, and we look forward to continuing that work.
2:23:09
And that is most important in the well-being of all New Yorkers.
2:23:13
Overall, we see a need for more intentional collaboration between the city and community based organizations to better identify language access and mental health services gaps in our communities and define and implement solutions that will have a direct positive impact on the well-being of all of our communities.